Valley Stops Glendale to Qualify for Postseason

Talk about your long days at the office.

Valley College defeated Glendale, 17-16, Thursday in a Western State Conference baseball game that lasted 4 1/2 hours.

By the time it was over, Glendale pitchers had walked 18 batters, blown a 10-run lead and kept the ice cream truck parked behind the backstop at Valley busy with customers hungry for some sort of diversion.

“That’s a hell of a way to end a year,” Glendale Coach Steve Coots said. “We’ve been really struggling with the bats and we kind of snapped out of that today. But you just can’t walk that many people and expect to win a ballgame against anybody.”

Glendale concluded its season 15-21 overall and 8-12 in WSC play. Valley, which plays College of the Canyons in its final conference game Saturday, improved to 27-9-1 and 12-7 and clinched a berth in the WSC’s five-team Shaughnessy playoff tournament that begins Tuesday.

The Monarchs trailed, 15-5, after three innings but rallied to tie the score, 16-16, in the fifth before scoring the winning run in the seventh on a ground out to second by Steve Ross that brought home John Stephens from third.

“We just battled, battled and battled,” Ross said. “We didn’t have any doubts at all that we could come back.”

Glendale knocked out Valley starter Tim DeGrasse in the second inning and wasn’t much kinder to relievers Mike Roberts and Wayne Schull, who entered in the second and third innings.

Art Chute keyed a three-run first inning with a two-run homer and John Bojanac’s three-run shot sparked Glendale’s five-run second.

Then the Vaqueros struck for seven more runs in the third inning.

Schull, however, toughened in the fourth and allowed just one run and six hits through the final six innings. The freshman right-hander from Burbank High earned the win to improve to 5-1.

“That was a great performance by Schull,” Valley Coach Chris Johnson said. “We’ve been going with our sophomore pitchers as starters most of the year, but Schull has proven that he can do the job, which is going to be important for us when we get into the tournament.”

Trailing, 16-11, in the fifth, Valley closed to within two runs on Greg Struhl’s bases-loaded double, within one on Mark Cavarretta’s run-scoring double and tied the score on Vladimir Pajcin’s sacrifice fly to right.

Steve Dempsey issued a leadoff walk to Stephens in the home half of the seventh. After an out, a walk to Eric Vargas and a passed ball, Ross followed with his ground out to second that scored Stephens with the winning run.