By Brian Bohl
Every year, the baseball club signs the biggest-name players available to fortify weakness in the lineup and pitching staff. The franchise leads the league in attendance and seemingly qualifies for the playoffs every single season.
The Ducks have much in common with the Yankees. But they also share another less desirable history with the 2005-07 Bombers: the propensity to flame out in the first round. Since the Ducks captured its only Atlantic League championship in 2004, the Flock has made it back the playoffs each successive season.
Yet that seems to be as far as they can get. Camden’s Sheldon Fulse lined a two-out, bases-loaded single to score Shaun Boyd in the bottom of the 11th, making the final score 3-2, as the Riversharks completed a two-game sweep over the Ducks Wednesday night.
It marked the third straight season the Ducks endured a nearly six-month schedule only to lose two games in the postseason and head home. Long Island has been swept out of the best-of-three first-round set since 2006 and is now winless in its last eight playoff contests. The Ducks won Game 1 of the 2005 series before dropping the next two.
Staff ace Randy Leek did his best to extend the series to a winner-take-all Game 3. The Levittown native was staked to a 2-0 first-inning lead and tossed seven innings of one-run ball. Closer Charles Weatherby couldn’t preserve a 2-1 ninth-inning lead, giving up a one-out homer to Nic Jackson that sent the game into extra innings. Jackson hit a solo homer in the seventh, helping the Riversharks advance to the championship round.
Despite compiling former major league stars like Henry Rodriguez and Juan Gonzales in previous seasons, the Ducks haven’t found the postseason magic.
The current version of the Ducks features former MLB All-Stars Carl Everett and Edgardo Alfonzo in addition to veterans Pete Rose Jr., Damian Rolls and Ray Navarrete. Camden was just 67-73, costing through a mediocre second half.
The Riversharks still qualified for the playoffs thanks to winning the first-half division title.
While Camden can’t claim a lineup filled with household names, Jackson was able to put a jolt into the Campbell’s Field crowd by blasting a seventh-inning shot to put the home team on the scoreboard. The Riversharks will face Somerset for the title.
Camden surged to a quick edge in the series, jumping on former Cincinnati Red starter Lance Davis to post a 5-1 win at Citibank Park to take Game 1 Tuesday night. The 2-5 hitters for the Ducks went 2-16 in the opener.
.”We know what’s ahead of us,” Rose said before Game 2. “With the guys we have in here, I don’t think anyone is going to put any extra pressure on themselves. We’ll just go out and do whatever we need to do.”
The offense didn’t exactly bludgeon Camden starter Jake Dittler. It simply capitalized on the right-hander’s wildness. Dittler, who pitched six innings, walked Bryant Nelson and Damian Rolls with the bases loaded to put the Ducks ahead, 2-0, in the first.
Thanks to expansion, the regular season stretched from 126 games to 140. Everett set a team record during the regular season, belting 29 home runs. Navarrete also set franchise records in RBIs (103), runs (105) and extra-base hits (64). Neither slugger drove in a run in the short series as the Ducks played its 12th one-run contest in 15 all-time playoff games.
Manager Dave LaPoint, who has skippered the team the past two seasons, was the pitching coach on the 2004 championship squad and the 2005 unit.
He’s been on the winning and losing ends of those nail-biters and can now take some solace in a rule change starting next year.
The Atlantic League’s first-round will shift to a best-of-five series commencing in 2009.