Post 280 joins Midlothian as Virginia teams to win American Legion Baseball’s championship.
Charlie Hogan sure knows how to make an American Legion World Series debut.
A 6-foot, 185-pound right-hander, Hogan made Chesapeake (Va.) Post 280 head coach Larry Bowles’ decision to start him in the 2025 ALWS title game look good as he limited League City (Tex.) Post 554 to four hits in a 5-0 victory that gave Chesapeake its first title and Virginia its second championship.
Virginia teams had played in three previous championship games, with only Midlothian in 1985 taking the title.
“It feels amazing to bring this back to my hometown,” said Hogan, who went 6 1/3 innings with five strikeouts while yielding four hits and three walks.
Hogan was pulled with 104 pitches, one less than the maximum limit for a single game.
He hadn’t pitched since last week’s Mid-Atlantic Regional due to a sore muscle in the back of his shoulder.
“My side was a little sore, so I took a break, rehabbed and was strong as ever tonight,” said Hogan, whose reliever Ty Woods got the final two outs on six pitches.
Since a Virginia team hadn’t even advanced this far since the 1985 ALWS title game, there was reason for Chesapeake to feel a little pressure. And particularly with a pitcher who hadn’t thrown an official pitch in more than a week.
“There was a little bit of worries,” said Hogan, who is soon to be a sophomore at Richard Bland College. “But I’ve been amped up the whole season hoping for this, so I was ready to play.”
Against a League City team that had scored 30 runs in its first five games of the ALWS, Hogan got an early lead and stranded runners in the scoring position in each of the first four innings and benefitted from defensive plays in the fifth and sixth to wriggle out of potential danger.
“I just mixed it up and had a good defense behind me,” Hogan said.
League City head coach Ronnie Oliver said Hogan was a difference-maker.
“Good job by their pitcher,” Oliver said. “He really kept us off balance. We had runners in scoring position. We just couldn’t get them in.”
In the fifth, right fielder Trey Campos retrieved a single to right and threw to first baseman Ben Kablach, whose cutoff throw to catcher Ryan Gocio negated a potential run at the plate.
Even more fortunately, Chesapeake turned an unconventional double play to end the sixth when an overthrow from second base after a forceout bounced off the wall and to Kablach, who threw to second for the out.
“All day long, we were talking amongst ourselves about this because it didn’t seem real that we were playing in a championship game,” Bowles said. “I’m still processing it.
“I can’t imagine this is not something that these guys don’t talk about the rest of their lives. And the way we won it with 13 guys banding together. You could not ask for anything more from these guys. It’s just special.”
Post 280, which finished the season 27-4, scored one run in the first inning on Gocio’s two-out RBI single, added an insurance run on Reid Vandergrift’s RBI single in the fifth and put the game away with a three-run sixth on pinch-hitter Jack Bonney’s two-run home run and Campos’ solo home run.
Campos (2 hits, home run, 1 RBI) led Chesapeake’s seven-hit offense.
For League City, which won the 2023 ALWS and was in the ALWS for a fourth straight season, Jackson Higgins had two of the four hits. Post 554 finished its season at 39-3.
- Baseball