U.S. Title Is Little Consolation

WILLIAMSPORT, Pa. — South Mission Viejo’s 4-foot-11 catcher shuffled slowly out of the players’ quarters to greet his mom.

The spark that had lit Adam Elconin’s eyes just two days earlier was gone. One awful final inning had taken it away. The scoreboard still flashed the defeat: The Vaqueros of Guadelupe, Mexico 5. South Mission Viejo 4.

“How do you feel?” Bonnie Elconin asked her son, pulling him to her.

“Sad,” the boy said quietly, staring at the ground, his dusty cap swinging at his side.

“Well, who’s the national champions?” she asked squeezing him to her.

“They are, because they beat us,” said Adam Elconin, who hit his first home run in the U.S. championship game Thursday.

“No,” Bonnie Elconin said. “You’re the USA rep, and no one can take that away from you.”

At that, her pint-sized son finally looked up and asked the question eating at his teammates: “Will everyone back home still be proud of us?”

It is the hardest part of being a champion. At some point you may lose. Saturday, the South Mission Viejo players and all the screaming fans who rode a roller coaster to the top with them plunged back down to unexpected defeat.

As Orange County’s 13 boys of summer dejectedly trudged off the field, they suddenly looked like kids again.

In the stands, their parents, who had shouted, shaken bottles filled with coins and striped their faces with colored paint, fell silent for the first time in 17 days, frozen, their hopes caught in raw throats.

Their “franchise player,” Ashton White, who saw the winning run bounce off his glove, slammed the mitt to the ground and cried, the black paint under his eyes smearing with his tears.

Adam Sorgi, who gave up the three-run homer that tied the game, wailed to his father, assistant coach Ed Sorgi, as if the world had ended: “It’s all my fault.”

In the stands, Karen Gattis, the manager’s wife, broke the awful quiet. Looking around at the parents, she began to shout: “We are so proud of you. Say, we are so proud of you.”

In seconds, the South Mission Viejo fans were screaming themselves hoarse again, rattling their trademark coin-filled bottles.

“Hey, they’re still the national champions,” said Gattis, whose 12-year-old son, Gary, played third base for the team. “They deserve their time to be disappointed.”

Back home, at the Clubhouse Family Sports Grill, the deafening cheering of 250 fans fell awkwardly silent as the home team’s march to victory ended on a dozen televisions.

Posters touting the team dropped to stunned fans’ sides. The jangling of coins stopped. The pandemonium that reigned from most of the game halted.

Ann Brisco, 31, dropped her head to the pizza-strewn table in front of her. “No. No. No. No. No. This can’t be happening,” she said, watching the final run score.

In Williamsport, Marel Fabian, whose son, Gavin, had a no-hitter for five innings, watched her son slowly walk off the field. “I think what hurts the most is that they lost to errors,” she said. “But they are tough. We have to let them know that this game means little to us in the scheme of things. But there’s nothing we can say to them right now.”

Jaime Luna, the manager of the Vaqueros, said the Americans had surprised him. “Our whole team was nervous for awhile. These boys are all winners.”