Marina baseball wins ugly at Edison

There was no shortage of adversity in Tuesday afternoon’s Sunset Conference crossover baseball clash between Edison and Marina, with 10 errors leading to seven unearned runs.

But the visiting Vikings dealt better with the struggles.

Chase Hennessey worked his way through some tough innings to notch his third victory of the season, sophomore Matt Wilson threw 2 1/3 innings of perfect relief, and Marina drove in runs on four successive fourth-inning pitches to pull away toward a most unattractive 7-4 triumph.

Shortstop Rocco Peppi was a sparkplug in all three innings in which the Vikings (5-3) tallied — the last after returning from a wrist injury that forced him to the dugout for a spell. Peppi and Braden Wylde each scored twice, and Austin Hallman delivered two RBI singles as the No. 8-ranked team in the CIF Southern Section Division 3 poll bounced back from a devastating loss Friday at Los Alamitos.

“It’s better to win an ugly game than to lose an ugly game ...,” said Marina coach Toby Hess, whose team was one strike away from victory before losing 3-2 to the Griffins. “I think everybody is a little bit behind the eight ball, considering how much rain we’re getting. To be honest, we have not been on the field enough, and I think that’s true of everybody, so, yeah, the baseball’s a little ugly.

“Baseball’s a game of consistency and repetition, and we just haven’t got that since January.”

The game was moved up from Wednesday to beat the first of two storms expected this week, with rain forecast to start falling Tuesday evening.

Marina High starter Chase Hennessey delivers a pitch during a Sunset Conference crossover game at Edison on Tuesday.

(Don Leach / Staff Photographer)

Hennessy, a 6-foot-5 senior right-hander, went to three-ball counts against five of the first seven batters he faced, walking three of them. He worked nicely out of a three-error, two-run second en route to a four-hit, no-earned-run effort over 4 2/3 innings.

“I was super happy with Chase,” Hess said. “He hasn’t really pitched on varsity until this year, so it’s the first time he got into trouble and then was able to work his through it. Everything went right for him [in his previous two victories], so it was really impressive how he stuck with it when things got ugly.”

All four Edison runs were unearned — fueled by six Vikings errors — and the Chargers (7-4) handed Marina an unearned run in the second and three more in the fourth — in an outing that head coach Cameron Chinn said “taught me a lot about our team.”

“We were pointing fingers at each other and calling people out and not taking accountability for our actions,” said Chinn, whose team came in on a five-game winning streak. “Hopefully, it will temper the attitude of the kids to let them know that while we were playing good for a while, you’ve got to continue to do the little things right. We didn’t do any little things right today.”

Marina jumped on Edison in the top of the first, using two walks and a run-scoring wild pitch to chase Chargers starter Josh Martin two pitches into cleanup hitter Andrew Sojka’s at-bat. Hallman followed with his first RBI, and Peppi drove home Bradley Coots in the three-hit, one-error second inning.

Hunter Baclig, who had two of Edison’s four hits, and Blake Morton came home on an error in the bottom of the second to make it 3-1. But Marina pulled away in the fourth, when the Vikings used three errors and timely hitting to score four runs.

The impressive sequence needed just four pitches from Kevin Hultgren, the third of five pitchers Chinn used. Wylde and Cory Lewis delivered back-to-back RBI singles, Sojka’s sacrifice fly brought home another run, and Hallman followed with his second RBI hit.

Edison added two runs, with Matt Swartz’s single producing the team’s lone RBI, with the help of three more Marina errors in the fifth, and then Wilson shut down the Chargers, striking out three of seven batters he faced.

SCOTT FRENCH is a contributor to Times Community News. Follow him on Twitter: @ScottJFrench