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Frank Varga

BURLINGTON — With startling abruptness, Tyler McLeod ended a game that seemed to be just settling in to be a marathon.

McLeod blasted the first pitch in the bottom of the ninth inning over the fence in right field to give the Burlington-Edison baseball team an 8-7 Northwest Conference victory over Anacortes on Wednesday.

“It was a great high school game,” Tigers coach John Thurmond said. “It wasn’t played great, but it was a fun game to be a part of.”

The win keeps the Tigers (9-3 conference, 13-4 overall) in the hunt for the second of two automatic berths to the double-elimination portion of the Northwest 2A District Tournament. The Tigers must win their final game and have Sehome beat Lynden to avoid a play-in game.

“It’s a cool feeling to be in a race like that,” McLeod said. “We’re usually in the playoffs or at least in the running, and this year’s no different.”

For the Seahawks (8-4, 8-9), they now know they will have to play a do-or-die contest with either Granite Falls or South Whidbey to move into the double-elimination portion of the tournament. Both teams were 3-13 in Cascade Conference play heading into the Wednesday, but single-elimination contests are always dicey in baseball.

“At the start of the year, if I would have known we were going to be 8-4 at this time, I would have taken that in a heartbeat,” Anacortes coach Pat Swapp said. “If we win that game, we would have had a pretty good chance of being that No. 2 seed, and that’s pretty important. But you’ve got to keep positive on the whole deal. We’re having a good year, so we can’t dwell on this too much.”

The Seahawks managed to survive several game’s worth of errors to force extra innings. Anacortes committed a defensive error in each of the first four innings, were unable to turn two other double plays that don’t officially count as errors, and had three runners picked off.

“It’s frustrating because we didn’t play as well as we should have,” Anacortes outfielder Kyle Macy said. “At the same time, we can play that bad and still come pretty close to winning. I think we’re going to be all right the rest of the season.”

“We made so many mistakes,” Swapp added. “You look back and say, ‘We’ll if we’d have done this or we’d have done this or we’d have done this, we would have won the game.’ We just made so many mistakes. The good thing is we competed really well.”

Still, the Seahawks survived all the mistakes. What they couldn’t survive was McLeod’s blast. He figured he would get a fastball on the first pitch, and got one for his first walk-off homer.

“It felt good,” McLeod said. “I got under it a lot, but I got enough of it to get out.”

The Tigers came in knowing they didn’t want to let Macy beat them, and he almost did singlehandedly. He gave Anacortes a 5-0 lead in the second inning with a grand slam, then had the key double as the Seahawks rallied to tie the score at 7-7 in the seventh. He also lost an extra base hit in the ninth to a diving catch in center by Sean Stransky.

“He’s as good a hitter as there is in the league and maybe around here,” Thurmond said. “He might be the MVP of our league, and we said we did not want to let him beat us, but we got that situation and we didn’t have much choice but to go right after him. He got on a ball and hit it out, and it didn’t surprise any of us. We were down 5-0 before we knew it, and at that point we just tried to focus on getting one back at a time.”

Burlington-Edison tied the game with five in the bottom of the third on just three hits, the last a two-run single by Stransky. Stransky then came home on a three-base error to tie the score.

The Tigers tacked on two more in the fourth on just one hit, capitalizing on a walk, a hit batter, an error and another double play that didn’t get finished. McLeod’s RBI single was the only hit of the rally, and chased hard-luck starter Kyle Dixon.

Marcus Abbott came in and didn’t allow a run until the ninth, pitching around a leadoff double in the bottom of the seventh by Zach Livingston.

Tigers starter Scott Jensen settled down after Macy’s grand slam in the second, retiring the next 10 batters and allowing just one hit until the seventh. He left after Macy’s double brought Anacortes within one. Macy would score the tying run on an error, though he would have come home had the play been made. The Seahawks would have the go-ahead run on third base, but a pickoff at second ended the threat.

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