Baseball powers past Golden West

The Saddleback baseball team finished off a four-game sweep of Golden West with a pair of wins at Golden West on Friday in Huntington Beach.  The baseball team won the opener, 6-3, before hammering the Rustlers, 15-6, in the series finale.

After a slow start in the power department over the first week of the season, Saddleback saw a surge in the power numbers during the second week.  The baseball team hit five home runs in the four-game series against Golden West, including three more long balls on Friday in the double-header.

Saddleback opened the double-dip with a 6-3 win on Friday afternoon, scoring five runs in the opening inning and never looking back.  The Baseball team had six straight hits to start the game, including a three-run homer from Christos Stefanos to close out the scoring.  Stefanos, Turner Pruitt and Jacob Naso all had two hits apiece in the game as Saddleback outhit Golden West 10-7 for the game. 

Saddleback used a committee approach on the mound after using just five pitchers in the first two games of the series.  The baseball team started Cameron Cooke and used five pitchers in the game, with none of them going more than two innings.  Joining Cooke on the hill were Jacob Juarez, Cory Ritchie, Samuel Murphy and Andrew Hayes.  Ritchie ended up gaining the win as a result of being on the mound through the fifth inning in improving to 1-0 on the season.

Game two saw Saddleback carry an 8-0 lead to the bottom half of the sixth inning after scoring in five straight innings.  The baseball team had home runs from Liam O'Connor and Luc Stuka while pounding out a season-high 17 hits on the afternoon.  Stuka, Nation Wood and Brent Riddle all had three hits in the game as nine different players had a hit. 

The pitching was led by Rhys Stevens, who started the game and left after six innings of work in picking up his first win of the year.  Stevens struck out nine Rustlers before giving way to the trio of Hunter Ash, Andrew Herbert and Connor Wilford.  The Saddleback staff finished with 13 strikeouts for the game, which was a season high.

Saddleback is now 6-2 overall and 4-0 in Orange Empire Conference play after the sweep of Golden West.  The baseball team will take a five-game winning streak into an important series against Cypress College (7-1, 3-0) this week.  The last time the two programs met was last March when the season was cut short due to COVID-19.  When the season was put on hold and eventually canceled, Cypress had the No. 1 RPI in the state of California and Saddleback was No. 2. 

Saddleback and Cypress will open the series at Cypress on Tuesday and Thursday, with both games starting at 2:00 PM.  It will resume with a double-header at Saddleback on Friday starting at 12:00 PM, with the opening game of the double-header being a scheduled seven-inning contest.