SAN BERNARDINO >> Sam Fitzgerald gave San Bernardino Valley College’s baseball team the start it desperately needed on Saturday.
Facing a must-win in Game 2 after dropping Friday’s opener to Mission Viejo Saddleback College in their best-of-three first-round CCCAA SoCal Regional playoff series, Fitzgerald pitched 5 2/3 solid innings, but then watched as SBVC’s bullpen crumbled in an 11-3 season-ending loss.
“I would say that Saddleback really took care of business in the later innings and we didn’t,” SBVC head coach Bill Mierzwik said. “We didn’t execute as well as we should have down the stretch (and) both games got away from us.”
San Bernardino Valley gave up 29 runs (22 after the fifth inning) in getting swept by Saddleback, the fourth-place team from the Orange Empire Conference.
“Our back-end bullpen has been pretty good all year. This series wasn’t very good,” Mierzwik said. “We had a couple of guys who had been consistent all year long, and maybe there’s some people wearing down a little bit and they didn’t pitch as well as they would have liked or should have.”
Aaron Cisneros doubled off the left-field wall and scored on a single from Jonathan McCray to give SBVC a 1-0 lead in the first, and the Wolverines (23-15) went up 3-0 in the fourth when Christian Fillingame scored on a passed ball and Andrew Ramones’ RBI single brought in Tyler Robles.
Fitzgerald, who went 4-0 with a 3.36 ERA during the regular season as the Wolverines’ No. 3 starter, scattered just two hits through four shutout innings, but walked and hit a batter to put two on with one out in the fifth.
The freshman left-hander induced a fly ball for the second out, but hung a fastball over the plate that Saddleback’s best hitter, Brett Barker, blasted for a game-tying three-run home run.
“The three-run home run was a fastball called away and the ball leaked inside,” Mierzwik said. “If there’s one thing that guy (Barker) can do — he can turn on it — and that changed the game quickly.”
Fitzgerald finished the inning, and got two outs in the sixth before being removed with a runner on second. He totaled five strikeouts.
“Getting to that bullpen, getting that lefty (Fitzgerald) out, that was big for us,” Saddleback coach Sommer McCarthey said. “Fitzgerald was tough today.”
Hard-throwing reliever Jeremy Moreno walked his first batter and allowed back-to-back singles on just eight pitches as Saddleback (25-13) scored twice to take a 5-3 lead.
“(Moreno) has been our go-to guy. He’s slammed the door on teams, but those walk and two hits changed momentum,” Mierzwik said.
Sophomore right-hander Brandon Conlin got SBVC out of the sixth and was brought back for the seventh, but after two quick outs, the Colorado State-Pueblo signee lost command, sandwiching three walks around two hits as Saddleback put six more runs on the board to put the game out of reach.
“We were fortunate to score a lot of those runs, most of them late in the game and with two out,” McCarthey said.
It’s the first time the Wolverines, winners of three consecutive Foothill Conference titles, have lost two consecutive games since they dropped eight of their first 10 to start the season.
