The Palo Alto baseball team lost all three games of the pre-season Mike Hazlett Tournament during the week of March 2 and is 0-6 on the season, but spirits are high as it heads into its first league game versus Los Gatos High School.
“Our record definitely doesn’t show it, but everyone on the team can feel it,” senior second baseman Matthew Tracy said. “We get better every game and we are really starting to hit the ball.”
After heavy rains early in the week, the league closed most fields in the Bay Area. This forced the Vikings to play consecutive games from March 5-7, thus pushing their pitching line-up to the brink.
“We already have a very thin pitching staff and playing three games in a row doesn’t help,” junior third baseman Wade Hauser said. “We have enough pitchers for when we play two games a week like in league, but this was kind of crazy.”
The first loss of the tournament was to Archbishop Mitty, 7-6, in a game that ended early because of darkness. However, the close loss was an improvement from the Mitty’s 8-0 shutout that occurred only a week earlier.
“Everyone on Mitty throws hard,” Hauser said. “When we played them the first game, no one was mentally prepared to hit that and we felt that we were overmatched. The second time around we were prepared for what they were throwing at us, and we saw a lot of improvement.”
The Vikings saw key hits from Hauser and junior center fielder Terry Beasely, which helped them jump out to a 5-1 lead by the second inning, one that they couldn’t hold. Junior Scott Witte was pitching well into the third inning, but the tides turned when Archbishop Mitty pitcher James Roberts hit a high fastball over the left field wall, pulling Mitty within 5-4. Freshman pitcher Freddy Avis then replaced Witte, but he struggled as well, giving up three more runs before the inning was over.
In the second game of the tournament, the Vikings battled with prestigious Valley Christian, but lost, 7-2.
Senior pitcher Steven Burk started the game and pitched well, only allowing one earned run in the first three innings. Things broke open in the fourth inning for Valley Christian, though, when Viking pitchers walked a total of five batters, which led to three runs.
The Vikings arguably played their best all-round baseball in their third and final game. San Benito jumped out to a 5-0 lead in the first two innings on Tracy’s pitching and an error-ridden Viking defense, but the Vikings were not out of the game. While senior pitcher Colin Byrne held San Benito off on the defensive side of the ball, the Vikings battled all the way back to make the score 5-5 by the seventh inning. Key hits came from Witte, senior catcher Will Holder, and sophomore first baseman T.J. Braff.
“I think that showed just how good of a team we can be, despite our record,” Tracy said. “Things looked pretty hopeless in the early innings and we were able to turn it on and get the necessary runs.”
In the bottom half of the seventh inning, however, Byrne seemed to tire, and walked in the game winning run, 6-5.
Coming off of a season that had a mid-season coaching change, and seeing another coaching change at the beginning of this one, the Vikings are searching for an identity.
“We have all the parts of a good team,” senior outfielder Michael Rizza said. “We just don’t quite know how to use them yet.”
The Vikings finished 13-12-1 last year and fifth in league. They will look to improve upon their record this year but have a tough schedule ahead of them. Their first two league series are against Wilcox High School and Los Gatos, the teams who respectively finished in first and second place last year.
“We know what we can do, we know what we have to do and now we just have to do it,” Tracy said.
Palo Alto will play Los Gatos at 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday at home.