Eagles sweep Mesa
Two crazy finishes, all in a four-day span, took place in the Battle for the Bell baseball series this week. The first game at Estancia High went eight innings and the next one at Costa Mesa lasted only five innings.
One team rallied for a walk-off win on Tuesday. Three days later, one coach didn’t want to walk away and it cost his team any chance of coming back.
The third-and-final game between the archrivals didn’t go seven innings on Friday because of Costa Mesa Coach Paul Grady.
The home-plate umpire tossed Grady after he argued a call in the bottom of the fifth. When the umpire looked over to the Mustangs’ dugout, Grady was still there. Once an umpire ejects someone from the game, that person must leave the premises.
The problem was Grady didn’t want to leave, leaving the umpires no choice but to call the game with Estancia up, 4-1. As a result, the Mustangs forfeited the contest and the Eagles will gladly take the win because they’re in the hunt to make the CIF Southern Section Division 4 playoffs and the Mustangs are not.
The scene was a bit awkward afterward for the Eagles, who rang the Paul Troxel Trophy at home plate. There wasn’t much fanfare, but the Eagles improved to 6-5 in the Orange Coast League. Half of those wins have come against the Mustangs, who are 2-9 in league.
“Our kids deserved that moment. [The Mustangs] would deserve that same moment if they won the Bell,” said Estancia Coach Nate Goellrich, who also addressed the Mustangs. “Just talking to them about, you know, keeping their heads up, because, you know, again, it was weird. They battled well. They were in all three games. All three games could’ve gone either way.”
Separating the Eagles from Mustangs in the first two games was their play in the late innings.
The Eagles beat Costa Mesa by a 4-1 score for the second time. The seventh inning decided the first game on March 25, when Estancia scored all of its four runs in the top of the seventh to break a scoreless tie.
The second meeting, coming on Tuesday, went extra innings. The Eagles ended a 26-inning scoreless drought with a suicide squeeze play in the bottom of the seventh to tie it at 1-1. In the eighth, Jeff Alai’s two-out single to right-center field drove in Christian Pruitt and Estancia prevailed, 2-1, to claim the rivalry for the seventh year in a row.
The one streak Estancia wants to end is its postseason drought. The program, which has missed the playoffs the past two years, is in third place in league. The top three teams in league earn automatic playoff berths.
With four games left to play in league, Estancia is a game up on Godinez, which lost to Calvary Chapel, 1-0, on Friday. Estancia has two games with defending league champion Laguna Beach next week, before playing two games with the Grizzlies the following week.
“Closing out with Godinez is going to be awesome,” said Goellrich, whose program has finished behind the Grizzlies the last two years, by 1½ games in 2015 and one game in 2014. “Obviously, we’re looking ahead to Laguna. We feel we can compete with [the Breakers]. Our team feels we let them win the last game, [5-3, on March 15]. We control our own destiny.”
Estancia is in position to qualify for the playoffs because of a solid performance turned in by Spencer Stern (4-4), who gave up one run and three hits, while striking out for and walking four. The right-hander also picked off Dylan Schafer, who went two for three, at second base in the third inning.
Colin Gardner and Jeff Alai singled in a run in the first and third innings, respectively, putting the Eagles out in front. Then Brian Rodriguez executed a suicide-squeeze play in the fourth inning to extend Estancia’s lead to 4-1.
An inning later, things ended abruptly.
The call that Grady questioned was the third out in the fifth inning. Grady argued that the ball Schafer hit went off his foot and it should’ve been ruled a foul. Instead, catcher Ryan Harrison fielded the ball a few steps away from the plate and threw to first to end the inning.
“I don’t know,” Costa Mesa assistant coach Don Ryan said of what happened between Grady and the umpires. “I wasn’t paying attention to that. We were supposed to bat. Let me see if the coach is available for you.”
Grady was gone by then. He didn’t stick around for the Eagles’ postgame celebration.
Grady didn’t return a message left on his voice mail after the game. In a text message, he said, “No comment.”
It has been another long season for Grady and the fifth-place Mustangs, who will miss the playoffs for the sixth consecutive year. This week, in two wild finishes, the Eagles ruined the Mustangs’ postseason aspirations.
“A little disappointing that we couldn’t finish out a game,” Stern said. “I like respect some of the players over there [at Costa Mesa]. I’ve known them for a long time. I know they wanted this just as bad as we did.”
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Orange Coast League
Estancia 4, Costa Mesa 1
(5 innings)
SCORE BY INNINGS
Estancia 102 10 – 4 6 0
Costa Mesa 100 00 – 1 3 3
Barton and Rodriguez; Stern and Harrison. W – Stern, 4-4. L – Barton, 0-2. 2B – C. Brown (E), Schafer (CM).
