From the Archives: 1999 “If I Had a Choice, I’d Want Midland High”
Updated: Sep 11
Some games mean a little more before the first pitch is ever thrown. In Midland, Lee vs. Midland High has always had a way of doing that. In March of 1999, the rivalry took over the Tournament of Champions for two straight nights. By the time it was over, the Rebels had their fifth TOC title—and a story worth retelling decades later.
Here's Where we Start
It was Friday night of the 1999 Tournament of Champions, and Midland High had yet to lose a baseball game that season. That didn’t seem to concern the Rebels. Before the game, Josh Ramos went to head coach Jesse Benavidez and told him he wanted the ball against the Bulldogs.
Then he went out and made his case.
Over seven innings, Ramos allowed just five hits and one walk while striking out 12. He struck out at least two Bulldog hitters in five of the seven innings and retired 10 of the final 11 he faced. Behind him, the Rebels were doing plenty of damage of their own. Lee collected 12 hits, with eight of the nine starters recording at least one. By the end of the night, Midland High’s unbeaten season was over.
Lee 8, Midland High 2.
Benavidez knew there had been a little something extra behind Ramos’ performance.
“Josh came out ready to pitch tonight. He came up to me and told me he wanted to pitch against Midland High. I think playing them motivates him, and he showed that tonight.”
Then someone asked him a question that probably didn’t seem particularly important at the time. If he had his choice, who would he want Lee to play again? Ramos said:
“If I had a choice who to play again, I would want Midland High.”
That isn’t shocking. The Cross Town rivalry has been a thing for years and Midland High spent the next day finding its way right back to the Rebels. The Bulldogs first survived Tascosa 3–2, then beat Lubbock Monterey 10–7.
And just like that, the rematch Ramos had asked for was set. Only this time, there was a championship attached to it.
For four innings Saturday night at Christensen Stadium, neither team could push a run across. Lee and Midland High had already seen plenty of each other over the previous 24 hours, and neither seemed willing to give the other much of anything.
Then the fifth inning happened.
With one out and the bases loaded, Midland High’s Aaron Pullin lifted a ball into right field. Lee’s Scott Worley went after it and appeared to make a diving catch. The umpire signaled an out. A run scored, and the Rebels appeared to double Matt Bose off second. It looked like the inning was over.
Except it wasn’t. The call was reversed. Worley was ruled not to have made the catch, and what had looked like an inning-ending play suddenly became something very different. Midland High kept hitting, and by the time Lee finally escaped the inning, the Bulldogs had put four runs on the board.
A scoreless championship game had become 4–0 Midland High.
It would have been easy for the Rebels to stay stuck on the call. They could have spent the rest of the game thinking about what should have happened. Instead, they went back to work.
Lee scored twice in the bottom half of the inning.
4–2.
Then, in the sixth, Michael Burlison came to the plate with a runner aboard. One swing changed everything. Burlison drove the ball over the left-field wall for a two-run home run, wiping away the last of a four-run deficit.
4–4.
The championship had started over.
Midland High wasn’t finished, though. The Bulldogs scratched another run across in the top of the seventh and took the lead back, 5–4. Now Lee had three outs left.
Fail to answer, and there would be an “if” game to decide the Tournament of Champions.
First, somebody had to get on base.
Eric Clodfelter did and that brought Eric Neatherlin to the plate. There was something most people sitting in the stands that night probably didn’t know. Neatherlin had been struggling and with a championship hanging in the balance, he wasn’t thinking about the slump. He was thinking about one pitch.
“I told myself to wait for the right pitch.”
As it turned out, he didn’t have to wait very long.
“That pitch came on the first one, and the ball just went where I wanted it to go.”
First pitch - Neatherlin drove it for a two-run double. Clodfelter came around. The winning run scored.
Lee 6, Midland High 5.
No “if” game. No second chance.
Ballgame!
The 1999 Tournament of Champions belonged to the Rebels.
For Benavidez, there was something especially satisfying about seeing Neatherlin standing in the middle of the celebration. “That’s great for Eric. He has been in a slump lately, and this was a great way for him to get out of it. It couldn’t happen to a better guy.” That slump certainly didn’t define Neatherlin’s season. By the end of the year, the Lee third baseman would be named First Team All-District and District 4-5A Co-MVP and his walk-off double was far from the only performance worth remembering from that weekend.
Ramos had wanted Midland High and responded with a 12-strikeout complete game. Burlison had erased a four-run championship-game deficit with one swing. Clodfelter had found a way aboard with the Rebels down to their final three outs. Neatherlin had waited for his pitch—and ended the tournament with it.
