Hart, Foothill Go Bump in the Night in Strange Game

The moon wasn’t full Friday night, but it should have been.

At least at Mayfair Park, where Foothill and Newhall Hart were playing for the Southern Section 4-A softball championship.

Years from now, the Knights will remember they won the title with a 5-2 victory. But hopefully, they won’t remember every detail from a strange game.

Between them, Foothill and Hart committed nine errors. Beside the errors, there were seldom seen calls by the umpires and interesting rulings from the official scorer.

Foothill Coach Joe Gonzalez was obviously happy his team survived the battle of the bizarre, but he began the process of forgetting the bad parts immediately after the game.

“I have no idea what happened,” Gonzalez said. “I haven’t seen the scorebook yet, so I don’t know how a lot of those things happened.”

Did Gonzalez really want to look at the book?

“Probably not,” he said, smiling.

Although Foothill didn’t play its best game of the season, the Knights did what they needed to. After giving up a run in the top of the third after a rare catcher obstruction call advanced a Hart runner into scoring position, Foothill took advantage of Hart’s numerous mistakes.

Hart committed two errors in the bottom of the third, which allowed the Knights to take a 2-1 lead. After Hart came back to tie, 2-2, in the fourth, Foothill scored three runs in the bottom of the inning, on an error, a wild pitch and an RBI single by Amy Tessman.

“It’s tough to see us make that many mistakes, but Hart had a lot of chances too,” Gonzalez said. “We took better advantage of our chances.”

Pitcher Leeann Gonzalez avoided the mistakes that plagued several of her teammates, limiting Hart to four hits while striking out six. Gonzalez also had two singles and scored a run.

Last year, Foothill lost to Irvine, 1-0, in the 4-A final, an experienced Joe Gonzalez hoped would give his team an advantage Friday.

“It helped the coaches because we had a better idea of how to prepare for a championship game, but I don’t know if it helped the players,” Gonzalez said. “It didn’t look like it for a while, but we got the job done. It’s unbelievable, isn’t it?”

Absolutely.