Sports writer

By Sun Advocate

While other teams at the tournament seemed to want to fight, cuss and swear at each other, the Babe Ruth team, consisting of 14-15 year olds went about their business and brought home third place to Carbon County.
The tournament got a lot of upstate attention when the final game between Westside and Taylorsville turned violent as two women from Taylorsville assaulted one from Westside. But that wasn’t the whole story, as the Westside team and supporters had also been pretty rude and nasty to the Price kids when they had been beaten in an earlier game.
“There were a lot of interesting characters at those games,” said parent Joy Grundy. “Those kids were throwing their bats and helmet when they lost and some of the spectators were pretty upset.”
That all came on the second game of the tournament as Price beat the eventual winners of the competition 3-2. The day before the Carbon County kids had defeated Granger 10-0 in a no-hitter that was thrown by Troy Grundy and Chris Hatch.
Those first two games made it look pretty good for Price, but the day after the second game things started to go downhill.
Their third game resulted in a loss as they lost to the Taylorsville team 4-0. But being a double elimination tournament, they still had a chance.
The next game was again with Westside who they had beaten the first time. The team went in with a confident attitude because of that and all the way through the fourth inning it looked like they would be in the championship game.
Mike Smith and Andy Farlaino did a good job pitching to a hard hitting Westside team. At the end of the fourth Price was ahead 11-5 on the strength of some great hitting by Travis Bettencourt who hit a three run home run and then Troy Grundy who smacked a grand slam over the fence.
But Westside came back in the last two innings and won the game with some hot bats, taking the contest 13-12 and heading off to the now infamous championship game with Taylorsville.
With that loss the team took third place in the state.