Monday Morning MIL: Kamehameha Maui leads tight Division I baseball race at midseason

At the midway point of the Maui Interscholastic League Division I baseball season, the race is clearly on. Kamehameha Schools Maui stands alone on top at 5-1, one game ahead of fellow powerhouses Baldwin and Maui High, who are both 4-2.

Over the last 15 seasons, dating to 2008, the MIL’s two annual berths to the Wally Yonamine Foundation/HHSAA Division I state tournament have been the exclusive property of Baldwin, Maui and Kamehameha Maui. The 2020 and 2021 seasons were wiped out by COVID-19.

The Warriors own just four of those state berths and have not won the MIL championship since 2009.

“I still think we’ve got a lot of work to do,” Kamehameha Maui coach Shane Dudoit said Friday at Maehara Stadium after his team finished a sweep of Lahainaluna. “We’re making mistakes that we shouldn’t be making at this point in the season.”

Dudoit knows how tough it is to get to the state tournament — he coached Baldwin to the state title in 2018, but last season his Warriors fell just short. 

This season, King Kekaulike sits in fourth place in the MIL Division I ranks at 4-5 and Lahainaluna is 1-8. The 12-game regular season concludes on April 12 and the Central Pacific Bank MIL tournament is set for April 23-25.

The regular-season champion clinches a state berth and the MIL tournament champion also clinches a state tournament spot. If the same team wins both, it is the overall champion. A second-place or overall championship playoff — necessary if there are separate winners of the regular season and MIL tournament — is set for April 29.

The Division I state tournament is set for May 7-10 at Maehara Stadium. The MIL has won 12 Division I state baseball titles — Baldwin owns seven of them (1959, 1960, 1984, 1995, 2016, 2018, 2024), Maui High has three (1982, 2017, 2024) and Moloka‘i two (1999, 2000).

“There’s three really good teams in this league, but that’s kind of the way it goes. I mean, sure, I’d love to see all of our teams in the state tournament, but only two teams get to go,” Dudoit said. “We’re hoping that we’re one of them. But like I said, we got a lot of work to do.

“We’ve got to clean ourselves up. You cannot take off any inning against any of these teams in the MIL, everyone’s got a chance to beat one another. The Lunas, they kept us on our toes for a while.”

Kamehameha Maui took two out of three from Baldwin earlier this year and plays Maui High in a three-game series this week.

The MIL made an unprecedented statement 11 months ago when Baldwin and Maui High both reached the Division I baseball state championship game. The game ended in a 2-2 tie, halted by rain with no make-up time available due to graduations, leaving both teams as co-state champions. It was the first time in state history that two teams from a non-O‘ahu league met in a Division I state title game.

To get to the state tournament is an annual battle. Last week, King Kekaulike took two of three games from Maui High, the defending MIL champion who came in to the series ranked second in the state by scoringlive.com and third in the state by the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

Na Ali‘i entered the series against the Sabers with a 2-4 MIL record. On Friday, King Kekaulike dealt Maui High a significant loss behind the pitching of Taydem Hashimoto, who had to come off the mound when he reached 111 pitches in a 6-4 Na Ali‘i win. The national pitch-count limit in high school is 110, but pitchers are allowed to finish an at-bat they start before reaching the limit. 

“It’s amazing to be in this spot, playing the number two team in the state coming into this,” Hashimoto said. “Coming out of our last series, we fell apart as a team. Then we grinded the whole week, practiced, stayed together. We focused on sticking together as a team. We only have 13 players, so we need every single person on this team.”

Hashimoto gave up a hit to his close friend Ekolu Arai, the first hitter for Maui High in the seventh (and final) inning, in what was Hashimoto’s final pitch. As he left the mound due to reaching the pitch limit, Hashimoto walked to first base and hugged Arai. Like most of the players in MIL Division I baseball, Hashimoto and Arai have been friendly foes since they were young.

“Yeah, that’s my boy,” Hashimoto said of Arai. “That’s my friend. I’ve known him since second grade. I went to school Upcountry my whole life and he went to school downtown. So, we met through (baseball) All-Stars.”

The Warriors have several players on their roster who were members of their Division II state championship football team in the fall, including starting shortstop Bransyn Hong. 

“Feels good record-wise, but we have to keep practicing, we’ve got stuff we need to work on,” said Hong, who has signed to play college baseball at Saint Martin’s University in Lacy, Wash., next year. “Feels good in the spot we’re at right now. It’s really up for grabs this year, it’s anybody’s league right now. We just have to stay focused, focus on the main goal of making it to states.

“It hurt not making states last year, so it’s just like the extra motivation to focus and lock in for this year.”

“Monday Morning MIL” columns appear weekly on Monday mornings with updates on local sports in the Maui Interscholastic League and elsewhere around Maui County. Please send column ideas — anything having to do with sports in Maui County — as well as results and photos to rob@hjinow.org.