Andrew Fasano
Staff Writer
Mira Costa’s baseball team lost to El Segundo High School 4-2 in the first round of the California Interscholastic Federation(CIF) playoffs at home on Friday. Despite the efforts from senior pitcher Trevor Franklin, the Mustangs were unable to maintain their early lead.
Franklin pitched a complete game with four strikeouts and nine hits against. According to Franklin, El Segundo played well, but the Mustangs needed to tighten up on offense and defense to win.
“Those guys are a talented team and they came out really wanting to beat us and played some great baseball the entire game,” Franklin said.
After falling behind 1-0 in the top of the first inning, the Mustangs came back with two runs of their own in the bottom half of the inning. Senior Reese Alexiades led off with a solo homerun to left field and senior Ty Conrad knocked home senior Zack Chan on a sacrifice fly ball.
“We played a good game we just got unlucky a few times,” Alexiades said. “We hit the ball hard all game but it was hard for us to get hits and score runs. We made a few mistakes which ended some rallies. We played solid defense the whole game and had great energy the whole game as well.”
In the top of the third inning, the Eagles leveled the playing field at 2-2 with a line drive base hit towards Conrad, who made the easy out, knowing the baserunner headed home couldn’t be caught.
“We played a good game, but not our best,” Conrad said. “We did not come up with the clutch hits we needed throughout the game. We also got unlucky a few times when we crushed balls right at their fielders even though there weren’t any errors on defense.”
In the top of the fifth inning El Segundo was able to break the tie with two base hits to give them the 4-2 lead. According to junior Matt Beserra, the Mustangs feel they came out of the game unlucky and a little disappointed since they played a good game.
“In the game the only thing we didn’t do well was come back and score when they scored,” Beserra said. “We also didn’t take advantage when we had runners in scoring position but other than that I feel like we played well. They just had some little bloop hits that fell in.”
The score was glued for the rest of the game resulting in an El Segundo victory which, unfortunately, ends the Mustangs hopes of winning CIF. According to freshman pitcher Merrick Baldo, despite many players graduating, the team has a promising future with the talent they have deep in the program.
“Well seeing all the seniors go is very sad because a mass majority of the team were seniors,” Baldo said. “But I feel like we will do really well and compete in the coming years because of all the great talent this program has.”
Leave a Reply