In the 20-year history of the West Coast League, there have been only six champions.

That small number is largely because the Corvallis Knights won seven straight titles – their streak ended last season – and 10 overall. The Wenatchee AppleSox won five championships in the WCL’s first eight years. The Bellingham Bells were champs in 2014, the Bend Elks in 2015, and of course one year ago the Portland Pickles earned their first championship.

All five of those teams are still WCL stalwarts; in fact all five of them were playoff teams this summer (with the Bells and Pickles facing off in tonight’s Championship Game).

But there’s one more WCL championship team, little-documented or -remembered, even by some of its key figures. That doesn’t make the Moses Lake Pirates’ 2007 championship any less real, though. Even without the photos or championship rings to prove it.

This was so long ago, by the way, that the WCL was still the West Coast Collegiate Baseball League. Moses Lake joined the league in 2006 and, as head coach Gabe Boruff recently said, “We were really competitive in ’06. I was from the area, and the new owners of the Pirates heard about me. My pitching coach and head recruiter was Kyle Heaverlo, and we immediately started cold-calling all the best programs.”

Okay, so they weren’t that competitive. The Pirates finished 16-26, sixth in an eight-team league.

They were competitive in 2007. Really competitive.

“Yeah, ’07 was a blast,” Boruff said. “Kyle and I were extremely young, super-hungry. We got a couple of kids out of Cal, University of Washington, not as many J.C. kids as the year before. It was just easier because we had a good reputation from the year before.”

The WCCBL was, for whatever reasons, a pitcher’s haven. In 2007, the league ERA was 2.86; Pirates hurlers paced the loop with 385 strikeouts (in only 42 games) on their way to a 2.39 staff ERA. Their mound ace – if for just a moment – would be Jorge Reyes, a local kid and Oregon State righty who’d just been named Most Outstanding Player of the College World Series. A few years later, he would become briefly (virally) famous in one of Cody Decker’s YouTube efforts. But in the summer of ’07, he joined his local WCCBL team for just long enough to win one game, and strike out 28 batters in 21 innings.

Well, also to help the Pirates win the championship.

But that’s getting ahead of our story.

Thanks largely to their great pitching, Moses Lake actually finished with the league’s best record: 29 wins, 13 losses.

There weren’t divisions; the top four teams in the league made the playoffs, seeded strictly by records. In the semifinals, the Pirates were matched against the AppleSox, who’d won both championships in the young league’s history.

Game 1 in Wenatchee was a blowout: AppleSox 11, Pirates 2.

But the Pirates had gone 17-4 at home that summer, and Game 2 was set for sun-drenched Larson Field. The home squad trailed 3-0 heading to the bottom of the eighth, but capitalized on two Wenatchee errors to score four runs for the lead, and held on from there. Back at Larson the next night, the Pirates grabbed an early lead and eventually sealed the series with a 7-2 win, Reyes pitching the top of the ninth (and giving up a rare run).

Meanwhile, the Knights had dispatched the Kitsap BlueJackets, setting up the best-of-three championship series.

In Oregon State’s Goss Stadium for the opener, the Pirates broke a 2-2 tie in the eighth with a single run, and the game ended 3-2. Reyes did pitch a perfect eighth in his home (college) stadium, but it was Pirates closer Daniel Wolford who got the ninth. He did earn the save, but not the way you teach ’em. With one out, the bases were loaded on a walk, a wild-pitch strikeout, and an intentional walk.

At which point the guy with 11 regular-season saves calmly struck out the next two Knights, both of them looking.

Then it was back to Larson Field and Moses Lake for Game 2.

The Knights’ head coach that season was Matt Dorey, who today serves as Vice President, Player Personnel with the Chicago Cubs. Then, he was coaching at Portland-area Mount Hood Community College in the spring, and enjoying the summer-ball life.

“I was a really young coach,” Dorey recalled, “and we had small coaching staffs. So I would do laundry for players on the road. I remember that summer, we played a series in Moses Lake. I went into a laundromat, with garbage bags full of jocks, sanitaries, and everything else. There was a black-and-white TV showing Mexican wrestling, and the only other person in there was a woman doing laundry with two ferrets on her shoulders. I thought, ‘So this is summer ball, huh.’”

That series was back in June, and the Knights had swept the Pirates (after the latter club had opened their season with six straight wins). Now it was the 13th of August, the Knights had to win to stay alive, and when Moses Lake’s Michael Ratigan threw the game’s first pitch, the thermometer was still sitting in the low 90s.

Ratigan hadn’t been the ace during the regular season, but he’d been effective with his fastball/slider combo and he’d earned coach Boruff’s trust in earlier summers, pitching in the area. “I just tried to get ground balls,” Ratigan says, “and let the guys do their jobs.”

Nobody scored in the first two innings, but the Knights put something together in the top of the third. With one out, they’d scored a run and the bases were full; Ratigan was one bad pitch (and a good swing) away from finding himself (and his team) in a big hole.

Instead, Braden Wells hit a grounder to first baseman Ryan Bersen, who threw to shortstop Marcus Tackett, who relayed back to Ratigan at first for the inning-ending double play.

Dan Segel, who’s been running the Corvallis Knights since before they were the Corvallis Knights, was at the game. So was legendary Oregon State broadcaster Mike Parker, who’s been broadcasting Knights games since … well, since forever. He’s a legend!

There wasn’t room in the press box at Larson Field for a visiting broadcaster, so Mike was installed behind a table that just happened to be set up right near first base. So Mike had a better look at the play than … well, maybe not better than the base umpire? But still: pretty good!

“It was a bad call,” Segel says, “and Mike went nuclear. He threw down his headset, ran onto the field and started screaming: That was horrible! That was horrible! Somehow we got him off the field, and just kept playing. We still talk about it, to this day.”

Coincidentally or not, the Knights’ defense softened in the next couple of innings and the Pirates scored three runs, all unearned. Meanwhile, Ratigan and reliever Lee Roberts strung together five scoreless innings. But the Pirates couldn’t score again, either. So heading to the ninth, Moses Lake still led 3-1, needing three outs to clinch the series.

That meant it was time for Wolford. After two quick outs, a double, a walk, and a single made the score 3-2. But Wolford finished off the Knights with yet another Moses Lake strikeout, and the Pirates were the third champion in (now) WCL history.

Today, there’s not much left. Most of the principals don’t remember much about those games, 18 years ago. Those guys are out in the real world now, running baseball teams and scouting players and selling securities and solving murders and flying cropdusters. If there’s a trophy, nobody knows where it is. The guys didn’t keep their jerseys, and nobody got championship rings. The organization itself, for reasons now lost to the Columbia Basin winds, disappeared just a few years later.

But 18 years ago, those Moses Lake Pirates had some kind of a summer, capped by some kind of a week.

You pile up enough weeks like that in your life, and you’ve really got something.

About the West Coast League: The West Coast League is western North America’s premier summer collegiate baseball league. With teams ranging throughout Washington, Oregon, British Columbia and Alberta, the WCL offers top collegiate players the chance to compete at a high level, develop their skills, and showcase their talents in front of thousands of fans, MLB scouts, and national media. The WCL’s 20th Anniversary Season concludes with the WCL Championship Game on August 14.