Putting people on base was not a problem Saturday afternoon for the Hawaii All-Stars in their game against the Kauai All-Stars at Wong Stadium.
Doing something with them once they were on base? Big problem.
Hawaii stranded 14 base runners in its 7-3 loss to Kauai in the 81st Annual Hawaii State AJA Tournament, knocking the home team into Sunday morning’s consolation game against Maui, 6-1 losers to Oahu in Saturday’s first game.
“Too many runners we left out there,” said Hawaii manager Chad Canda, “it always hurts when you think have something going and then you look up and you made the third out with those guys still out there.
“Hard to understand what it is,” he said. “During the season, this team is a scoring machine, it’s always kind of been that way and we get to this tournament and that first game has been tough for us.”
Hawaii last won the state AJA tournament in 1992. Since then, it has been a string of 21 championships by Oahu, one by Maui in 2008 and one by Kauai in 2014.
Oahu goes for another at 11:30 am Sunday, preceded by the Hawaii-Maui game at 9 am which will be played under a two-hour time limit.
Hawaii opened the scoring with a first inning run but was tied after Kauai scored one in the third on a fielder’s choice by catcher Brandon Hew, then they got two more in fourth and fifth to open it up against Mikey Inaba, who went four innings before surrounding the mound duties to Aaron Correa who came in with two runners on base and recorded three outs, the second one a sacrifice fly to center that scored Kauai’s fifth run.
“He took us through the whole season, he’s been our guy,” Canda said, “and when you have a guy like that who’s meant so much and won so much, you tend to stick with him.
“He has battled some mechanical issues all season and it cropped up on him again today, but you know what they say? That’s baseball.”
Two singles around an error — Hawaii had four errors in the game, all contributing to Kauai runs — made it 7-1 in the top of the eighth, but two walks, a single by Cortney Aruda, a hit batter and a wild pitch all converged for two more Hawaii runs in the bottom of their eighth but Kauai relief pitcher Shannon Oketani put an end to the threat.
Canda said he would start Onan Masaoka in the consolation game, which was not a part of the plan going in.
“I wanted (Masaoka) for the championship game, I thought he might have something for that, but it didn’t work out that way,” Canda said. “For some reason, in this tournament, we always play better the second day. I wish we could get off to that good start one time, but I feel good about our chances, it’ll be our last shot.”
