SAN DIEGO — Down to their final out, the Sharyland Pioneer Diamondbacks had to find an answer.
After playing from behind all afternoon for the second straight game, Pioneer had become tantalizingly close to tying the game with its back against the wall and the heart of its lineup due up.
Shortstop Karisa Lopez crushed a deep fly ball to the wall in center field, an RBI double which drove in a runner from second to cut Victoria West’s lead to one and put the tying run in scoring position.
In the next at-bat, third baseman and cleanup hitter Caitlyn Handy beat a groundball to the Warriors’ shortstop by half a step for an infield single that put the potential go-ahead run on base and the tying score 60 feet away from home plate.
Handy and Lopez, however, advanced no further, as Warriors’ pitcher Alexis James recorded a four-pitch strikeout to end the game and Sharyland Pioneer’s season, as Victoria West sealed a 5-4 Game 2 victory over the Diamondbacks to earn a series sweep and trip to the Region IV-5A semifinals Saturday at San Diego High School.
“For two games in a row we fell behind but today, the fight these girls and this young team have shown a lot of poise. … We accomplished a lot this year and we went down fighting,” Sharyland Pioneer head coach Orlando Garcia said.
“We always tell them it never comes down to the last batter. … I never attribute (a loss) to the last out or the last anything because there are a lot of things that happen during the course of a game. We have nothing to hang our heads about, and I’m really proud of this team.”
The D’backs found themselves in an early hole for the second consecutive contest during their regional quarterfinal series against Victoria West after the Warriors capitalized on big offensive first innings to seize momentum.
After a hitless top of the first for Pioneer, West used back-to-back leadoff singles by center fielder Sydney Harvey and catcher Lilly Chavez to put runners in scoring position after a fielder’s choice advanced them to second and third.
That enabled shortstop and cleanup hitter Katarina Zarate to lace a bases-clearing ground ball into left field to give West a 2-0 advantage. The Warriors doubled their lead in the third with a two-out, two RBI single by James to ensure the D’backs played the entirety of the series in catch-up mode.
“We knew in learning about them and scouting them that they were always strong in the first two innings,” Garcia said. “That’s kind of been their forte and we talked about that. It just didn’t work for us. We fell behind a little bit and it’s always hard to play catch up.”
Despite playing from behind, though, the Diamondbacks were able to make dents in the Warriors’ lead by steadily chipping away in the later innings.
Pioneer scored twice in the fourth courtesy of a fielder’s choice off the bat of right fielder Faith Nunez and an RBI single by first baseman Kayla Monjaras after Lopez and Handy reached base to start the mid-inning rally.
The D’backs added another score in the fifth when Lopez swatted a towering fly ball off the fence in center field that brought in Hannah Garcia to score and gave the team runners at second and third with one out.
That was the closest the group would come to seizing a lead during the series, but a Victoria West insurance run scored with two outs in the bottom of the fifth ensured Pioneer’s comeback bid fell short by the final out of Game 2.
“It’s unbelievable. It shows their mental toughness and we’re going to build on that,” Garcia said. “Come next year, this experience is going to help us through district and as we get into the playoffs because that’s where we expect to be.”
The loss ends a historic season at Sharyland Pioneer and drops the team to 21-7-2 overall.
The Diamondbacks captured an outright District 31-5A title, advanced to the regional quarterfinals for the first time in program history and battled to become the last Rio Grande Valley team still standing by season’s end in their return to the diamond after a promising 2020 campaign was wiped out by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Pioneer is set to return 17 of 19 varsity letterman to the fold, including its entire pitching staff, as the team looks to parlay its unprecedented playoff success this season into a deeper postseason run next year.
“It’s huge for us because we’ve been close, really close, to breaking through that barrier. This group is so young and was able to do it,” Garcia said. “They’re going to have the confidence knowing that they went out of town to face these teams, had a good series with Flour Bluff and had a good series with Victoria West too. We lost in two games, but we were right there and they’re going to go into next year knowing that.”
Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @ByAndyMcCulloch
