The Bozeman Brewing Company Fighting Fermenters edged the Belgrade Building Supply Two-by-Fours 11-10 in the Gallatin Valley Co-Ed Rec League championship Monday night at the Regional Park complex. The game lasted three hours and seventeen minutes, which league officials confirmed is the longest title contest since the 2019 mercy-rule debate extended a semifinal by forty-five minutes.
Starting pitcher Dave Haverstock of the Fermenters threw 142 pitches over six innings before leaving for a 5:30 a.m. shift at the concrete plant. “He told me his arm felt fine,” said Fermenters player-manager Clint Voss, 34, who also plays third base and sells industrial lubricants. “I told him his arm isn’t the one mixing batch tickets at midnight.”
The Two-by-Fours led 10-7 entering the bottom of the seventh when left fielder Marnie Driscoll, a dental hygienist who moved from Missoula in 2021, hit a two-run double off the temporary fence. The tying run scored on a passed ball that catcher Troy Bickford later attributed to “a rock, or maybe a clump of dirt, or possibly the general geography of this infield.”
Bickford, 41, owns a fencing company and coached his daughter’s 10U travel team to a state berth last summer. He played catcher in high school in Roundup. “The hops here are different,” he said. “In Roundup you know where the ball’s going. Here it reads the wind and makes its own decisions.”
The winning run scored in the bottom of the ninth when Fermenters shortstop Jake Pfeifer, a second-year MSU architecture student from Billings, laid down a squeeze bunt that died perfectly on the chalk. Two-by-Fours pitcher Kyle Renshaw, who drives a 2023 diesel Ram 3500 with a “Native Montanan” sticker, fielded it cleanly but threw wide to first. Renshaw moved from Kalispell in 2020.
League commissioner Deb Halvorson, who has run the schedule since 2008, said registration for fall ball opens Friday. “We’ve got four new teams already,” she said. “Three of them are just the same guys with different sponsor logos.”
The Fermenters celebrated with postgame IPAs in the parking lot while the Two-by-Fours loaded gear into truck beds. Both teams have the same practice field reserved for Tuesday at 6 p.m.