COLORADO SPRINGS — His arm still warm from an unorthodox varsity debut, a Pueblo County sophomore sat in the lonely dugout and watched the state champions celebrate on the infield.
By the time he’d been asked to take the mound, there wasn’t much he could do to save his team. The Hornets needed two wins that day, having climbed out of the depths of the double-elimination bracket. Down big in the first game, they had essentially run out of pitchers. They just needed an innings eater. Blake Swift obliged.
“His first pitching appearance of his career,” Pueblo County coach Matt Eades recalled two years later, as if he still couldn’t quite believe the circumstances of it.
Welcome to the big leagues, kid. Now give us a few innings in the state championship game.
Swift gave Eades four. . A first baseball state title in school history eluded Pueblo County. Eades approached Swift and another sophomore, JJ Barger, in the dugout after the game.
“He told us we’ll be back,” Swift said. “And he wasn’t lying. We knew we’d be back.”
Swift’s career ended with a dogpile on the same diamond two years later. Pitching into the seventh inning, the senior led Pueblo County to a 9-4 win over Falcon High School for the Colorado Class 4A championship on Saturday at Air Force Academy’s Erdle Field. This time, the Hornets were in pole position, needing only one win. Eades’ promise was fulfilled; Swift took advantage of the second chance. The program’s breakthrough was all the more satisfying for it.
“It comes full circle today,” Eades said.
Swift’s only regret was that he couldn’t go the distance. He cruised into the seventh, safely under the 110-pitch limit, comfortable with a 9-1 lead. He wanted the complete game “pretty bad,” he said. But after letting a few batters get away from him, his pitch count had spiked. Eades had no choice but to go to his bullpen.
“When I went out to get him,” the coach said, “I just told him, ‘What a great career. Don’t worry. We’re gonna finish this for you.'”
A blowout started to inch toward anxious territory first. After the Falcons scored their third run of the inning on a two-out walk, they were one baserunner away from bringing the tying run to the plate. But the game ended on a strikeout looking. Swift’s final gem was preserved, even if the box score didn’t appear as pristine as his 1.34 season ERA through 14 games. He pitched 6 1/3 innings in the title-clinching win, striking out five while allowing three earned runs on six hits.
“Ever since he pitched that day (in 2024), we just knew he was gonna be our guy,” fellow senior Nick Hernandez said. “So it was nice to see him go out this way.”
Falcon tried to hammer Swift before he could settle in, swinging early in counts and making hard contact. The exit velocities and launch angles he allowed in the first inning would’ve portended disaster if those sorts of things were tracked in high school baseball. The first five batters of the game had Pueblo County’s outfielders chasing down tricky fly balls in the morning wind. A double off the wall. Two deep sacrifice flies. An error in left field on a drop near the track.
The Falcons only got one run out of it. They made Swift throw only 12 pitches.
“All you need to know about him is the way the game started,” Eades said. “Three rockets, and you couldn’t tell. He was the same guy that he is all the time.”
The deficit didn’t last long. With two outs in the top of the second, nine-hitter Elijah Tafoya fought off a full-count pitch out of play, then tripled off the right field wall to give Pueblo County the lead for good. Hernandez followed with a rope up the middle to score Tafoya.
The Hornets thrived all season by creating havoc on the base paths. On Saturday, they had Falcon kicking the ball all over the field. Two runners went first to third on errant pick-off attempts. Pueblo County capitalized on the second of those errors with an insurance run in the fourth. Again, it was the senior second baseman Hernandez delivering a two-out RBI single. He finished his 2-for-3 day with an RBI hit-by-pitch in the sixth, igniting a five-run frame to put the game out of reach.
“We definitely played our game,” Hernandez said. “We played clean. Relied on Blake to get us outs. Played good defense behind him and had his back.”
The Pueblo community had his back, too. About a week before their return to the state championship game, the Hornets’ catcher’s communication equipment broke, leaving them little time to order a replacement. Pueblo South coach Kevin Ortiz came out to Pueblo County’s graduation, according to Eades, and hooked the Hornets up with his team’s equipment.
“We’ve been rolling with it ever since,” Eades said. “… The city of Pueblo are champions today.”
Swift wasn’t at his absolute sharpest, but he was at his gutsiest. In the bottom of the fourth, he plunked back-to-back hitters to load the bases, warranting a mound visit. With the go-ahead run at the plate, he quickly got ahead 0-2 on the next batter, eventually inducing an inning-ending grounder to shortstop. Falcon left another two runners stranded in the fifth, when Pueblo County was still protecting a 4-1 lead.
It helped, he said afterward, to have experience on the same exact mound. Experience burning through innings when his team needed it on the biggest stage.
“El Caballo!” Eades shouted at Swift as the Hornets hoisted the trophy. The Horse.
A nickname that could’ve applied to the senior hero or the sophomore upstart just the same.
