By LARRY MORITZ

Salina Journal

HAYS -- The Salina Pestinger Falcons couldn't have picked a more inopportune time for their worst inning of the season.

The Hays Eagles, on the other hand, used that same inning to secure at least one extra week to their 2008 season.

Hays trailed 6-1 going into the bottom of the sixth before scoring 14 runs in the inning to steamroll the Falcons, 17-7, in the championship game of the American Legion Class AAA Zone 7 Tournament on Thursday at Larks Park.

With the victory, the Eagles (28-14) advance to the Legion state tourney starting Friday, Aug. 1 at Pittsburg. It will be the first state tournament appearance by Hays since 2004.

The Falcons end their season at 27-18 and will be absent from the state tournament for the first time in four years. Salina was the 2007 Class AAA state champion, and it will be only the fourth time the team has missed a state tourney since 1990.

"We're disappointed we don't get to defend our state championship, and it's especially disappointing because we feel like if we had made the state tournament, we could have made some noise," Salina head coach Ryan Kolzow said. "It's just unfortunate that us, Hays and Great Bend were in the same zone and two of the three had to go home."

For Hays head coach Mike Jenner, it will be a return trip to Pittsburg next week. Jenner was the head coach of the Eagles in 1997, the last time the state tourney was in Pittsburg, and led that Hays team to a runner-up finish.

"What's so sweet about the whole deal is the first team I took a team to state was at Pittsburg, and now we get to go back," Jenner said. "I think people kind of underestimated this team all year, and they just go out and get the job done."

Had Salina defeated Hays in Thursday's contest, the two teams would have had to play another game immediately following. The Eagles finished the double-elimination tournament 3-0, while the loss was the second in as many days for the Falcons against Hays.

"I'm excited," said Hays first baseman Sam Rohleder. "We've been disappointed the last two years with the way our high school season ended with McPherson beating us, so this feels good.

"This kind of thing never happens to us. We always seem to be on the short end of the stick."

This time the Eagles were on the right end of one huge inning. Some of the highlights of the 14-run sixth:

The Eagles batted around twice, sending exactly 18 men to the plate. The first 14 batters reached safely before Salina recorded its first out.

The Falcons used four different pitchers in the inning and the last, Taylor Wilson, recorded all three outs.

Hays had seven hits in the inning -- five for extra bases -- with four walks, two batters hit by a pitch and two Salina errors.

Rohleder was the lone Eagle to get two hits in the inning, but they included an RBI double that gave Hays the lead for good, 7-6, and a two-out triple that drove in the final two runs of the inning.

Matt Malott and Jay Sanders had two RBI each in the inning, and both were among the five Hays players to score twice in the sixth.

"Never in my life have I been part of an inning like that," Rohleder said. "We've scored 11 runs in an inning a couple of times this year, but never against a team of that caliber.

"Salina is a good baseball team, and if we played each other 10 times, we would probably each win five."

"We did two of the three things that have cost us all season," Kolzow said. "One is throwing strikes, but we did an adequate job of that today.

"The other two are we didn't knock in some runs early, and we couldn't avoid the big inning. That's been the story of our season."

After throwing 3 1/3 innings of relief Tuesday, Salina starter Tyler Benton had allowed only one run and seven hits through the first five innings against Hays. But the Eagles finally started to catch up to him in the sixth.

"I was sitting there trying to figure out who I was going to save for the next game," Jenner said. "Then it just snowballed. Benton was throwing a heck of a game, and it surprised me the way he came back after throwing Tuesday."

Wyatt Hall and Conner Martin had two hits apiece for Salina, with Martin driving in two runs. Seth Myers reached safely in each of his four plate appearances with a single and three walks.

Salina and Hays played one another six times this season, splitting their four regular season games before the Eagles took both postseason contests.

"They just beat us," Kolzow said. "Everybody we threw out there, they hit in that inning.

"But I don't think our record this season is indicative of how good this team was. We fought walks and we fought the big inning, and that seemed to be our downfall. And we couldn't put a string of wins together when we needed to."