Pirates drop two to Tigers Page 1B
After starting the season off on a 10-game winning streak, the Porterville College softball team hit a rough patch in Central Valley Conference play where the Lady Pirates have dropped their last four games.
PC (10-4, 2-4 CVC) had their worst loss of the season on Tuesday in a 17-3 five-inning fall to visiting Reedley College (6-4, 3-2 CVC) in the second game of a double-header in Porterville. The Pirates were also shutout 5-0 in the first game of the series.
“We’re very freshman, only one sophomore,” PC head coach Vickie Dugan said. “Early on we were beating everybody in five innings and scoring lots of runs. And they’re being freshmen. They get in clutch (panic) mode if we get tied or score three runs. You can just see it, you can just see it. And they start playing rushed and they start playing tense and they come up bat tense. And that’s what we do.”
Playing without their cleanup hitter freshman Angel Geston, who has a .594 batting average, the Pirates struggled to string together hits in both games and finished with just 10 on the day compared to the Tigers’ 25. PC’S top hitter freshman Chelsea Ramos, went 2-for-6 for the series and was kept off base in the second game despite starting the day as the top hitter in the state. Ramos is now second in the California Community College Athletic Association with a batting average of .689.
Coming off their first loss of the day, PC gave up two runs in the top of the first but answered with two runs of their own on Rbi-singles from freshmen Ashley Rojo and Sophia Carrillo in the bottom of the inning. But after holding the Tigers’ scoreless in the second, PC fell apart in the third and gave up six runs to Reedley on a two-out rally.
Down 8-2 the fourth inning with the bases loaded the Pirates’ pitching staff couldn’t get out of the inning, and without much help from their defense, gave up another nine runs. PC finally managed to get one run back in the bottom of the fourth on a sacrifice-fly from freshman Raquel Gonzalez. Shantae Gutierrez was PC’S top hitter in the loss after going 2-for-2 with a run scored.
“I went through all the pitchers that could pitch today,” Dugan said. “The pitchers ball weren’t moving like they should’ve been moving, they were throwing pretty flat. But in the past our defense was able to kind of pick up that slack when our pitchers throw flat but I didn’t see it today. I didn’t see any extra effort to help the pitchers out when they were getting hit.”
PC had three errors in the second game and all but one of the 17 runs they gave up were earned runs. Shiloh Lewis went 3 2/3 innings with just one strikeout. She gave up six hits, six runs and one home run. Alexis Rodriguez, Ashley Eyraud and Rachel Green all pitched in the second game where they combined to give up nine hits, 11 runs and three walks. Neither of three pitched more then 2/3 of an inning. Eyraud took the loss in the first game where she gave up seven hits, four earned runs, a home run and a walk. She also had one strikeout. Lewis relieved Eyraud in the first game and gave up three hits but fanned five in 3 1/3 innings.
Dugan said that she and her coaching staff warned the young Pirates early on that wins wouldn’t come as easily in the CVC as they did in the preseason. She added that there will be no more “freshmen” excuses and that the team’s focus has to be on correcting what went wrong and focusing on the next game. On Thursday, PC travels to Merced (6-4, 3-1 CVC) for a 2 p.m. game.
“They need to believe in themselves, that they are a good team no matter who they face,” Dugan said. “We’ve had four losses. You know we still turned some nice double plays. You know we caught some stealing. We didn’t have the hits that we should’ve had but we’ve had them in the past. Think forward not backwards. They need to get over that and go on and improve. Accept challenge, accept that we’re going to have adversity.”