Waipahu Baseball Team Top Seed In West OIA Playoffs
By Jack Danilewicz
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Del.icio.usOn paper, the Waipahu baseball team could be considered an overwhelming favorite as it enters its first-round OIA playoff game at 3:30 p.m. Thursday at home against Farrington.
With that in mind, Marauder head coach Milton Takenaka has had his team on “Upset Alert” since the day the regular season ended.
“You can’t ever take anything for granted,” said Takenaka, who led Waipahu to a 9-0-1 regular-season mark in the OIA White Division. “I just went to the (Waipahu) girls softball game the other day and watched them play against Aiea, which hadn’t won a game, and I watched our girls struggle. They had beaten them easily the first time the two teams had played, and I went to their practice the other day and I told them, ‘thank you for having a game like this. Now, I can go back and tell my own boys what can happen (when taking the other team for granted).’
“The girls thought it was funny, but we’re in the same situation,” added Takenaka, whose team is the top seed out of the West.“We beat Farrington fairly easily (17-3) the first time we played them, and it’s a whole new game in the playoffs. If you lose, you’re out. They (the Governors) have nothing to lose. There’s no pressure on them. Strange things can happen when you come out loose and just play.”
Should the Marauders do the expected and eliminate Farrington on Thursday, they will not only advance to a semifinal matchup Friday at their home field, but they’ll automatically clinch one of the OIA’s four berths for next month’s Wally Yonamine Foundation Division II state tournament. The site and time of Saturday’s OIA DII title game was to be announced early this week.
For their part, the Marauders are pinning their postseason hopes on their pitching staff. In Eric Hudson, Kaimi Haina and Triton Gante, Waipahu boasts three of the league’s better pitchers.
“Pitching is a key,” Takenaka said. “Our pitching has always been there - we’ve been decent all year - and we’ve been hitting the ball and making less errors in the field lately. I think we’re peaking at the right time.”
Hudson is the scheduled starter for Thursday’s game against Farrington, with Haina and Gante the likely starters for Friday’s and Saturday’s games should Waipahu move on. Hudson had also started Waipahu’s regular-season meeting April 1 with the Governors, earning the win in an encounter reduced to five innings due to the 10-run rule.
“His confidence is up right now - he’s been hitting the ball really well, too,” Takenaka said of Hudson.
The Marauders scored eight runs in the first inning of their regular-season meeting with Farrington to remove any early doubt. A similar start this Thursday would be welcomed by Takenaka, who was worried about the week-and-a-half layoff without a game between the start of the playoffs and the end of the regular season.
“Hopefully, it won’t hurt us,” said Takenaka, who acknowledged the current break is the longest for his team since it began playing preseason games in late February. “We gave them a couple of days off to break up some of the monotony. As a team, overall, we’ve gotten a lot better since the beginning of the year. We were fortunate in our early games. When we didn’t hit well, the other team helped us out with walks and errors. We weren’t taking advantage of those earlier in the season, but lately we’ve been jumping on them (mistakes by the other team).”
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