OAK HARBOR — If you coach baseball long enough, and Jim Waller says he has, you see just about everything.

So the Oak Harbor coach, five days away from his final game in a Wildcats uniform, didn’t bat an eye when his team lost a Western Conference North Division game 2-1 Friday to first-place Monroe on a pair of wild pitches.

Waller is stepping down after Tuesday’s season finale against Marysville-Pilchuck High School, and a full three decades after he first assumed the job.

“As a kid, I came up and watched the high school team, and he’s been here as long as I’ve been alive,” Oak Harbor pitcher Danny Lura said. “It’s going to be a chance of pace. But it’s his decision. If that’s what he thinks is best, that’s what’s right for our program.”

“It will be weird to come here and play next year,” said Monroe coach Neil Henderson, who has coached against Waller for the past six seasons and also played against him. “You come to know some expectations. It will be a whole new game. He’s done a great job.”

Waller said he planned to step down after last season, when he retired from teaching, but stayed on at the request of the school’s athletic director to give Oak Harbor more time to find his successor.

“I’ve coached 30 years, and it’s time,” Waller said. “I’ve really enjoyed coaching them and working with the kids. When you get older, you don’t have the energy you once had. The thing that is more difficult now is not the coaching, but the other part of it. We have a fundraiser tomorrow, and taking care of the field, the little things you have to do to have success. I just don’t have the energy to do that anymore.”

During his tenure, the Wildcats reached the state tournament six times, climbing as far as the title game once, in 1990. That Oak Harbor team lost the championship 1-0 to Fort Vancouver.

Waller won’t be adding to that total this year, as the Wildcats (4-10 division, 6-12 overall) have been eliminated from playoff contention. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t give the front-running Bearcats all they could handle.

Lura twirled a four hitter, keeping Monroe off balance with a selection of curves and offspeed pitches. He wriggled out of a bases-loaded jam in the first.

The downside is that curves sometimes bounce, and sometimes bounce at the wrong time. Monroe’s two runs came home on wild pitches.

Zac Miller, an outfielder and reliever pressed into starting service for the Bearcats by a four-game week, allowed four hits in six innings.

“He got ahead in the count and our defense made the plays behind him,” Henderson said. “He’s usually a relief pitcher, so he did a good job.”

The cavernous field at Oak Harbor High School cost the Bearcats a run, then gave it back a few minutes later. Monroe’s Colton Rintala led off the fifth with a blast to left-center that would have easily cleared the fence at most high school fields — and some college and professional ones, too. But with 390 feet to the power alley and a little farther to where Rintala blasted it, the drive ended up as a double.

That’s not the only place where the Oak Harbor field is big, however. Behind home plate is 60 feet of real estate before the backstop, a distance that provided plenty of time for Rintala’s courtesy runner, Andrew Ralph, to score when a Lura pitch got away from Johnny Encinas behind the plate.

Monroe tacked on what would prove to be a crucial unearned run in the sixth after a walk, a wild pitch, a potentially inning-ending error and another wild pitch.

Lura provided the only RBI of the game, singling up the middle with two out and Chris Reilly on second in the sixth to close the gap to 2-1.

“That was a pretty fun high school baseball game,” Waller said. “It was fun to be in the game and competitive.”

• Eric Francis can be reached at 360-416-2131 or by e-mail at