SACCO: Lucas’ long road to a win at TA

It didn’t hit Joseph Lucas until the Little Giants shook hands with the Knights after Monday’s game. That’s when it slapped him in the face like a hot shot back to the mound. That’s when he let out a sigh and realized what he and the Little Giants had done.
“We were walking down to have our [post game] meeting and it hit me,” the 16-year-old said Tuesday before practice. “We just beat Turner Ashby.”
Not many Little Giants can say that. Not last year’s Group AA Final Four team, not Virginia Tech pitcher Jake Peeling, who stepped out of his Jeep on Tuesday, baseball bag in tow, hoping to get in some workout time with his former mates.
Did you hear about the win, Jake?
“I heard,” he said, opening his eyes a little wider and losing that cool-guy relaxed look he wears like an Italian suit.
The team before last year’s can’t say it, nor the one before that. Before Monday’s 7-6 win over Turner Ashby, coach Jim Critzer told his players that it had been 11 years since the Little Giants scored a win over the New York Yankees of the Shenandoah Valley.
Guess what Critzer can’t say anymore?
“I still haven’t gotten over it,” Lucas said. “It’s like I’m sitting on Cloud 9 right now.”
Lucas recovered from a first inning two-run shot (he would give up two more) and pitched the rest of the way, even snagging a shot back to the mound and tossing it to first for the final out that sparked a state championship-esque celebration on Ray Heatwole Field.
“When I caught the ball,” Lucas said, “I could hear our whole crowd standing on the side yelling.”
He made the throw to first, though he lofted it because he “didn’t want to throw it too hard,” threw his glove into the dugout and jumped with the rest of the Little Giants as Josh Craig caught the ball at first.
“Just to get over that hump of finally beating them is great,” he sad.
It’s funny how things work. Before the game, Lucas was on Could Zero sitting in the backseat of his parents’ GMC Acadia, riding back from Martinsburg, W.Va., and his grandmother’s funeral. His family knew her death was coming, there was no surprise there. But that doesn’t matter; losing somebody you’re close to is never easy, even if you get a year’s notice.
“We were pretty close,” he said, darting his eyes back to the diamond where his teammates were beginning to warm up. “We went up there regularly, a couple of times a month, to see the whole family.”
That’s how it goes when you grow up on a dairy farm like his father, John, did. Lucas’ dad was one of two children to leave the homestead. When they would visit family, grandmother was always there. A bond was formed. What else could you expect from a family that all live on Lucas Lane?
Sitting in that car heading to Bridgewater, where he planned to meet his teammates at the field, Lucas knew baseball was just what he needed. He and his father talked about as much over the weekend while they were up in West Virginia for visitation. The mound is sometimes the best medicine for what ails a pitcher, and Lucas was ailing.
“We knew it was going to be a good distraction for us to come back and play a baseball game,” Lucas said. “I knew I was starting, I knew I wanted to get the win.”
He was backed up well by his offense — an Eric Hall two-RBI double and a Jay Thompson solo shot just to name a couple — and in return, Critzer had Lucas’ back. Keeping the leash long on his young gun even after the Knights hit that third two-run homer.
“They told me I had it and I told them I have it,” he said.
Tough as nails, or so they say. Kind of like someone everybody called “Sis,” — his grandmother Ethel Lucas — whose parents died when she was young, thrusting the country girl into raising her siblings, or having to learn how to drive and getting a job when her husband died.
Wonder no more where Lucas gets his toughness. That’s just how things work.