Leo Roth

Sports columnist

When I think about how the Rochester Red Wings season ended, when their fate was in and then out of their hands, I think of Crash Davis explaining to Nuke LaLoosh the difference between hitting .250 and .300 and the ramifications in the movie Bull Durham.

“It's 25 hits," Davis says. “Twenty-five hits in 500 at bats is 50 points, OK? There's six months in a season; that's about 25 weeks. That means if you get just one extra flare a week, just one, a gorp, you get a groundball — you get a groundball with eyes — you get a dying quail, just one more dying quail a week ... and you're in Yankee Stadium."

Or in the Red Wings case, you’re in the International League post-season for the first time since 2013.

There’s a reason the saying “Every game counts" is a cliché.

After five months and 142 games, Rochester and Lehigh Valley tied with 80-62 records, but the IronPigs captured the IL's wild-card spot thanks to winning the head-to-head season series with the Red Wings 13-9.

“Record-wise, I wish we were 19 over (.500). That's all I can say the morning after," manager Mike Quade said Tuesday as he met with the media one last time in his tiny Frontier Field office.

Maybe one more dying quail scores one more run that wins one of the 19 one-run losses the Wings played.

After the Red Wings took care of business in their season finale against Pawtucket, winning 10-1 behind Matt Hague’s two home runs and the pitching of Adalberto Mejia and Dietrich Enns, Quade, his players and 9,300 fans at Frontier Field learned that Lehigh Valley also took care of business at home by beating Scranton/Wilkes-Barre 4-3 in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

What many didn’t know was how the IronPigs won. By the width of a pork chop.

Trailing by a run, the North Division champion RailRiders loaded the bases with one out in the ninth inning. But reliever Pedro Beato struck out slugger Jake Cave on three pitches, then got Billy McKinney to bounce out to second.

Rochester’s Cito Culver was the tying run on third

Yes, one gorp, one groundball with eyes, one dying quail by Scranton/Wilkes-Barre and we might be talking today how the local kid helped his hometown Red Wings make the playoffs.

“Got to give them credit," Red Wings manager Dan Mason said of the IronPigs, who finished the year 6-0 as Rochester was going 3-5 in its last eight. “They beat the best team in the league four straight. It would’ve been easier to swallow had they not loaded the bases with one out. They gave us hope and took it away. But all in all, it was still a really good season."

So good, fans loitered in the concourse as if the lights just came on at a family reunion nobody wanted to see end.

The same mood existed in the clubhouse as players packed their belongings and headed off, some to help the parent Minnesota Twins in their Major League Baseball wild-card quest.

It’s a great credit to Quade and his coaches, Stu Cliburn and Chad Allen, when a team is this close in the minor leagues. Where roster churn is so heavy the clubhouse door revolves.

Some 66 players came through Rochester this season, with 33 playing for both the Wings and Twins, seven making their major-league debuts. A total of 41 pitchers took the mound.

And yet, for the first time since Earl Weaver’s teams of the mid-1960s and Joe Altobelli’s powerhouses of the mid-1970s, Red Wings fans were treated to a second consecutive 80-win season — and mistreated with no playoff berth.

That’s never happened before in IL history, a league that dates to 1884.

After a night of decompressing with his staff, asking, “What’s it going to take to get over the hump?" Quade, who is 46 games above .500 in his three seasons with the Wings, arrived back at the ballpark refreshed and full of perspective.

“Someone had to win six in a row at the end of the season ... to beat us. So, while it’s always disappointing, you take the season as a whole and where we were record-wise and the contributions to the major league club and where they’re at, it’s all part of what we’re here for, so I look at it as a success," he said.

A younger man might need a few months to get over such a finish but Quade, 60, needed only a few hours, especially with Hurricane Irma bearing down on Florida, where he makes his winter residence.

“I was proud of all of them,’’ he said of his players. “I know I was extremely happy we won yesterday. That might seem like a small thing now because Lehigh Valley won as well, but I didn’t want to come home and lose three of four; I didn’t want to lose the last day when we had a chance to win and get in. It’s down to one game and you like to see your club play well when the pressure is really on, and we got great pitching and we played really well, so that I was very happy about."

All a team can do is leave it on the field. And while there was consistency in the Wings' pitching (3.39 ERA) and batting (.261 average), both third in the IL, there was also consistency in character, Quade noted.

“I told them, and I mean it, 'When they take the uniform off you, and it’s a short-lived deal, it’s about character,' " he said. “When they put you in that box, and say ‘Adios,’ it’s about character.

“I love this game, I love watching the guys compete and I’ve had the pleasure of watching it at every level," Quade said. "But in the end, who are you? What kind of person are you? I think there are a whole bunch of guys in that room that no matter what kind of career they have are going to be successes down the road. They will have the kind of integrity you want from your friend, your family and the people around you. That may sound sappy but I believe it."

It doesn’t sound sappy at all, Skip. It sounds like the kind of team a city was proud of.