Sunday, August 30 · Capuchino High School — The San Jose Orioles won their second straight SJ NABA Division III championship Sunday, beating the Bay Area Formosans 3–2 in a winner-take-all Game 3.

 

They did it as the fourth seed. And they did it by winning twice in one day.

 

The fourth seed

 

The Orioles went 12–3–1 in the regular season and were seeded fourth. In a division this tight, that is what a very good record buys you: the long way around.

 

Their playoff run started in a single-elimination game against the fifth seed, NorCal Phillies, winning 4-3.

 

And then, a three-game battle against the Muffins — the number one seed. The Orioles won that series.

 

Then came the Formosans, and another best-of-three, and that one went the distance too.

 

One single elimination, two series. The most games played by any Championship team in the league. No bye, no soft draw, and a championship at the end of it.

 

The morning game

 

For four innings on Sunday morning, nobody scored. Mikel Irigoyen was matching Jack Warren pitch for pitch, and the Orioles were nine innings from ending the series before lunch.

 

Then the Formosans put five on the board in the fifth and the series turned over.

 

The Formosans' Eason Chen doubled and drove in three of them. Carlos Chen drove in two more later. Warren, who has spent this season being the best player in Division III, went seven innings on 92 pitches and gave up three runs — only one of them earned — to take the win. Matthew Szedlock closed it out for the save.

 

Carlos Chen, #52

 

Irigoyen came out after 4.2 innings and 72 pitches with the loss.

 

The Orioles clawed back — two in the sixth, one in the seventh, one more in the ninth — and here is the strangest line of the whole series: they scored four runs in Game 2 without recording a single RBI.

 

Every run came on an error, a walk or a wild pitch. Kurt Beckmann went 2-for-2 with a double and a walk. Ryan Watters went 2-for-3 with a double. Michael Cash, Jacob Cook, Sean Rynewicz and Scott Lesan each singled.

 

Eight hits, three stolen bases, and nothing that drove anybody in.

 

Formosans 7, Orioles 4. A series that could have ended before noon was tied instead.

 

The 4.1 innings that won a championship

 

Here is the part of Sunday that will not show up in any highlight, in any win column, or on any trophy.

When Irigoyen came out in the fifth, down 5–0, in a game the Orioles were not going to win, the ball went to Kurt Beckmann — a utility player, not a starter, who had already been to the plate twice that morning.

 

Beckmann threw 4.1 innings. Three hits. Two runs, none of them earned. Six strikeouts. Sixty-seven pitches. Then he went back out that afternoon and played center field and shortstop in the championship game.

 

Nothing in that outing helped the Orioles win Game 2. They lost it. What it did was this: Mike Cash, Pedro Enriquez and Jacob Cook — the three men who would win the Division III championship three and a half hours later — did not throw a single pitch before lunch.

 

The Formosans had no such luxury. Warren had thrown 92 pitches. Szedlock had thrown 42 behind him and also played first base. By the deciding game, they were on Kevin Liou, their third pitcher of the day, and Szedlock had to come back out for 3.1 more innings in relief. Warren spent the championship game in center field.

 

Add it up. The Orioles used five pitchers across eighteen innings on Sunday, and nobody threw more than 72 pitches. The Formosans used three, and two of them worked both games.

 

That is the championship. Not a moment — a roster.

 

Three and a half hours later

 

The Orioles scored in the first inning and added two in the fifth, and that was every run they would get.

 

Dave Baulwin, Ryan Watters, & Mike Spooner drove them in. Dave started the scoring with a RBI infield single in the 1st inning. 

 

Ryan Watters added on with a sacrifice fly in the 5th inning, which is exactly the kind of at-bat that decides a one-run championship and never makes a highlight reel.

 

Mike Spooner went 2-for-3 with the game-winning RBI single in the 5th inning. Anthony White doubled and scored. Matthew Kirk played lockdown defense at 1st, singled, and scored. Kurt Beckmann played center field and shortstop in the same game and scored a run. Liou hit three Orioles batters and lasted 5.2 innings.

 

And the Orioles ran. Seven stolen bases in a championship game — two by George Hunt, two by Beckmann, two by Irigoyen, one by Watters. Irigoyen, who had thrown 148 pitches that morning, stole two bases that afternoon.

 

Mike Cash started and threw five shutout innings on 61 pitches, four hits, three strikeouts, for the win. Pedro Enriquez took the sixth, seventh, and eighth. The Formosans finally got to him in the eighth for two — Jerry Hsiung and Alex Chen driving them in — and a 3–0 championship game became a 3–2 championship game with six outs left.

 

Mike Cash, #33

 

Jacob Cook came in for the ninth. He threw thirteen pitches. Twelve were strikes. One hit, one strikeout, and the 2026 season was over.

 

Overcoming five errors

 

The Orioles committed five errors in the game that won them a championship. Five defensive mistakes in a nine-inning game, the team led by three runs and then by one.

 

They allowed one earned run.

 

They were not clean. They gave the Formosans chance after chance to take the game, and every single time, somebody got the next out anyway. A championship team is not usually the team that plays perfectly. It is the team that is still standing after it doesn't.

 

What the Orioles did to one of the Formosans' best players

 

The Formosans' Jack Warren hit .667 this season with 19 RBI, 18 stolen bases and a 2.45 ERA. No one in the division was better.

 

Across three championship games, the Orioles held him to 2-for-12.

 

One hit in Game 1. One in Game 2. In the game that decided the championship, Warren went 0-for-4. He drew a walk and scored a run, and that was the extent of it.

 

You do not shut down a .667 hitter by accident over twelve at-bats. Somebody had a plan, and the whole roster executed it three times.

 

Hats off to the Formosans

 

None of the above should read as a team getting run over.

 

The Formosans lost Game 1 by a score of 8–5 — and four of those five runs came in the last three innings, against a team that had led 6–1. That was the first sign of what this series was going to be.

 

A week later they were eliminated by lunchtime if they lost, and they didn't. Warren threw seven innings, and Eason Chen drove in three, and they won the game they had to win. Then they took the deciding game to the last inning of the season, on their second nine innings of the day, with their third pitcher.

 

Matthew Szedlock deserves the same paragraph Beckmann got. He played first base, pitched in both games — 5.1 innings across the doubleheader — and went 5-for-10 at the plate on the same afternoon. Spiro Stameson doubled in the clincher. Carlos Chen caught eighteen innings in one day.

 

In a three-game series decided by one total run, second place is not a lesser thing.

 

2026 Bay Area Formosans finished the regular season 12-4.

 

Back-to-back

 

Winning once means a team was good for a summer. Winning twice means everyone else in the division spent the offseason planning specifically for you, and it didn't matter.

 

The Orioles did it the hard way. 12–3–1 and the fourth seed. The number one seed beaten in a best-of-three. An elimination game survived in the morning, and a one-run championship held through the last two innings of the season.

 

A year ago this group learned how to win one of these. On Sunday they proved they knew how to do it again — from further back in the bracket, against a tougher draw, on a longer day.

 

Congratulations to the San Jose Orioles — your 2026 SJ NABA Division III back-to-back Champions.

 

And to the Bay Area Formosans: an outstanding season, and a championship series this league will be talking about next summer.

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