Buckeye Local graduate George Laase guided the Staunton Braves to a runnerup finish in the Shenandoah Valley Baseball League postseason tournament earlier this week. The top-seeded Braves lost 2-1 in the best-of-3 to the Strasburg Express.

Staunton won the South division pennant and finished 34-17 overall with a 5-4 record in the playoffs. However, the second-seeded Express won Games 1 and 3 on the Braves’ home field, including a 4-3 nail-biter in the deciding game.

“It was a great game and a great season,” Laase said by telephone Friday afternoon. “We knew the suicide was coming, but the guy got such a great jump off of third. We had everyone up and made the play, but flipped the ball to the wrong side of the plate and he got around the tag.”

A thrilling two-run rally in the top of the eighth inning propelled the Express to victory over the Braves. Josh Cushing led off the inning with a walk and crossed home plate on an RBI triple from Trevor Rucker that tied the game at three. With a runner on third, Jeremy Musser stepped into the batter’s box and laid down a textbook squeeze bunt. Rucker dove head first into home plate before the tag to give Strasburg a 4-3 lead.

Musser was thrown out in a run-down between first and second but it did not matter as the Express rallied for the win.

Staunton was seeking its first championship since 1999. The Braves made the championship finals in 2004 when Laase was an assistant coach and the team had former major leaguers John Jay and Chris Perez on the squad.

Helping the Braves to the finals were a pair of Ohio Valley products in Sam Vincenzo, of St. Clairsville Potomac State, and Mark Smyth, of Edison and West Liberty University.

“Sam was coming off labrum surgery and we knew we had an inning-count on him,” Laase explained. “He got us to where we needed to be.”

According to the head coach, Vincenzo, who will be attending NCAA Division II St. Thomas Aquinas in New York this fall, won the division championship that gave Staunton the No. 1 seed.

“Sam did a great job in that pennant-clinching game,” Laase revealed. “He’s got a great opportunity ahead of him.”

Laase expects the southpaw to return to Virginia again next summer.

Smyth was the Braves’ No. 1 pitcher down the stretch, according to his head coach.

“Mark took the ball when we wanted him to,” Laase said. “He really stepped up for us.”

Laase said the sky’s the limit for the righthander.

“He has a great pitching coach at West Liberty in Mark Cisar,” Laase noted. “Mark (Cisar) pitched in this league for New Market and that is who Mark (Smyth) made his first start against. It was kind of neat to see the baton passed on like that.

“It’s always good to see kids from where I’m from come down here and excel,” Laase continued. “Both of those guys helped get us to the finals.”

American Legion Baseball

What could’ve been for the St. Clairsville Post 159 American legion baseball team.

The local squad was defeated by Toledo in the opening game of the Ohio state tournament at Beavers Field in Lancaster after leading late in the contest. Toledo went on to capture the state title, but had to default on its trip to the Great Lakes Regional Tournament at Lloyd Hopkins Field in Alton, Ill., when most of its players had to report for high school football workouts.

Troy Post 43 (36-14) was the state runnerup in Lancaster, falling in the championship game to Toledo. It is the first regional appearance for Post 43.

Wheeling Post 1 (27-10) is to be congratulated on a fine season. The locals won the W.Va. state tournament in convincing fashion in Sissonville, but ran into some stiff competition at the Southeast Regional Tournament in Asheboro, N.C.

Mark Delbrugge is a great baseball mind and I think he showed that to many people in his first season at the helm.

Steubenville Native Shining for O’s

Chaz Roe, a former first round pick of the Colorado Rockies in 2005, is filling a spot very nicely in the Baltimore Orioles farm system.

The 6-5, 190-pound righthander is 2-1 with a 2.91 ERA this season with the O’s. He has worked 34 innings, striking out a like number of batters. He has appeared in 26 games and his WHIP is 1.26.

For his career, which has taken him from Colorado to Seattle to Arizona to Texas to Miami to the New York Yankees to Pittsburgh to Baltimore, he is 3-1 with a 3.55 ERA in 58.1 innings. There were also a handful of minor league stops along the way.