Knocked out: Yuba City eliminated from baseball playoffs

SACRAMENTO — One by one, the Honkers signed a team picture, gathered their gear from the dugout and departed.

The five-peat fell without a tear.

In their away grays, some players hugged their parents. Others just walked away in silence from Dan McAuliffe Ballpark. They were sad, yet stoic; disappointed, yet free from total dejection in the public eye. They proved a lot of naysayers wrong, their coach said.

But they couldn't stop Rodriguez Tuesday, falling 10-3 in game two of the Sac-Joaquin Section Division III semifinals. Yuba City High baseball's title run is over, its end a definitive one after the Fairfield-based Mustangs comfortably came back from an early deficit.

The defeat dilutes nothing about the program to first-year head coach Vicente Luevano. He and his roster played the entire season with not only the five-peat question lingering, he said, but of how they would respond without former coach Jim Stassi at the helm.

"These guys went out there and shut a lot of people up," Luevano said. "We were going for that fifth section championship to really put a stamp on it.

"It didn't happen, but these guys really played their butts off all year long, did everything I asked them to do, and they (didn't) complain once."

They also responded from Saturday's eight-inning, 4-3 loss by striking first against Mustangs' ace Jesse Scholtens. To force a third game in this best-of-three series, the Honkers (23-6) needed to start strong against the all-state caliber (Cal-Hi Sports) pitcher. They did with Raul Lozano cranking a two-run homer to left in the second and Tyler Olson singling home Aaron Byers in the third to take a 3-0 lead.

The rest belonged to Rodriguez (26-4-1). Scholtens stymied the Honkers after the third, allowing one hit in the final four innings. As a whole, he scattered five and fanned 12 in a complete-game effort.

The Mustangs did enough damage offensively in the fourth — an inning that started with a first-pitch home run and ended with six runs on five hits, one error and a sacrifice fly after batting around the order. They built on their buffer by scoring two more in the fifth and sixth innings.

When Yuba City went down 1-2-3 in the top of the seventh, it was a subdued affair. There was no grand celebration of defeating the team that's won the championship the last four seasons. Changing of the guard ceremony this was not, even with Yuba City knocking the Mustangs out of the postseason in 2008 and 2009.

"The guys from Yuba City are so competitive, I can see it in their faces," Mustangs coach Jason Chatham said. "They know how to win, they're competitors, and that's something you can't teach."