When Douglas High School was bumped up to the large school classification in 1980, it seemed to many that the heyday of the Tiger athletic program was over.
Douglas went from perennial powerhouse (the Tigers had captured eight state championships in five sports during the 1970s alone) to perpetual also-ran almost overnight.
"We dominated the 2A and then all of a sudden we were the doormats," former Douglas baseball coach Hal Wheeler said. "It wasn't just in baseball. Football and basketball too. It took years for us to start winning some games."
It baseball that had a shorter curve than the other sports. The Tiger baseball team won its first regular-season 3A title in 1985, did it again in '87 with a senior-laden squad and had a successful 1988 season.
"Baseball started winning a little faster than football and basketball because you didn't have to be 6-2 and built like a brick house to win games," Wheeler said. "We started a summer program and put in a lot of work.
"We'd move up a bunch of younger kids and take our lumps for a year and then we'd be successful for the next two years. We just didn't have the numbers. We were a school of 900 kids and Carson and Reed were out there with 2,200 or 2,300 kids.
"It was all a numbers game. We had to take our time to build, because we couldn't reload like other programs. We got into a cycle where it was almost every other year there. We contended every year and we were very competitive."
In stepped the 1989 squad. Coming out the summer of 1988, there was little secret within Carson Valley as to what was coming. Somehow, outside of the Valley, the 1989 Tigers stayed exactly that " a secret.
"We were the farm boys, the dumb hicks, you know?" said Mike Lawton, who played right field for the Tigers that season. "We didn't get a lot of respect. That played a lot into who we were as a team and what we were able to do."
"They called us the Hayseeds," said Jake Rogers, who pitched and played first base. "We'd go up to Reno and Carson and we were just from the small town out in the sticks. We played along with it and wore cowboy hats to our games. It was pretty funny."
The joke, though, was on the rest of the region.
Behind a scrappy lineup and one of the best pitching staffs to ever come through the school " all-time strikeout leader Russ Garside, Rogers and a young sophomore named Shawn Estes " the Tigers rolled through their season to win the Northern 3A Regional title and post a 23-5 record.
Two of those losses came at state against a Valley High School team that featured former Red Sox catcher Doug Mirabelli and Tyler Houston, who was the No. 2 pick overall in the 1989 draft and spent eight seasons bouncing around the Major Leagues.
"The group we had in 1989, they just didn't lose," Wheeler said. "That was the name of the game. They'd played together for a long time, most of them came up as sophomores. They were strong as juniors and we were a pretty good ball club by the time the '89 season rolled around."
So good, in fact, that they breezed through the zone tournament in three games, including a pair of decisive wins over Carson to take the title.
"We walked in there with our cowboy hats on and we walked out with the zone title," said Lance Hutchison, who started at second base. "It's hard to believe it's been 20 years. It still seems like it was yesterday."
To date, it is the only regional title the Douglas baseball program has ever won.
Talking with the coaches and players from the 1989 season, one word consistently comes up from each individual.
Pitching.
The ace of the staff was the lefty Garside. He appeared in 16 games for the Tigers in 1989, posting a 10-4 record with six saves and 171 strikeouts in 94.2 innings pitched. He had 19 career wins and still holds the school record for career strikeouts at 309 " which will probably never be broken.
He had 39 strikeouts in one week during his senior year and struck out 20 in a game against McQueen during his junior year.
He was drafted in the fourth round by the San Diego Padres that summer and went on to post an 18-11 record with 144 strikeouts in the three minor league seasons.
Most say there has never been another pitcher like him on the mound at Tiger Field, on either side.
"He was just a great high school pitcher," said Douglas pitching coach Rick Kester, who was performing the same role for the Tigers in 1989. "Just the kind of kid you wanted playing for you. He always wanted the ball.
"He wasn't overpowering, but he had good stuff. We're talking maybe 83 mph on his fastball, and a decent breaking ball. He just pitched. He battled you. There was great movement on his pitches.
