The season is over for the Grand Forks Blues baseball team but catcher Sam Ross is proud of how his team performed.

The senior men’s team that plays in the Sr. Babe Ruth XBL finished with a record of 7-8-1 and lost 7-2 in the playoffs to Trial Pirates on June 22.

“(The Blues) gave (the Pirates) four runs in the bottom of the first due to a couple of errors,” said the Blues’ catcher when asked about the playoff loss.

“After that we really buckled down and it was really a tight game. We scored a couple of runs in the fourth or fifth inning but we just couldn’t really get over the hump.”

The week was shortened due to all the rain and because of that, the playoffs went into single knockout and that coupled with the loss cost the Blues an opportunity to play a home game in Grand Forks.

But despite the ending to the season, Ross likes the progress his team made as the season wore on; he became de facto manager after suffering an ankle injury.

“We actually came along way,” he explained. 

“We got great pitching this year from Grant Mills and Greg Hayward, they were our two main starters, and those guys were awesome for us this year.”

Ross says the Grand Forks Blues struggled at times, had some blowouts and were blown out and was competitive – he said that while his team lost to every team, it also beat every team as well.

“We had a couple of walk-off wins where we won in the bottom of the seventh inning, so games like that were really big for us,” he said.

While the Blues did make the playoffs, Ross does admit that the team had problems in the latter stages of the season but it was because of reasons out of the team’s control.

“We struggled a little at the end here because of an injury to myself and Tom Starchuk (second baseman) and Byron Colin (third baseman/left fielder) both had to go back to work,” Ross said.

Starchuk and Colin both work on oil rigs in Northern Alberta.

“So we were a little short for the last few games of the season but we managed to get by.”

“We developed a really good core group of guys,” Ross went on to say.

The Grand Forks Blues has been invited to play in a B.C. senior men’s provincial tournament during B.C. Day long weekend in Trail, B.C.

Ross says he wants to organize a mini-tournament with teams from Penticton and Vernon to come to town in order to warm up for the tournament in Trail.