Gulls fly into second round

OLD ORCHARD BEACH — Teams seeded No. 8 are at best title long shots.

But to rack up playoff wins is to keep the shot alive, and Old Orchard Beach did just that, Tuesday, with a 5-2 win over No. 9 Waynflete, in a Western Maine Class C prelim tilt at the Ball Park.

Ryan Gallant scored on Garrett Hayes’ seeing eye single in the bottom of the fourth with what proved to be the go-ahead run, sending the Seagulls to Thursday’s date with top seeded Dirigo (time to be announced).

“They (Dirigo) is a tough team,” said Gallant, a junior shortstop. “I think it’s going to be a pretty good match up. But we’re very confident.”

That confidence will likely be buttressed by the efficient way the Gulls dispatched Waynflete.

Having grabbed a 2-0 first inning lead, OOB watched Flyers fight back to a 2-2 tie, before easing ahead again with a run in the fourth.

There after, the Gulls scraped up sufficient offense and flashed enough timely defense to put the game away.

“We’ve made big plays all year,” said senior Brandon Ouellette, who squeezed three innings on the mound in between stints behind the plate. Old Orchard took its first lead after Evan Bujnowski’s lead off fly ball dropped in for a double. He later scored on James McDermott’s RBI single.

McDermott then came in on Ouellette’s grounder to third.

Waynflete immediately replied with two runs on one hit in the top of the second, which knotted the score.

Play was halted for half an hour in the middle of the fourth by a passing rain shower, a pause that OOB coach Tom LaChance said worked to the Gulls’ advantage.

“I think it motivated the kids more,” LaChance said. “At the beginning of the game, I thought they (the Flyers) looked like they were more excited about playing here (at the Ball Park) than we were. Then there

was the rain delay, we wanted to go hit and get ready to play. I think it really made a difference.”

The difference showed immediately.

Gallant led off the bottom of the fourth by drawing a walk off Waynflete hurler Charlie LaPrade.

He swiped second, then hustled home with the go ahead tally on Hayes’ grounder to the right side.

“Gallant’s an athlete,” said LaChance, who said that Gallant rounded third base on his own. “He matches up with anybody on the field.”

Ouellette took over from Gulls starter Brandon Seavey and fed Waynflete hitters a steady diet of hard to read curveballs.

“They just didn’t know what to do when I threw my curveball,” he said. “They’d never seen one like that before. It kind of felt like middle school again. I remember in middle school, everybody used to fall out of the plate when they saw the curveball.”

Ouellette worked out of trouble in the fifth, thanks in part to Gallant’s cut down throw to the plate that nailed Waynflete’s Tom Spagnola.

The Flyers threatened again in the sixth, but Gallant choked off that threat by starting an inning ending double play.

“That was key for us,” said Gallant. “The score was tight, but everybody was up. That was a big play for us.”