Costa Mesa baseball claims first league title since 2009
Costa Mesa’s persistence prevailed in an often frustrating regular-season baseball finale, with the reward the Mustangs so craved: sole ownership of their first Orange Coast League championship in 15 years.
They scored in every inning Thursday afternoon, twice in the sixth — three of them unearned — to pull out a 7-4 victory over visiting St. Margaret’s, finish a game ahead of arch-rival Estancia, and secure Division 6’s top seed heading into next week’s CIF Southern Section playoffs.
“It feels amazing. It’s really, really fun,” said sophomore third baseman/pitcher Wylan Rottschafer, who went two for three, scored two runs and earned his third save of the season in three innings of relief. “We worked so hard, and we deserve this. We earned it.”
Costa Mesa (21-6 overall, 11-1 in league) has rebounded from a mostly fallow decade since head coach Jim Kiefer, who guided the Mustangs to the 2009 league title and departed after the 2011 season, returned two years ago. Three straight winning seasons, 40 wins and successive playoff berths have followed.
“To do this this year is a tremendous achievement for them,” Kiefer said. “They worked really hard to get here ... We definitely thought we’d be competitive in our league, that we would be in the mix, but as things unfolded, we realized, ‘hey, we’ve got a chance to do this’ and we just kept chugging along and kept winning games.”
Junior middle infielder Omar Gutierrez, who reached base twice and had a sacrifice bunt that set up Rottschafer’s go-ahead-for-good run in the fourth inning, called the scene “surreal.”
“Freshman year, the new coaches put out the plan [and] told us this is the goal,” he said. “It just feels unbelievable to finally accomplish something. There were ups and downs. There were moments I didn’t believe it, but we stuck with the plan and made it happen.”
Rottschafer was “not surprised at all.”
“I saw this coming last year,” he said, “because we were good last year and we’re a year older. It’s basically the same team. So I knew we had a really good season in us.”
They vaulted atop the Division 6 rankings this week, which “puts us in a really good spot to win CIF and then maybe even win state.”
Costa Mesa missed opportunities to build a substantial early advantage, leaving the bases loaded in the first two innings while taking a 2-1 lead on Isaiah Mamian’s RBI single in the first and a bases-loaded walk that brought home Owen Dever, whose double started the Mustangs’ second.
Errors led to runs in the third (by Mateo Navarro), fourth (Rottschafer), and fifth (Zeno Piazza), and Dever followed Will Clark’s RBI single in the sixth with a sacrifice fly to make it 7-3.
Sebastian Salazar gave St. Margaret’s (7-12, 5-7) a first-inning lead, scoring an unearned run after leading off with a bloop infield single, and delivered a two-run single pull even at 3-3 in the fourth. He went three for four and scored again in the seventh on Jasper Smith’s sacrifice fly.
The Tartars needed to win to set up a showdown with Santa Ana Calvary Chapel for the league’s final automatic playoff berth. Four errors, five runners stranded at second base and allowing 19 of 36 Costa Mesa batters to reach base didn’t help.
“That’s kind of a microcosm of our season,” St. Margaret’s coach Scott Wallis said. “Tip your hat to those guys. Coaching staff over there is class. What they’ve done with this program, turning it around in three years and win a league championship, those guys are awesome. I’m happy for them.
“It’s never great to have a team celebrate in your defeat, but they deserve all of that.”
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