Turlock baseball season comes to disappointing end with St. Mary’s seventh-inning rally

St. Mary’s coach Rob Selna expected nothing less.

In just his second year as head baseball coach of the perennial powerhouse Rams, Selna was facing Turlock for the third time in the postseason. He knew his top-seeded club would be in for a long night.

He was right.

St. Mary’s, mastered for six innings by senior right-hander Marcus Lopez, scored three runs in the bottom of the seventh for a 3-2 victory and remained in contention for a seventh consecutive Sac-Joaquin Section Division I South title.

The Bulldogs’ season came to an end on the horns of the Rams for the fifth time in six seasons.

“Mark de la Motte is one of the most well-respected coaches in our section,” Selna said of his counterpart in the opposite dugout. “And those are hard-nosed kids over there. We knew what we were getting into.”

Both teams did.

Thursday night’s game, played under a constant threat of rain, marked the 10th meeting between the teams since 2010. The Rams have won eight times, with three of those victories coming in the South final.

“Our guys weren’t intimidated,” said de la Motte, whose team hasn’t won a South crown since 1997. “This was a great group of guys to coach.”

The two met last year, splitting a pair, with St. Mary’s winning the all-important elimination game in the South semifinals. That gave the Rams a 7-2 advantage on the Bulldogs since 2010. And just to put an exclamation point on their dominance over the city of Turlock, the Rams have a playoff win over Turlock’s Pitman High (2013) during that span, too.

For six innings Thursday, Lopez seemed bent on making up for every one of those seven losses. He allowed just two hits and faced the minimum in the third, fourth, fifth and sixth innings, striking out six of the 12 batters he faced.

He seemed to get all the runs he’d need in the second inning when Tate Soderstrom, granted second life when catcher Joey Cortopassi dropped a routine foul pop, hit a solo blast over the wall in right. Turlock added what appeared to be merely an insurance run in the fifth when Alex Pallios scored on a single by catcher Brandon Booz.

In the seventh, there just wasn’t the same magic.

Rams second baseman Evan Fagundes reached on an error to start the inning, and Cade Peters singled sharply up the middle to put runners on first and second. After Anthony Gallindo sacrificed the runners into scoring position, designated hitter Matt Avila walked to load the bases. Karsten Lee, the game’s eventual winning pitcher, hit a single to left that dropped just in front of Pallios, who did a nice job getting the ball to his cutoff man to hold the Rams to just one run. That brought up No. 9 hitter Nick Uota.

The Rams left fielder was 0-for-2 with a strikeout in his previous at-bats.

“We’ve played countless close games this season,” said Uota, a senior who was all too familiar with the Bulldogs. “We’ve won some and lost some.”

In other words, Uota was ready.

Uota worked a 3-0 count before taking a fastball for a strike. He missed on another fastball, and the count went full. He got another fastball, down and in, dropped the head of the bat and stroked a clean single to right. Peters skipped in with the tying run, while Avila barreled around third and easily beat the throw for the winning run.

Did it appear to de la Motte that Lopez was running out of steam?

“It really didn’t,” said de la Motte. “He’d only thrown 75 pitches to that point. He just put the ball in a couple of spots that he didn’t want to.

“Really, for us, we missed a bunch of chances to get some more runs in the first four innings, and that would’ve blown the game open and we wouldn’t have been biting our nails in the seventh.

“But Marcus gave us all he had.”

In the first inning, Bulldogs second baseman Brian Mendez singled with one out and reached third on a stolen base and a throwing error by Cortopassi. But neither of the next two hitters could plate him.

In the second, after Soderstrom’s leadoff homer, Jon Temple walked and Cody Cornell singled, and Lopez bunted them up 90 feet. Again, the next two hitters couldn’t capitalize. The Bulldogs left runners in scoring position, with less than one out, in each of the next three innings.

“This win can go a long way for us if we use it the right way,” Selna said. “The players are aware that playoff baseball is different than regular-season baseball. It’s a cliché, but it’s never over until the final out is made.”

This story was originally published May 15, 2015 at 10:48 AM with the headline "Turlock baseball season comes to disappointing end with St. Mary’s seventh-inning rally."