A live performance of Beauty and the Beast played out last weekend in Bellevue’s Bannerwood Park, one of the four venues for the Class 3A state baseball quarterfinal, and all the props were provided by the Enumclaw High baseball team.

The beauty in question was the outing the Hornets had against Meadowdale High of Edmonds, when they stung the Mavericks 19-2 Friday afternoon. The beast came the next day against a 20-3 Mount Si club that dragged Enumclaw back to earth with a 6-2 triumph, ending the Hornets’ spring campaign.

The old saying about good pitching beating good hitting certainly rang true, as the Wildcat offense furnished just enough run support for senior hurler Reece Karalus, who went the distance and was anything but careless in doing so.

Pitching seven strong innings, Karalus struck out five, gave up only four hits to the formidable Hornet bats and issued no walks.

“Karalus wasn’t an overpowering or dominating pitcher, who was going to blow anyone away with his fastball,” EHS coach Eric Fiedler said. “Unlike the pitcher in the previous day’s game, though, he had great command of his location as he hit most of his spots. That simply made all of the difference.”

Fiedler’s squad finished 20-4.

Fiedler added that he was proud of his group of upperclassmen for taking the South Puget Sound League 3A crown for the third year in a row and advancing as far as they did in the playoffs, prevailing over teams like Mountain View along the way.

“We’ve had back-to-back 20-win seasons,” he said. “There just aren’t that many teams out there who can say that. We’ve had a standard of excellence for four years at EHS and it has been an honor to coach this group of guys.”

One of the players who made a difference in the Mount Si game was junior outfielder Tyler Carlson, who smacked an RBI double that scored Kyle Thomson and gave EHS an early 1-0 lead that soon evaporated.

While almost everyone in the Hornets’ dangerous lineup swung the bat well against Meadowdale, it was the talented Carlson who swatted a three-run homer that pretty much broke the game wide open. Kyle Baumgartner went 3-for-4 with a double and three RBI, and pitcher Cody Hughes put together a solid afternoon on the hill and went 2-for-3.