Knowing it had already advanced to next week’s Southwest Regionals in Modesto, the San Benito 18-and-under Babe Ruth All-Star team went into Tuesday’s action needing to beat Stanislaus twice to successfully repeat as state champions.
It didn’t happen. San Benito dropped a 5-1 decision in the championship round at Veterans Park after leading for most of the game. Had San Benito won, the two teams would’ve played again later that night in a winner-take-all game.
San Benito went 3-2 in the tournament, with both losses coming to the Cardinals.
Fortunately for San Benito, it had already punched its ticket to regionals after recording a 9-4 win over Kings Tulare on Monday.
“Monday’s game was the make-or-break elimination game for us,” San Benito manager Andrew Barragan said. “That was the game we needed to have.”
San Benito’s Dylan Yamasaki, Zack Moeller, Dylan Ito and Tony Amaral were named to the all-tournament team. Amaral baffled the Stanislaus hitters for most of Tuesday’s contest, throwing five shutout innings before running into trouble in the sixth, when the Cardinals put up five runs in the bottom half.
Amaral, who played second base during the high school season, allowed three earned runs in 5 1/3 innings in a solid performance against a powerful Stanislaus lineup.
“Their coach was telling me after the game how Tony had them off-balanced until that sixth inning,” Barragan said. “We weren’t sure who we were going to throw in this game, but Tony came up big.”
So did Ito, a 2013 San Benito High graduate who is an incoming sophomore at UC Santa Barbara. Ito isn’t playing at the college level, but he showed some nifty glove work throughout the contest, repeatedly snagging liners and tracking down hard-hit balls up the middle seemingly with ease.
“My God he was all over the place,” Barragan said. “Without Ito, we don’t have a 1-0 lead until the sixth.”
Ito was instrumental in Monday’s elimination game, as he stole home base to give the team a 2-0 lead in the sixth inning. As the third-base coach, Barragan had a great view of Ito’s theft.
“He kind of looked at me and I said, ‘What do you think?’ Dylan told me he thought he could do it,” Barragan said. “I said, ‘OK, you pick the pitch to go on.’ Sure enough, four pitches later, he stole home and made it easily.”
David Werolin pitched five innings of shutout ball in Monday’s victory, and he also got the win in the team’s opening-round 6-3 win over the Stanislaus Royals. San Benito, which opens up against Arizona in a 2 p.m. Wednesday Southwest Regional opener at Modesto Christian, also has Hunter Haworth and Tommy Hernandez in a strong three-man starting rotation.
Greg Steinbeck, who was the workhorse in last year’s run to the World Series, probably won’t start much less pitch unless there’s an emergency.
“They (Cal State Monterey Bay coaching staff) don’t want him to (pitch), but he’s been throwing a bit of side bullpens here and there,” Barragan said. “It’s going to be tough to repeat as regional champions, but I wouldn’t count our guys out. The important thing is a lot of our younger guys have stepped into a big role and gotten a taste of the competition at this level. I don’t think they realized how much of a challenge they were going to get out of this tournament.”
In Monday’s elimination game, Moeller and Yamasaki both had key two-run hits in the pivotal second inning, when San Benito scored six times to break things open.
