Section champions or not, the Willow Glen Rams have been the toast of Blossom Valley Athletic League baseball the past three years under Mike Riley.
Beating them would have been the perfect antidote for a Sobrato team suffering from the same early funk it never shook last year in finishing 8-19. Instead the Bulldogs lost 7-3 and continued to fade beneath away-gray clouds Friday in San Jose.
“This group has been used to losing,” first-year manager Brian Collom said. “They need to snap out of it and find their mojo, whatever that is.”
The Bulldogs held their ground through an exciting first two innings and matched the defending Mount Hamilton Division champs with 10 hits. But the Rams had a mental edge that was plain to see after Sobrato committed its first error. The SHS dugout was quiet the rest of the afternoon.
“As soon as things start not going our way,” catcher Westyn Herscovitch said, slightly shaking his head, “this team’s just dead, no energy.”
The Bulldogs lost for the third straight game and have dropped three of their last four in league play, falling six games behind first-place Willow Glen (10-1, 8-0).
Sobrato never recovered after Mitch Ravizza’s two-out, two-run single in the second inning put the Rams ahead for good, 3-2. Tucker Bacon extended the lead in the third with a sacrifice fly to score Justin Bruce, who reached on an overthrow, and Willow Glen poured in three more runs off starter Tanner DiSibio in the fourth.
“Pitching and defense are our thing,” Collom said. “Today, they weren’t working.”
Sobrato’s offense was a different story. The Bulldogs got after Bruce, the Ram’s ace, with five hits in the first two innings. Eric Guill-Perez drew a seven-pitch walk to lead off the game and scored on Blake Porzio’s groundout to short. In the second inning, Tyler Lerma broke a 1-1 tie with a one-out single that would have brought home two, had Alejandro Torres not been picked off in the previous at-bat. Nathaniel Batad followed with a superbly executed hit and run, and Javier Jimenez singled in the No. 9 spot to load the bases with one out. But Bruce struck out Guill-Perez with a nasty breaking pitch and ended the threat by bare-handing a suicide-squeeze bunt by Conor Havstad and throwing him out at first.
“Hitting is definitely there; we showed it today,” said Guill-Perez, who scored in the seventh on a single by Jerry Jacob. “But there’s too many mental mistakes all around.”
DiSibio took a careful approach to the game but ended up issuing seven free passes, including four hit batsmen. The junior struck out four and was charged with six runs on as many hits.
“I just tried to do as good as I can today because they’re looking like the best team in league,” he said. “I know I can do better as long as I throw like I can.”
Bruce moved to 8-0 with a pedestrian two strikeouts to eight hits, a walk and two runs in five innings. He did more with his defense, picking off two runners and assisting two putouts off bunts.
Jimenez went 2 for 3, and Havstad singled twice to lead the Bulldogs (3-8, 3-6).
“A lot of it was Sobrato. They take good two-strike approaches,” Riley said. “This guy [Collom] knows what he’s doing. They have a lot of good hitters. They’re a pretty good team. I think they could be a force down the road.”
It was only three years ago that former SHS manager Shorty Gutierrez said the same thing about the Rams after beating them 2-1 to reach the Central Coast Section Division II final. The following spring, Willow Glen matched a CCS record for consecutive wins with a 27-0 regular season. The Rams went back to the Division II semifinals in 2011. This year, Willow Glen is poised for a third straight league title – second in the BVAL A conference – with 11 varsity veterans.
“We’ve had a really good group of committed kids,” Riley said. “We’ve always had good talent, but we know this year could be the best year we’ve had.”
At least for a few innings, the Bulldogs didn’t back down to the challenge.
“Mentally, we’ve got to step up,” Herscovitch said. “They’re not a better team than us; I don’t think any team really is in this league. We need to start showing it on the field.”
