BEMIDJI — The impeccable timing of JD Wood’s game-tying double in the bottom of the sixth inning cannot be understated. The Bemidji High School baseball sophomore has taken most of his cuts on the junior varsity team. But with the Lumberjacks trailing 7-5 against eighth-seeded Brainerd in a Section 8-4A Tournament elimination game, Wood was called on to pinch-hit with the tying runs in scoring position.
Wood took an outside pitch from Keaton Lingenfelter and drove it to the left-centerfield gap to tie the game at 7-7. “I had a situation in East Grand Forks, and I didn’t pull through,” Wood said. “In this big situation, I was having flashbacks of that.
You just have to go up there and swing the bat and get a couple of runs in.” If that hit had come any later on Thursday evening, it wouldn’t have come at all. Per the MSHSL rulebook, section tournament games do not have a seven-inning requirement regardless of weather conditions.
So when the thunderstorms rolled through Bemidji 10 minutes after Wood’s clutch double, suspending the game until Saturday at noon, BHS caught the most fortunate of breaks. “When we got to the top of the fifth, we talked to the guys about them understanding that they’re behind by more than just two runs,” head coach Jim Grimm said. “They might not get the opportunity to have some seventh-inning magic because the umpires had the power to call the game early (if it wasn’t tied).
We needed to play with a sense of urgency and not.
