By Brendan Hamilton
TAFT, CA – A low scoring baseball affair took place on Tuesday, March 5 between the Taft College Cougars and the Merced College Blue Devils as conference play resumed. Kaleb Hay took the mound for game one of the series and he went 7 innings of 1 unearned run, baseball. Ian Gross took over and finished the job, going 2 scoreless innings. In the fourth inning, Merced took advantage of a passed ball and opened the scoring, but that would remain their only run of the game. Similarly, the Cougars struggled on offense and could not score until the ninth inning. With runners on second and third after a walk and a single, Elijah Olaybal stepped up to the plate and hit a ball off the left field wall easily scoring 1. Jackson Berry was given the stop sign from assistant coach Fabian Gutierrez, yet he ran through the sign sliding into home safely to win the game.
In Merced, game 2 of the series did not go as planned for the Cougars. In the first inning the Cougars rallied off their momentum from the previous game to plate 2. However, in the bottom half of the first Merced strongly rebounded to score 7 runs. Merced kept tacking on runs as they scored 2 in the second and 3 in the third to go up 12-2. Chance Morbeck came in and shut the door for a couple of innings giving the Cougars an opportunity to strike back, but this strike did not come. Instead, Merced scored 2 more in the sixth, going up 14-2. The Cougars rallied in the late innings, putting 7 runs on the board in the seventh, eighth, and ninth inning. The final score came out to be 14-9 in favor of Merced.
Once again, the Cougars rallied off their late game momentum into game 3, scoring 1 in the bottom of the first to go up 1-0. Merced tied it up in the top of the second, but the Cougars responded quickly, scoring 1 in the bottom of the third to regain the lead. A lead that would be short lived as Merced scored 7 in the top of the fourth. The Cougars started chipping away and put up 2 in the bottom of the fourth, but Merced added 2 more runs in the top of the fifth, a crushing blow. Merced again put up 2 in the seventh and kept the Cougars off the board for the remainder of the game. The game ended at 12-4 for Merced.
The next series of the season is against College of the Sequoias, starting on Tuesday, March 12 in Visalia. The next Cougar home game is on March 14 at 2:00 pm.