"There's a lot to be said for someone who takes the ball, goes right after you and throws strikes. He didn't walk anyone. I think he had maybe nine or 10 walks his senior year. In high school, that is phenomenal."
Wheeler echoed Kester's sentiments.
"He was a great athlete," Wheeler said. "He played center field when he wasn't pitching. His arm was just never sore."
While Garside bore the bulk of the load on the mound, Rogers was among the top all-around players in the region.
As the Tigers' No. 2 starter, he put together an 8-0 record with a 2.25 ERA. He struck out 51 in 56 innings pitched. He was 13-0 during his career on the mound.
"Jake was probably as good as any of them out there," Wheeler said. "He had amazing control of his split finger. Threw in the low 80s."
And the No. 3 starter was a Estes, another lefty, who played the role of the sophomore just trying to break in. He had five wins that season and after striking out 18 in a junior varisty game at South Tahoe, Wheeler was quoted in the paper as saying "He's going to be a pretty good one."
Estes was taken as the 11th pick overall in the 1991 draft by the Seattle Mariners after his senior year. He has 101 major league wins and is currently in the Dodgers' Triple-A system.
"He was still pretty young that year," Kester said. "He threw really well, but he was still breaking in with us. Overall we just had tough kids who wanted the ball. It's all you can ask for as a coach."
By the time the bulk of the 1989 roster had reached its senior year, they were more than a little familiar with each other.
"That's what's really cool about Gardnerville," Lawton, who now lives in Las Vegas, said. "We'd all been playing ball together since we were 10 years old in Little League. We were a super tight-knit community. That was special. You don't get that in places like Vegas.
"Pretty much everyone on the team played multiple sports too, so you knew how to work with each other pretty well."
And it wasn't just on the field.
"It was a fun group of guys to be around," said catcher Chris Bracy, who lives in Arizona now. "We all hung out together all the time. We stuck together on weekends. We were pretty close."
The Tigers entered the year with eight returning starters, including first-team all-conference outfielder Frank Raschilla.
"You look back on it and it is one of the best teams Douglas has ever had," Raschilla said. "There was a lot of talent there. A bunch of guys went on to play college ball and then a couple guys played in the minor league and of course you had Shawn out there, but he was just a pup at the time."
The team carried a certain swagger, based partly on its strong '88 season and partly on is successful summer.
"That was by far our best summer," Hutchison said. "We had the pitching and we had the talent offensively and defensively."
Bracy agreed.
"We were very fundamentally sound," he said. "Other teams could hit the ball but we were small and fast. We took advantage of a lot of good defense and some great pitching. We could hit the ball a bit, but our defense was what carried us."
"There was never a doubt in my mind that we were going to win zone that year," Lawton said. "If we hadn't done that, I would have been devastated. We had Russ Garside, we had a strong team. We knew we had what it took, it was just a matter of executing."
And execute they did.
Rogers was a first-team all-conference honoree at first base and finished second in the region in batting at .523. It was his teammate Hutchison, also an all-conference first-teamer, who took the batting crown at .525.
"We've teased each other a lot about that in the years since," Hutchison said. "We were neck-and-neck all year and going into the last month he had me by four or five points. I went 3-for-4 or something on the last day of the year and passed him up."
A fact that still gets Rogers a bit.
"That was a little bittersweet," Rogers said with a laugh. "That was how the team was though. We'd push each other just to see who would do what. We weren't a big power team, it was just the rest of the stuff we did, the little stuff, that made us good."
Raschilla hit five home runs during the year, easily repeating as a first-team all-conference selection, and Bracy, Lawton and shortstop Keith Crofton all earned second-team honors.
"They hid me in right field." Lawton said. "I barely made the team as a junior, didn't get much playing time and was basically just expected to help warm up pitchers in the bull pen. It was just about working hard out there and trying to find a little glimmer of hope for a starting spot.
"That's how the whole team was. None of us had any delusions of grandeur. We were all just ready to work hard to get the job done."
