Cypress Wins, Clinches Conference Championship

Scott Pickler, Cypress College baseball coach, says he doesn’t try to find out the results of other Orange Empire Conference games the day they are played.

Instead, he looks at the morning newspaper to see what happened to the teams chasing his first-place Chargers.

Pickler can sleep in today because the Chargers beat Orange Coast, 6-5, to clinch the conference title with two games left.

“It’s sweet,” Pickler said. “This is a big surprise, when you start as many freshmen as we do.”

The Chargers (32-11, 17-5) started as many as seven freshmen position players in most games this season and two made major contributions Saturday.

Junior Rodriguez, a shortstop from Sonora High, drove in two runs with a double and his fifth home run.

The homer, his second in two games, started an eighth-inning rally in which Cypress scored three times to take a 5-4 lead.

Jeremy Booth followed Rodriguez’s homer with a double and freshman Steve Hindman, from Buena Park High, drove in pinch-runner Lance Williams with a single to tie it, 4-4. Hindman scored the go-ahead run on an error.

Hindman, who had a key pinch-hit two-run homer in the Thursday’s 11-10 victory over Rancho Santiago, had a single in the ninth to drive in Keith Ginter and put Cypress ahead, 6-4.

Orange Coast’s Forest Long, who had three hits and scored two runs, opened the ninth with double and scored on Deric Yanagisawa’s one-out single. But reliever Ara Petrosian struck out the next two batters to end the game.

Petrosian (7-3) gave up seven hits, two runs and struck out seven in the final 4 1/3 innings for the victory.

Yanagisawa also had a home run, his third, and Geoff Wilson had an RBI single for Orange Coast (22-16, 6-15).