For the first time this season, Skyline College baseball lost to the same opponent twice in a row. The Chabot College Gladiators defeated the Trojans on their home field 18-10 on Friday, April 10th leaving the club in a crucial position for the third game of this series.
This series as a whole is meaningful as the team is fighting for the top spot in the North-Coast conference. Placing as the No. 1 seed would likely get the Trojans to play at home to start the playoffs, and with this win Chabot claimed the top spot in the conference.
The first crucial point of the contest would be during the top of the second inning, when two Chabot runners scored off of errors. This early struggle set the tone for the rest of the game as Chabot would blow the door open in the sixth inning with four runs , capped off with a 3-run homer to put the deficit to 12-3.
Head coach Tony Brunicardi said it was important for Skyline to be able to stop Chabot when they’d built so much offensive momentum.
“A big thing for me is that we’ve got to handle when negative things happen… we’re letting things stack on each other,” Brunicardi said. “We’ve got to make a play on defense to get us out of that inning, they did that, we didn’t.”
Brunicardi noted that a big factor in Skyline’s defensive lapses in the past two games have been injuries, causing the defensive rotation to have players out of their usual positions.
“We’ve got guys playing out of position, so we’ve got to just compete and play faster and take care of the baseball a little bit better. [Injuries to the team] it is what it is, it happens in a season,” Brunicardi said.
The Trojans would see a late game spark in their offense led by a grand slam from right fielder Vinny Smith that cut the lead to 16-9, in the seventh inning.
“This is definitely motivation, losing by eight on our home field… when we’re down we just got to not think about being down, and just chip at runs until the end,” Smith said.
With only six games left before the playoffs, and a soon must-win third game of the series at Chabot’s home field, this loss acts as fuel heading into what could potentially be Skyline’s most important game of the regular season.
