CMS Baseball Splits Twinbill With Cal Lutheran

THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. - The No. 21 Claremont-Mudd-Scripps baseball team came back from a 5-1 deficit to win the opener of its SCIAC doubleheader with No. 23 Cal Lutheran 12-6, and threatened to come back again in the nightcap but the Kingsmen were able to hold on and salvage a split with an 8-5 win on Saturday at Anderson Field.

With the split, CMS moves to 16-6 on the season and 6-3 in the SCIAC, falling one game behind Cal Lutheran, which improves to 7-2 in the SCIAC (and 12-4 overall). 

In the opening game, CMS trailed 5-1 going into the bottom of the fifth, but scored four in the fifth, two in the sixth and four in the seventh, and came away with a 12-6 win. In the fifth, the big blow was a three-run homer from Paul Roche, who was able to tie the score at 5-5 and completely change the momentum of the game with one swing. 

Cal Lutheran took the lead back in the sixth with a run on back-to-back doubles, but Tyler Shaw lined a double down the left field line in the bottom half to put CMS ahead to stay. The Stags then tacked on four more in the seventh, keyed by a two-run single by Julian Sanders, and William DeForest tacked on an RBI tripe in the eighth to close out the scoring. 

CMS had 19 hits in the opener, led by a 4-for-4 effort with two runs scored from Derek Seneker. Shaw was 4-for-5 with three RBI, and Kieran Sidebotham was 3-for-3 with a run scored. 

The CMS bullpen allowed only one run in six innings of work, with Hamilton Finefrock throwing two hitless innings, Lucas Welch throwing two innings and getting the win, and Jake Tracey closing it out with two innings of one-hit relief, striking out two. 

In the nightcap, the Stags fell in a 6-0 hole early, but Aaron Herst had a dominant effort out of the bullpen, throwing six shutout innings, allowing three hits and striking out six. Herst kept CMS in it, and the Stags left the bases loaded twice in the early innings before breaking through with a three-run sixth. Cade Kritsch started it off with a double, and came home on an RBI single from Mitchell Mashiko. Blaise Heher drove in Mashiko with an RBI single, and Nick Wilson had a sacrifice fly to make it a 6-3 game. 

Seneker had another sacrifice fly in the seventh to close it to 6-4, but Joseph Scalzo hit a two-out, two-run homer in the top of the ninth to give the Kingsmen a little bit of extra breathing room. That came in handy, as CMS brought the tying run to the plate in the bottom of the ninth after the second RBI single from Mashiko, but Cal Lutheran was able to escape after Shaw hit a rope to deep left field with two on that Gordon Richardson caught in front of the wall for the final out. 

Mashiko was 3-for-4 with two RBI in the nightcap, while Wilson (2-for-3), Heher (2-for-5), Roche (2-for-5) and Shaw (2-for-6) had multi-hit games. 

CMS will be back in action in two weeks for a three-game series with Whittier on March 31 and April 1.