Mustangs’ great start wiped out
M'town rolls to 24-0 win before COVID-19 shutdown
LA Beating Upper Lake 24-0 for their fifth straight win to open the 2020 high school baseball season nearly a year ago today, the Middletown Mustangs were on their way to a great season.
Until the COVID-19-delayed 2020-21 sports season starts, the Lake County Record-Bee will take a look back at the local sports happenings of a year ago and the teams and athletes who were making the headlines.
But it all came crashing down two days later when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down high school sports not only in Lake County. The Mustangs never played another game after winning their first five contests, all of them at home. Dreams of winning a league championship and perhaps even a section title with their senior-heavy roster of veterans were dashed.
On that day against Upper Lake, things couldn’t have looked any brighter for head coach Jon Hoogendoorn’s Middletown squad. The Mustangs dispatched the Cougars in only 4 ½ innings because of the 10-run rule.
“He’s doing a really good job from what I’ve seen the last couple of seasons,” Hoogendoorn said of his Upper Lake counterpart, Upper Lake head coach Brian Milhaupt. “He’s growing the program.”
It was a big step up in competition for the Cougars, a Division 5 team, against the powerful Division 4 Mustangs, a veteran club that hit the ball up and down its lineup.
“Their team is very good,” Milhaupt said of the Mustangs. “They just pound the ball when they hit it.”
Upper Lake’s first two batters of the game had the Cougars’ only hits as things would turn out. Diego Velasco and Jonathon Thiessen had back-to-back singles against winning pitcher Jimmy Rockwell, who got out of the inning unscathed with the help of a 6-4-3 double play and an inning-ending strikeout.
“Their starting pitcher, he brought it,” Milhaupt said of Rockwell.
Middletown scored twice in the bottom of the first against losing pitcher Velasco before adding nine runs in the second. The Mustangs batted around again during an 11run third inning.
Among the big blows struck by Middletown’s bats were a two-run triple by Aidan Skinner (3-for-5) in the first inning, a bases-loaded trip by Tyler Crudo (3-for-4, 6 RBIs) in the third, and a two-run home run to left-center field off the bat of Will Aden (2-for-2, 3 RBIs), also in the third.
Rockwell, Nico Barrio, Isaac Perez and Hunter Blair added two hits apiece. Rockwell also doubled and drove in four runs.