The Long Beach State Dirtbags dropped their Saturday match-up with the visiting Pacific Tigers, 5-3, evening the weekend series before Sunday’s finale.
The Dirtbags (26-25, 13-7 Big West Conference) took Friday’s opener 5-4, but let Saturday’s affair slip away in the ninth inning.
Going into the inning, the game was at two-all, but Long Beach reliever Jon Maciel, ran into trouble quickly. After retiring the previous three batters he faced in succession, Maciel allowed a single to Tigers shortstop Josh Simms. The next batter, Erik Lockwood, attempted a sacrifice bunt that Dirtbags first baseman Jeff Yamaguchi threw into center field.
“Yeah, [Yamaguchi] threw that one away and the inning slipped away from us a bit,” head coach Troy Buckley said. “Just a bad game, bad loss and we didn’t take good at-bats. Its disappointing”
The error by the sophomore first baseman put runners on the corners for the Tigers, who pushed the tie-breaking run across on a fielder’s choice to Jeff McNeil, who tried to get the run at home to no avail.
Before the inning was over, Maciel would surrender three runs – all unearned. He allowed six of the nine batters he faced to reach base.
“After that error the inning got away from us and we couldn’t recover,” Buckley said.
The Dirtbags responded with a run of their own in the bottom of the ninth with a single by Johnny Bekakis that scored Brennan Fulkerson. Fulkerson had hit a pinch-hit double down the right field line earlier in the inning.
Long Beach starting pitcher Ryan Strufing threw seven strong innings for the Dirtbags and struck out a career-high seven batters on 94 pitches. Strufing allowed a run in each of the first and second innings, but went on to pitch five more scoreless frames until Maciel relieved him in the eighth.
“[Strufing] battled in the first couple of innings and cruised through the later parts,” Buckley said. “His stuff was really working for him there and he settled in. We just couldn’t get any [runs] across.”
Kellen Hoime’s single up the middle in the fourth inning tied the game, scoring both Brennan Metzger and Josh Guerra. Metzger, Bekakis and Ino Patron each had two hits for the Dirtbags.
Going into the weekend, the Dirtbags needed a good showing before next weekend’s season-ending series with Cal State Fullerton. The Titans remain two games ahead of the Dirtbags in the Big West standings with four games to go, including next week’s highly anticipated showdown in Long Beach.
“It doesn’t matter what [Fullerton] does, we need to be playing our best ball right now and we aren’t,” Buckley said. “This is the time of the year where you have to and right now we aren’t.”