Miners throttle Bucs for second straight Alaska Baseball League title

PALMER, Alaska (KTUU) - The Mat-Su Miners are once again Top of the World Series champions - and this time, they didn’t even need a miraculous seven-run comeback.

The Miners completed a second straight title campaign with a 13-8 win over the Anchorage Bucs at Hermon Brothers Field in Palmer.

“Feels great, man,” head coach Ty LeBrun said after the victory. “I give all the kudos to the players. We were down to seventeen guys the last two weeks and they came out and showed out and did a great job to bring it home again.”

Mat-Su jumped out to a large early lead, scoring three runs in the first and tacking on a couple more to lead 5-0 going into the bottom of the third (the Miners batted in the top half of each inning as the acting road team).

Anchorage did not go down without a fight, however, taking advantage of several Miner mistakes in a chaotic bottom of the third to tie the score at 5.

“They’re a great ball club,” LeBrun said of the Bucs. “We tell our guys, just don’t give them any room, don’t give them any rope. And they kept throwing some punches at us, but we kept throwing them back and we threw enough to shut them down.”

Indeed, the momentary hiccup did not quiet the Mat-Su bats. The Miners scored at least once in each of the first seven innings to build a towering 13-6 lead, and despite a two-out rally in the bottom of the ninth, the Bucs could not return the favor and avenge last season’s gut-wrenching defeat.

“It was awesome,” Miners shortstop Austin Park said. “I love every single one of these guys. It was a ton of fun.”

At the outset of the season, it looked as though the Miners had come down with a championship hangover. A late June skid dropped the defending ABL champions to 7-8 on the summer.

“We had a meeting with our coaches,” Park, who went 3-5 with a double and 4 RBIs in Sunday’s contest, recalled. “We weren’t swinging it too well. We just said, ‘hey, go out there and just be us and be aggressive’. And that’s what we did the second half of the season.”

Mat-Su left fielder Alex Pearson went 4-5 with 2 RBIs and a double, while second-baseman Diesel Toth added a home run. The Miners totaled 15 hits

The title cements Mat-Su as the first back-to-back ABL champions since the Anchorage Glacier Pilots three-peated between 2021 and 2023.

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