The timing of your hits is more important than the quantity, the Alaska Goldpanners proved on Sunday at Growden Memorial Park.
The Goldpanners relied on solid pitching, good defense and opportunistic hitting to edge the Southern California Running Birds 2-1 and salvage a split in their two-game nonconference baseball series.
Two of the team’s meager five hits came with two outs and runners on base in the third inning, plating all the runs Goldpanner pitchers Kevin Hernandez and Brian Bird would need. Hernandez aided his bid to earn a Panners’ roster spot with six innings of one-run ball and reliever Brian Bird shut the door with three frames of scoreless relief for the save.
“It’s the sort of game I like to play in, especially when it’s low scoring,” said Bird, who got into a seventh-inning jam before retiring the final eight Southern California batters.
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“I left a couple of balls up that got hit, then I just had to bear down,” said Bird, who was 9-0 with a 1.56 ERA this past season at Cuesta College in California.
Defense and clutch hitting also keyed the Panners’ win.
Mark Thompson made several spectacular plays on grounders deep in the hole at shortstop and registered six assists. He also stole two bases, reached base three times and scored a run, while Chu Yuan-Chin and Jovanny Bramasco had RBI hits in the third inning as the Goldpanners improved to 4-1.
But the Goldpanners offense struggled against SoCal pitcher Andres Esquibel, who struck out 12 batters and allowed just five hits in throwing a complete game. He also beaned three batters and walked two.
“He deserved a better fate than that,” said Running Birds Coach Don Sneddon, a coach on the Goldpanners’ star-studded 1980 national championship squad who also played for the Anchorage Glacier Pilots in 1975-76. “He just had one little inning where they manufactured runs, but that’s Alaska baseball.”
After the game, an obviously displeased Goldpanners’ manager Ed Cheff had his position players take some batting practice and directed them through various calisthenics.
Bird isn’t concerned about the Goldpanners’ hitting woes, and said Sunday’s game was important after the team’s 5-4, 13-inning setback on Saturday night.
“We didn’t want to lose two in a row,” said Bird. “These are some of the best players in the country. I’m sure they’ll get in a groove and start swinging well.”
Hernandez and Bird also frustrated SoCal hitters as the first four batters in the Running Birds’ lineup went 0 for 16 and harmlessly hit the ball out of the infield just twice. No. 3 hitter Nick Mahin, who had three hits on Saturday, struck out four times. He exhibited his displeasure–and drew jeers from the Panners’ crowd–after fanning in the sixth against Hernandez and tossing his bat and helmet to the backstop near his team’s dugout.
“We gotta have some punch out of the 3-4 guys (in the lineup),” said Sneddon, the winningest coach in California junior college history who has returned to Fairbanks with various teams about five times since coaching here a quarter century ago.
“To me, it’s like taking kids to Disneyland for the first time,” Sneddon said of his Alaska visits.
The Goldpanners scored twice with two outs in the third inning. Thompson took first and started the rally after getting grazed by an Esquibel pitch. Then Chu, the Taiwanese center fielder who’s quickly becoming a crowd favorite, doubled him in with a smash to the gap in left-center field. Bramasco followed with a flair that dropped in short center for an RBI single.
SoCal got a run back in the fifth on an RBI single by Brandon Hay, but Hernandez induced Ryan Giertych to ground into a 4-6-3 double play to end the threat.
SoCal’s best chance to tie came in the seventh inning, when Bird gave up consecutive singles before fanning Mario Ramirez and retiring Hay on one of five grounders to Thompson at shortstop.
The Goldpanners are off today before starting a three-game nonconference series against the Beatrice (Neb.) Bruins on Tuesday. The famous Midnight Sun game will be played at 10:30 p.m. Wednesday without the aid of artificial lights. Goldpanners players continue to trickle in and the team expects to have all but one regular in uniform for the solstice contest.
Staff Writer Matias Saari can be reached at msaari@newsminer.com or 459-7591.
