Six home runs, one blowout, and a playoff spot still very much alive: the Mavericks' wild weekend

Baseball has a way of humbling a team one night and letting it play the hero the next, and the Medicine Hat Mavericks packed that entire mood swing into a single weekend.

It started rough. On Friday at Ross Wells Park, the Mavericks were run over by the Moose Jaw Miller Express 12-2, with Moose Jaw piling up four runs in the second inning alone before adding three more in each of the sixth and seventh. Medicine Hat's offence, by contrast, managed exactly one good inning — a two-run seventh that arrived well after the outcome had been settled.

Then came Saturday, and whatever had gone missing on Friday showed up all at once. At Athletic Park, the Mavericks throttled the Swift Current 57s 23-9, launching six home runs along the way. After an opening run in the third, Medicine Hat scored six in the fourth and then ten — ten — in the fifth, a stretch that turned a competitive game into a rout. Swift Current kept swinging, adding four runs in each of the fifth and sixth innings, but climbing out of a 17-run hole in a single game is not really a thing that happens.

The weekend closed on a quieter note Monday at Spitz Stadium, where the Lethbridge Bulls edged the Mavericks 4-2. Lethbridge scored early and often enough — two in the first, one more in both the fifth and seventh — while Medicine Hat's runs in the third and fifth weren't quite enough to complete the comeback.

Split the ledger and the weekend reads as one loss, one statement win, one more loss — but the standings tell the story that matters. The Mavericks sit fourth in the Western Canadian Baseball League's East Division at 22-32, holding a two-game cushion over the fifth-place Weyburn Beavers (20-33) for the last playoff spot.

That cushion will be tested immediately. Medicine Hat closes out the regular season with a two-game road series against the very team it just beat by 14 runs — the Swift Current 57s — with a playoff berth on the line.