St. Mike’s smash hits
district championship is us against Robertson.”
It’s funny Heath mentioned Robertson because the Horsemen looked about as alive to start the game against West Las Vegas (14-3, 2-3) as they did for the first 14 innings against Robertson before splitting the April 13 doubleheader.
Dons starter Jerry Ortega flummoxed the lineup, allowing just two hits and garnering three punchouts and appeared to be on his way to a third scoreless inning.
But freshman centerfielder Adam Bird battled Ortega to a full count before plopping a single to left-center field, which set the wheels of change into motion. A Heath walk gave shortstop Santi Martinez a chance to get the offense rolling, which he did with a two-run triple to center field to cut the deficit to 6-2.
Martinez scored on Elijah Archuleta’s opposite-field single and a seemingly insurmountable deficit was a much more manageable 6-3.
“It was very relieving, especially because the balls we hit were hard,” Archuleta said. “That hasn’t been happening to us for a while.”
Another two-out rally in the fourth produced a pair of runs when Dons third baseman Cruz Gallegos bounced Bird’s grounder past first base to score Lucas Stoll and Sabiani Rios-Guevara to cut the deficit to 6-5.
Meanwhile, Michael Geisler once again saved his team. In a five-run seventh-inning rally to beat Robertson 5-4 in the second game of the twibill, Geisler’s infield hit sparked the rally. Three days later, Geisler took to the mound in relief of Stoll to stop the bleeding.
After a rocky third in which he allowed two Dons runs for the six-run margin, Geisler threw two scoreless innings that helped change momentum.
“I should have got out of [the third] with no runs,” Geisler said. “I think that kinda pumped us up and gave us energy to get through the rest of the game.”
The energy at the plate was electric in the fifth, as the Horsemen took 16 turns at the plate and produced their best inning of the season on the strength of 10 hits, three West Las Vegas errors and a walk.
Martinez had his second two-run triple of the day, as he finished with four RBIs and scored two runs for the game. Derick Saiz, who was hitting an anemic .118, ripped an RBI single into left field to give St. Michael’s a 7-6 lead that only ballooned after that.
Stoll, who had just one hit all season coming into the game, had two in the fifth alone and went 3-for-4.
Bird, who has been a steady hand for an offense in need of one, had a chance to end the game in the fifth and invoke the 10-run rule, but his groundout with the bases loaded ended the frame with a 15-6 Horsemen lead.
“Putting up runs like this is only going to help,” Ruiz said. “Stoll, he wasn’t even hitting a buck-something. He was like, .056 [.050, for accuracy sake], and he goes 3-for-4 with a walk. “
Even though the Dons scored three times in the sixth, St. Michael’s used four hits, three walks, a Dons error and a wild pitch to score four times and finally bring the game to a conclusion when Rios-Guevara walked with the bases loaded to score John Leeder for the mercy-rule win.
For a team starving to score, Tuesday served as a muchneeded feast for the hungry. Ruiz, though, wants his team to continue to gobble up runs because he feels the Horsemen can be special if they do that.
And it starts with the right mindset from the outset, not when their backs are against the wall.
“We gotta turn that switch on right away,” Ruiz said. “Flip that switch. When you come through that gate [entering the field], flip your switch on. It’s got to be that way.”
Only time will tell if St. Michael’s heeds those words — much like it heeded Ruiz’s whiteboard message.