Southern Section 4-A : Fountain Valley Has Incentive to Win, 9-3 : Barons Score Nine Runs in First Four Innings, Sharpnack Pitches Team to Championship Game

Fountain Valley High School pitcher Bob Sharpnack didn’t take the mound for Tuesday’s 4-A semifinal game against Ocean View with visions of Anaheim Stadium or a Southern Section championship dancing in his head.

Instead, he was having flashbacks of Ocean View players dancing out of the dugout after Tom Smythe’s three-run home run in the seventh inning on April 26 gave the Seahawks a one-run win over the Barons in the teams’ final Sunset League meeting.

Sharpnack had been obsessed with the memory of allowing that game-winning homer, but it took just a few innings Tuesday for his negative feelings to dissipate.

Fountain Valley scored nine in the first four innings and cruised to a 9-3 victory over Ocean View at Santa Ana College to earn a berth in Friday night’s 4-A championship game in Anaheim Stadium. The Barons will play Camarillo, a 7-2 winner over St. John Bosco on Tuesday, at 8 p.m.

“I’ll never forget the way those guys were jumping around after that home run,” said Sharpnack, a senior right-hander who allowed three hits in four innings Tuesday to gain the victory. “That gave us plenty of incentive to beat them. We remembered that.”

Afterward, the Barons (20-9-1) staged a celebration that Ocean View players will have the whole summer to disrelish. The entire Fountain Valley team, 30 players strong, piled up around first base, where Jim Wayne had recorded the final out on a ground ball.

Ocean View Coach Bill Gibbons, meanwhile, stood in the dugout and questioned his decision to start right-hander Rudy Taub, who had thrown a complete-game, four-hitter in Friday’s 4-1 upset of top-seeded Mater Dei.

Taub, a breaking-ball pitcher, also threw a two-hitter in the Seahawks’ 2-1, first-round win over Lakewood, but he wasn’t nearly as sharp Tuesday. He became a spectator in the second inning after allowing four runs on three hits, one of them Jeff Olson’s solo home run to right field.

Gibbons replaced Taub with Brett Johnson, who was racked for five runs on three hits during the third and fourth innings.

Craig Anderson, a hard-throwing right-hander, finally came on to shut down the Barons, as he retired the final 10 batters after yielding an RBI single in the fourth.

“It was a gamble starting Taub,” Gibbons said. “I had three guys I could have gone to, and maybe I chose the wrong one today. I thought Fountain Valley was a fastball-hitting team and that a breaking-ball pitcher could stop them. If I started Anderson, maybe it would have made a difference.”

That’s debatable. The way the Seahawks played defense Tuesday, even Fernando Valenzuela would have had trouble holding the Barons.

Ocean View (21-8) committed four errors, each of which helped Fountain Valley score, and couldn’t come up with the big defensive play after the first inning. The Seahawks turned a double play to get Taub out of a bases-loaded jam in the first but provided little support the rest of the way.

Center fielder Mike Abascal got a bad jump on Steve Miller’s long fly ball in the second inning and played what appeared to be an out into a two-run triple that gave the Barons a 3-0 lead. Jim Doyle then scored Miller with a sacrifice fly.

Ocean View committed two more errors during the fourth inning, in which Fountain Valley scored four runs to take a 9-0 lead. Don Snowden helped the Barons capitalize with a two-run single, while Olson and pinch-hitter Chris Bugbee knocked in runs with a walk and a single, respectively.

“You don’t win games playing defense the way we did today,” Gibbons said. “The ball in center field had to be caught. After that, we were four runs down and couldn’t use our running game. When you fall behind and when Sharpnack is pitching, it’s tough to come back.”

Sharpnack struck out five in four innings and allowed a run on back-to-back singles by David Tinkle and Phil Chess. He had thrown 61 pitches when Baron Coach Tom DeKraii pulled him in favor of Steve Kaloper, who allowed Bill Daymude’s two-run homer in the sixth inning but finished the game with no further damage.

Sharpnack will draw the starting assignment Friday night when Fountain Valley shoots for its first Southern Section baseball championship. The Barons, who finished third in their league behind Ocean View and Huntington Beach, had won just one playoff game in the previous 20 years.