You Again: W.F. West, Tumwater Take Their Rivalry North, With a Championship Spot on the Line

Posted

Once again, the bus drivers will get their work in.

Thursday, Jesse Elam will get his W.F. West baseball team on the bus for State, and drive 26 miles north to Tumwater, where their semifinal opponents reside. 

Then they’ll go another 153 miles, through Tacoma and Seattle traffic, to get to Bellingham, where the game will actually be played.

“It’s crazy how we have to travel so much,” Tumwater coach Lyle Overbay said. “I was talking to Jesse about that before the district championship, and I like, ‘Hey can’t we just play in Centralia instead of having to go down to Ridgefield?’

“Now it’s like, can we do the same thing for this one too?”

There are nine counties along I-5 in Washington; come Friday, the Bearcats and T-Birds will have played in four of them.

It’s the second straight year they’ve met in the state semifinals, with Tumwater beating W.F. West in Yakima last spring. That game was the sides’ third meet-up of the season. This time around, they’ve played four already, with Friday lined up to be the fifth.

“They’re obviously a very solid team,” Elam said. “We both know each other and have charts on each other, know tendencies and things like that. It’s going to come down to who executes the best.”

Going off of past games, it may be a question of who executes at all. Despite Tumwater and W.F. West being two of the top three teams in 2A according to the final seedings, none of the four previous matchups featured both sides’ best showings. Elam freely admitted that “we haven’t played well against them all year,” with the possible exception of the district title game, which the Bearcats won thanks to what Overbay called “uncharacteristic” struggles in his bullpen.



“If we throw strikes, we have really good defense,” Overbay said. “That was a day where we didn’t, and if you look at our losses, that’s what’s happened.”

So far, there’s been something about the stakes of facing the other power in the region that’s made both sides a little shaky.

“Our biggest thing in all the games is controlling the strike zone,” Elam said. “I think we did a better job of it in that last game, but the first three I think we walked or gave them almost 30 free bases. You can’t do that for them. They’re too good of a team.”

And both teams are too good — and controlling the zone is too important — to let either dance around the question of starting pitching. There’s an argument for a confident team to keep its ace up its sleeve for the title game by resting them in the semifinal, but with how evenly-matched Tumwater and W.F. West are, that’s not a strategy likely to be explored here.

So it’s likely to come down to the aces, with Hunter Lutman going for the Bearcats and Alex Overbay starting for the T-Birds, especially with Lyle Overbay saying his other star pitcher, Trenton Gaither, isn’t fully back to 100% yet.

The two matched up on April 21, in a game that Tumwater dominated 10-0. Alex Overbay was dominant, allowing one hit and two walks. Lutman wasn’t, giving up nine walks in three innings. But of late, WFW’s ace has turned it on, finding his best stuff down the homestretch and coming off of a no-hitter in the first round last week, topped off by an extra scoreless relief appearance later in the day.

And behind Lutman, W.F. West has its vaunted bullpen, and a coach not afraid to give anyone a quick hook if they’re missing the zone or giving up hard contact, like he did when he used five pitchers to get through a seven-inning win over White River last Saturday.

“We’ll have everybody ready,” Elam said. “Everybody’s confident, and everybody’s ready to go.”