Coast Baseball was led to an 8-6 victory over the Trabuco Colts on Sunday behind strong offensive performances from James Loughlin and Christian Holm, who combined went 5-8 with three RBI's and three runs scored. 

 

Enzo Sanchez (shown above) started on the bump, and threw two quality innings despite allowing only one earned run and two strikeouts. Enzo has been a bulldog for us all year, and I was very impressed with how he stepped up and gave it everything he had despite not feeling his best. That says a lot about his character and the type of guy and teammate he is, and his future coaches will love that about him. In addition, he also had a nice day at the plate, going 2-4 with a double and a run scored. 

 

Brooks Hogenauer relieved Enzo after two innings, and only allowed one unearned run while striking out five batters through his three innings of work. He was attacking their hitters with his fastball, and mixing in his off-speed pitches when the meat of their line up was up with runners in scoring position. We did, however, make a few errors behind him. We need to do a better job of making the routine plays to keep our pitchers' pitch counts down which will then allow them to go deeper in to ball games.

 

We scored at least one run in five of the seven innings on Sunday, but the four-run third inning proved to be the deciding factor. This was a great display of putting together several quality at-bats that allowed our four-hole hitter Christian to be in a bases loaded nobody out situation. The inning was led off by Tari Farman who worked a five pitch walk. James Loughlin then smashed a double over the left fielders head putting runners on second and third with nobody out. Will Potratz then stepped up to the plate, and got a little two strike knock over the shortstops head. The runners were unable to advance as it was a close play, so that left the bases loaded. Christian then crushed a 2-0 fastball in the right-center field gap to clear the bases. He did an excellent job of staying in the heart of the plate, having a good approach, not being over-anxious, and driving the baseball where it is pitched. 

 

Prior to this game, our 14u team dropped two straight. It seemed as though we kind of lost that competitive mentality and approach to the game that had made us so successful this season. It was nice to see the boys get back to playing the type of quality baseball they have played all year long.