Other team members included Doug Broughton, Pat Winchell, Chuck Niblack, Phil Scicholone, Kevin Capra, Matt Carter and Bret Blankenship.
The Tigers had just three setbacks during the regular season, to Reed, Carson and Wooster by a combined six runs and went into the zone tournament on an 11-game win streak.
Still, a familiar opponent loomed on the horizon.
"We knew who our competition was " Carson, absolutely," Bracy said. "We knew what we were up against. If we were going to win zone, it was going to have to be against Carson."
While the Douglas-Carson rivalry remains one of the best in the region today, it's cooled down considerably from those early days in the 3A.
"We had a couple games end in fistfights," Raschilla said. "Football or baseball, it was pretty intense."
"There was some brawling going on," Bracy said. "It was a huge rivalry."
"We absolutely hated each other," Lawton said. "It was ugly."
While Carson had taken a 3-2 win against the Tigers early in the season, Douglas had come back for a 5-1 win in the latter half of the season.
Garside struck out 13 in a first-round win over Hug, setting up a zone semifinal showdown with the Senators.
The Tigers punched their ticket into the championship game at Moana Stadium in Reno with a hard-fought 7-5 win over Carson during which Rogers and Garside pitched them through.
Then, in the title game, Estes, Garside and Broughton combined to shut down the Senators, weary from battling through the loser's bracket, 9-2.
"I just remember being on the mound after the championship game," Hutchison said. "I just remember that feeling and everyone jumping on each other."
"Hands down, it was one of the best feelings of my life," Bracy said.
Rogers agreed.
"That was the best," he said. "We beat them pretty good in that last game. It was just sweet. Then to go on to state, it was an exciting time. It was some of the best times of our lives. We felt like we kind of owned the town there for a while."
Wheeler was visiting at Spring Training several years back to watch Estes when he was still with the San Francisco Giants.
In the clubhouse after the game, catcher Doug Mirabelli, who was also with the Giants at the time, found Wheeler and joked that one of his home runs against the Tigers during state still hadn't landed.
That more or less summed up the Tigers trip to state in 1989.
Valley beat Douglas 10-3 in the opener at UNLV and later ended the Tigers season in the loser's bracket finals 17-5.
"For as much as I was sure we'd win zone, I didn't really expect to do anything at state," Lawton said. "That's something I still regret, because now that I'm older I can see how much your expectations affect the way you play."
While the game against Valley, aside from the inordinate amount of future major leaguers involved, were forgettable, the game in the middle is something that everyone on the team remembers quite clearly.
Douglas picked up a 5-4 come-from-behind win over Eldorado on a three-run home run off Raschilla's bat in the bottom of the seventh.
"That was probably the most exciting home run I've ever seen in high school baseball," Wheeler said.
"It was kind of a storybook ending for me," Raschilla said. "For a lot of us, really. We were coming up on the end of high school and to win a game like that was something else.
"I hadn't been able to hit this guy's curveball all day long and he had me at 3-2 with two outs and he threw me a fastball. Just the right place, right time."
The memory is even more fond for Lawton, who batted behind Raschilla in the batting order.
"I was having a terrible day," Lawton said. "I went 0-for-3, 0-for-4, something like that. Just a bad game.
"We were playing from behind all day and I was on deck with Frank up to bat. I knew if I got up we were in trouble. I kept thinking 'Frank, get out or win this thing' so it doesn't fall on me.
"He ends up hitting the ball that clears the fence by like a foot. It was great. I was probably happier than he was."
The class of '89 will be gathering in Minden later this summer for their 20-year reunion, but members of the team contacted for this story said their attention will be on the Valley this week as Douglas, currently ranked No. 1 in Northern Nevada and having just claimed the Sierra League crown, will be vying for the school's first title in 20 years.
"I just wish the best of luck to those guys," Bracy said.
"It's a really tough thing to do," Wheeler said. "The odds are that you'll win one every now and again, but it doesn't work that way. Obviously these teams don't come around that often.
"If anyone is going to do it, they are going to do it this year. This is the type of team built to win a regional tournament."
