SAN MATEO, CA -- Both the Aragon Dons and Woodside Wildcats needed a win in the last regular-season game on Thursday. The Wildcats rallied for four runs in the bottom of the seventh inning, but ultimately fell 6-4 to the Dons.
Senior David Hermann pitched six shutout innings for the Dons, and he had a 6-0 lead going into the seventh inning. However, the Dons had a string of three consecutive errors in that inning, two of which were on the same play, and the Wildcats threatened with runners on first and third with one out.
With two out, Shane Stafford and Jamie Kruger came through for the Wildcats with back-to-back doubles, and the Dons lead was cut to 6-3. At that point Aragon coach Lenny Souza decided to pull Hermann for junior Andrew Abbott.
“I just wasn’t hitting my spots that inning,” Hermann said. “I was starting to get tired, so I was hanging my off-speed pitches and I didn’t have as much velocity on my fastball. Those were their big bats in the middle of their order too, so if I was gonna give them something to hit they weren’t going to make a mistake.”
Abbott had some problems of his own, allowing a double to junior Matt Hennefarth and walking Jose Robles. But even with the potential tying run on base, Abbott got Evan Yedinak to pop out to end the game.
“It wasn’t like ‘Oh my God, here we go again,’” Souza said. “We just always have to do it the hard way. I was pretty confident we’d work through it. Once we got past their top part of the order, I was confident we could get the job done. That was Andrew’s last batter though. If he didn’t get the out we had another pitcher ready to go in to get the next guy. Fortunately, though, Andrew was able to get the job done.”
The Wildcats won the first game of the series on Tuesday at Woodside, but they needed to win both games this week while Aragon only needed one. The Wildcats walked off 2-1 in extra innings to keep their season alive on Tuesday.
“It’s really tough to sweep a team,” Woodside coach Tim Faulkner said. “Today it all came down to hitting, and we didn’t really get our bats going until it was too late.”
The Wildcats only had four hits going into the final inning, but they were able to take advantage of some of the Dons' five errors. All of their runs were unearned.
Kruger was a key factor in their offense, reaching base three times and scoring in that final inning. He drove in two runs and stole a base as well.
The Dons' bats were leD by senior Billy Mason, who went 3-for-4 with an RBI and a run scored, and junior Alex Athanacio who went 2-4 with two runs scored and an RBI.
