Fortunately for Maui, pitcher Mikito Barkman fell on his face only literally and not figuratively in the biggest game of his career.
The Sabers pitcher went six innings and was 3-for-3 at the plate, setting the tone in upstart Maui’s 6-1 win over Waiakea in the Division I final of the Wally Yonamine Foundation/HHSAA State Baseball Championships on Saturday night.
But before he could take the mound for the first inning, Barkman, the tournament’s most outstanding player, tripped near the third-base line as he jogged out and slid face-first onto the Les Murakami Stadium turf.
“Kaipo (Paschoal) tripped me and I just fell over,” Barkman said with a laugh. “Hopefully that wasn’t on TV.”
That’d require a lot of luck, given the setting. But fortunes were smiling on Barkman and Maui in other ways.
Maui’s first baseball championship since 1982 came in large part due to his lights-out performance. The 6-foot-1 junior yielded just four hits a day after going the last four innings of Maui’s 6-4 semifinal win over Campbell. The only run charged to him was unearned and came in the top of the seventh, when Gehrig Octavio reached on an error and eventually came around to score.
He reached his pitch limit and took over at first base as Jyrah Lalim eventually closed out Waiakea.
“I know he’s a good pitcher and I know he can do big things. I know he had my back,” Barkman said.
Yet Barkman very easily could’ve been unavailable to pitch.
He threw exactly 35 pitches against Campbell. That meant he could go Saturday under the new pitch-count rules.
If he’d hurled 36 pitches Friday, he’d have been ineligible to throw in the championship.
“I knew that I wasn’t going to save anybody for anything,” Maui coach Chase Corniel said. “We have to win that (semifinal) game. We have to go to the final to win the championship. So, we had Lalim. … We (were) going to roll with him if we burned Barkman. But it worked out that way. Maybe it was fate, I don’t know. Bottom line, Barkman stepped up big for us, not only pitching but hitting, too.”
On the mound, he struck out only three but kept the Warriors off balance. One of his strikeouts came in the fifth on Trayden Tamiya to keep the Warriors blanked.
“He was locked in. From last night, he was locked in,” catcher Bryant Nakagawa said.
Barkman said he trusted his fastball and curveball command equally for the night.
“If I just threw strikes, I knew my defense would be behind them,” he said.
He was pretty good there, too; he scooped up a comebacker cleanly for the third out in the sixth.
Barkman’s perfect bunt down the third-base line kept things moving for Maui in their five-run sixth inning that blew it open.
“It means a lot. We made history,” Barkman said. “Thirty-five years in the making.”
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