LYFORD — The Santa Rosa Warriors will have to wait until Friday to see if they clinch the District 32-3A title outright as the Lyford Bulldogs rained on the Warriors’ parade.
Coming into Tuesday’s game against Lyford, the Warriors were up two games on the Bulldogs with an opportunity to seal the deal and remain undefeated in district. However, Lyford had other plans and defeated Santa Rosa 2-1, erasing the Warriors’ hopes of going 9-0.
More importantly, the win gave the Bulldogs a chance to clinch a share of the league title with a win Friday and a Warrior loss to Monte Alto.
“Each of these last three games has been won by one run and we’ve been on the short end of those other two games,” said Lyford head coach Chris Cervantes. “I’m really proud of the guys and I think Santa Rosa has a great ballclub, and they’re very similar to us and to what we do and if any pitch or hit goes the other way they could have been 3-0 against us or we could have been 3-0 against them.”
For the Bulldogs, Layne Klostermann had an impressive outing on the mound giving up no hits with 10 strikeouts, three walks, one hit by pitch and one unearned run.
“As a senior Layne wanted the ball to have one last shot at beating these guys,” said Cervantes. “In our district this is one of our rivals so he wanted that ball and we were going to let him go the distance.”
Down 1-0 in the bottom of the third inning, Lyford’s Chris Gonzalez hit an RBI single to center field bringing in Ramsey Reyna to tie the game.
However, the hero of the night was Reyna who scored the first run and hit the walk-off RBI that drove in Andrew Reyna in the bottom of the seventh.
Despite the loss, the Warriors will take the mistakes made and turn it around Friday.
“It’s a little humbling because we thought we were going to run the table ago 9-0 in district but it didn’t happen. But that’s not going to deter us from what our goal is which to lift the trophy,” said Santa Rosa head coach Steve Mendoza.
“This is a small-town baseball battle of pride and the battle of competing because we don’t want to lose against another team. They were district champs last year and we are just trying to take what they had last year.”
The Warriors go into Friday’s game against Monte Alto trying to win their first district title in six years.
