Schaumburg in finals

The West Division champion Schaumburg Boomers punched their ticket to the Frontier League championship series last night with a 9-8 win over the Florence Freedom in 10 innings. Schaumburg swept the best-of-5 semifinal series, 3-0.

Florence had won five of the six regular-season game against the Boomers.

Schaumburg erased a three-run deficit in the ninth inning, getting a two-run homer from Brian McConkey and scoring the tying on two passed balls. The Boomers then scored the game-winner in the top of the 10th on a run-scoring hit by McConkey.

It was the second game in the series that Schaumburg won by scoring in its final inning of batting. The Boomers won Game 1 when Steve McQuail -- the Frontier League Home Run Derby winner -- hit a walk-off homer in the bottom of the ninth.

The wins in Games 1 and 3 were very Boomer-like. Schaumburg had been able to overcome tying for the league lead in blown saves (more on this in a later post) by scoring the winning run in its final inning of batting -- either the bottom of the 8th, top of the 9th, bottom of the 9th or extra innings, depending on if at home or on the road and the length of the game. The 16 last-at-bat wins tied for the most in the league.

Schaumburg's ability to pull out wins late in games, even after blowing a lead, shows the confidence the Boomers played with all season. This is a team believes it can win, no matter how desperate the situation. That reminds me of something Washington manager Bart Zeller said late in the season about his team. Zeller mentioned that his team never quit and played hard to the end of every game, but added that when something bad happened to the Wild Things during a game, they seemed to expect to lose. Maybe that is showed in the number of last-at-wins this season:

2013 Last-At-Bat Wins
16 - Lake Erie
16 - Schaumburg
13 - Windy City
12 - Evansville
12 - River City
11 - Normal
11 - Rockford
10 - Gateway
 9 - Southern Illinois
 7 - Florence
 7 - Joliet
 7 - Washington
 6 - Traverse City
 2 - Greys

An interesting note about this statistic is Windy City had six of its last-at-bat wins during a six-game stretch in August. Three of those wins were in a series at Washington.