Top 15 baseball finals in 15 years at Wild Things Park: Pine-Richland tops Hampton in 2006
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Thursday, May 24, 2018 | 10:04 PM
The TribLive High School Sports Network is counting down the Top 15 WPIAL baseball championship games held over the past 15 years at Wild Things Park.
Catch all the postseason action on the exclusive broadcast home of the WPIAL baseball playoffs, the TribLive High School Sports Network.
Here's a look at No. 5:
2006 Class AAA championship: Pine-Richland 6, Hampton 5
Growing up, kids are told they can either go the blue collar working man route or go white collar in more of an executive career path. Twelve years ago, Pine-Richland senior Dan Kollar decided to power his way down the rare path of the gold collar.
Kollar smacked a pair of home runs, the second leading off the bottom of the seventh and breaking a tie game to help Pine-Richland to a thrilling 6-5 triumph over section-rival Hampton at Falconi Field.
Hampton catcher Chris Beatty also homered twice, the first coming in the second inning to give the Talbots a 1-0 lead.
Pine-Richland took the lead in the third on a pair of unearned runs on a Brian Miller RBI single and a sacrifice fly by Tony DiPasquale.
Hampton's Sean Hennessey tripled and scored on a single by Cory McGinnis to tie the game 2-2 in the top of the fourth.
But in the bottom of the inning, following a Brett Mollenhauer single, Kollar smacked the first of his two long balls to put the Rams up 4-2.
A Mollenhauer RBI single scored Brad Slavick in the fifth to extend the Pine-Richland advantage to 5-2 after five.
In the sixth, a Josh Campanella groundout brought home the third Hampton run. That was followed by a second home run by Beatty as he took Pine-Richland starter John Karr deep over the center-field fence to even the game at five and set up Kollar's heroics an inning later.
In winning the championship for a third consecutive season, Pine-Richland set a record that still exists to this day.
No WPIAL baseball team has won three straight championships. Riverside's hopes of tying that record this year ended with a loss in the Class 3A semifinals.
Don Rebel is a TribLIVE High School Sports Network broadcaster and staff writer. Reach him at drebel@tribweb.com.
Tags: Hampton, Pine-Richland
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