By the time the awards were handed out, Michael Burlison, Eric Clodfelter, Josh Haney, Ryan Klatt and Josh Ramos had all been named to the All-Tournament Team.
Neatherlin received the TOC Tournament MVP.
Lee had gone a perfect 4–0 in the tournament, improved to 8–3 on the season, and claimed the program’s fifth Tournament of Champions title. Benavidez was pleased.
Comfortable? Of course not!
“We feel good about our play, but not overconfident. You play in these tournaments to get better and build your confidence. We have to continue to build on this weekend until district starts.”
The Rebels did. And that may be the part of the 1999 story that gets lost if you only look back at that one weekend. The TOC championship wasn’t the ending, it was just the beginning. Lee went on to claim an undisputed district championship, advance all the way to the regional semifinals, and climb in the State rankings.
The record books can still tell us those things. They can tell us who won, who lost, how far a team advanced and where it ranked but the 1999 yearbook preserved something a record book never could.
What kind of team were the ‘99 Rebels?
Because apparently, the 1999 Rebels were very serious about baseball. They were considerably less serious about themselves. If somebody on the team had a quirk, the others noticed it—and made sure he knew they noticed it. When Coach Benavidez once punished the team by making them run, senior Nate Brignon decided they had done so much of it that they should simply rename themselves the “Lee Baseball Cross Country Track Team.”
Opposing hitters weren’t safe from them either. A batter standing at the plate might hear the Rebel dugout dissecting every little movement, trying to get inside his head.
Then there were the traditions. Some made sense. Some apparently did not.
There were Pinkie Tuesdays, when a good play might earn a congratulatory locking of little fingers. There was Monkey Monday, which Josh Haney admitted didn’t really mean anything. There were handshakes created between teammates, eye-black designs that somehow turned into superstition, and after-practice trips to the snow-cone stand near H-E-B. The routines became familiar enough that teammates knew one another’s orders—Marc Matthews liked chocolate; Michael Burlison went with cherry.
They spent enough time together to know the little things and somewhere along the way, Josh Haney and Eric Neatherlin came up with another tradition.
Huggy Thursdays and Saturdays.
Make a good play on one of those days? You got a hug. It started as a joke, like plenty of things with this team apparently did, and then it stuck. Which brings us back to Saturday, March 13, 1999.
A championship game. A controversial fifth inning. Four runs down.
Burlison over the left-field wall.
Clodfelter finding a way on base in the seventh.
Neatherlin waiting for the right pitch and getting it.
A walk-off win over Midland High is always great! Tournament of Champions title, even better!
All on a Huggy Saturday in March of 1999.
Maybe that little detail says more about the 1999 Rebels than another statistic ever could.
The yearbook described a group that cared about one another as much as they cared about the game. They teased each other, invented ridiculous traditions, celebrated the guys on the field and the guys on the bench, piled into the snow-cone stand after practice and somehow found a way to turn an ordinary day of the week into something only they understood.
Then, when things got difficult on the baseball field, they picked each other up there, too.
One guy pitched. Another homered. Another reached base. Another brought him home.
Twenty-seven years later, the district championship matters. The regional semifinal run matters. Being ranked high in Texas matters. For the Rebs who wore those uniforms, maybe the things that matter just as much are the things nobody put in the standings.
The handshakes, the jokes, the snow cones, and the hugs.
And one Saturday night when they were four runs down against their crosstown rival and simply refused to go away. The night before they had said they wanted Midland High…..
And the Rebels were waiting.
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Special thanks to the 1999 yearbook staff for putting so many fun details in the vault for us. I’m not from Lee and I didn’t grow up in Midland but some of those names I got to write about are some of my closest friends. Now, I might not get to roll my eyes if they ever tell a “When I was a Rebel” story again….
Actually, I can 100% still roll my eyes. Sorry Eric.
If anyone has suggestions on a team, a tournament, a series or just a story from Rebel Baseball, let me know! Email: BoosterClub@LHSRebelsbaseball.com
I’m currently working on 1964 and it's a great one! Stay tuned!
-Andrea
Archives of Rebel Baseball History.
Sources: Midland Reporter-Telegram, March 1999 — “MHS, Lee host Tourney of Champions,” Lee Passmore; “Ramos pitches Rebels past MHS” and “Rebels capture crown,” Andy Penney. Additional team history and photographs from the 1999 Lee High School yearbook. Huggy Saturday was corroborated by Eric Neatherlin himself.
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