The Â鶹ÊÓƵeast Royals continued slugging their way up the Prairie Midget Baseball League standings Saturday with an 8-0 win in Weyburn over the Regina Athletics.Comprised largely of players from Estevan and Weyburn, the season-ending win locked the Royals (11-9) into fourth place. They are also riding a four-game winning streak with provincials scheduled for this coming weekend and league playoffs to follow.The credit for that, according to assistant coach Tom Copeland, goes to having a more intimidating presence at the plate.After suffering through an eight-game stretch in May and June where they scored just 13 runs over eight games, the Royals scored 55 over their next eight to end the season."The kids in the bottom half of our lineup are hitting a lot better," said Copeland. "From mid-June on, our numbers improved dramatically and it catapulted them into fourth."Case in point, no Royal was hitting over .300 before June 22. From that date forward 10 of the team's 12 players improved their batting averages and seven hit over .300.Still the Royals ended the season as the PMBL's second-lowest scoring team and have depended equally as much on strong pitching and defence.The former has been led in the latter half of the season by Estevan's Kris Keating and Tyler Kendall.Keating was 1-0 with 12 strikeouts and a 1.00 ERA in seven innings pitched since June 22, while Kendall didn't allow an earned run over 10 innings in two wins, running his season record to 3-1 with one save. "We win the games we're supposed to win and every once in awhile you win a game you're not supposed to win," said Copeland. "If you can do that then you're going to have some success."Provincials are scheduled for July 30-Aug. 2 in Saskatoon, and the Royals will face the Saskatoon Diamondbacks in a best-of-three first-round playoff series once provincials wrap up.Saskatoon actually finished eighth in the PMBL but was seeded fifth for playoffs due to the league's use of a points system instead of calculating games behind.Â鶹ÊÓƵeast beat the D'Backs in the semifinal of a tournament in Moose Jaw and lost both halves of a doubleheader during league play earlier this year.The top two teams at provincials will earn a berth to nationals and Westerns. Depending on how teams from Saskatoon (the host city for Westerns) do, a second team from Saskatchewan could also end up playing at Westerns."The reality is that there's a lot of parity in the league," said Copeland. "Nobody other than the Saskatoon Giants is really that outstanding that they run away with any given game. You can go into any game and win it."We've got to get solid pitching performances right across the board and if we get those things then we have as good a shot as anybody at finishing in the top two or three."
