“Our bats were real silent in the first three innings and that scared the heck out of us as coaches — our kids were getting a little silly out there on the field and it seemed that the summer was getting a little long for those guys for a second,” said Crescenta Valley Coach Todd Erickson, whose team is now 1-1 in the tournament after opening with a 7-4 loss to Quartz Hill on Saturday and will play another loser’s bracket game tonight at 5:45 against Encino for the right to face Quartz Hill in the championship game on Tuesday. “But they pulled it off and their bats started coming alive real quick in the fourth.”
Crescenta Valley’s fourth-inning explosion featured seven extra-base hits, including home runs by Kevin Hello, Christian Castaneda and Jacob Martinez and a walk-off double from Will Lombardo.
Soft-tossing righty Tony Parker kept Crescenta Valley off balance for the first three frames, but couldn’t get himself out of trouble with one out early in the fourth. In all, Pasadena American used three pitchers in the fourth inning, none of which could stop a carousel of run production that saw 16 batters come to the plate.
“We really hadn’t seen that type of pitching in the tournament, it was a lot slower than what we had seen in all the other games, so it was hard to make that adjustment,” Lombardo said of Parker’s success the first time through the order. “When we did make the adjustment and they pulled [Parker] out, the pitchers they brought in were throwing harder and it was easy for us to adjust to that.”
