NCS BASEBALL: Longaker bomb powers Gauchos to victory

Casa Grande High School added a big bomb to its winning formula of pitching + defense to conquer Campolindo’s Cougars, 3-0, in the first round of the North Coast Section Division 2 baseball playoffs.

The win advances Casa’s Gauchos to a second-round game against the winner of Wednesday’s Maria Carrillo vs. Pinole Valley game. Results of that contest were not available at press time. The second-round game will be played on the Casa diamond at 1 p.m. Saturday.

Pitching for Casa’s first-round win on Tuesday was supplied by sophomore right-hander Chris Joaquim, who used just 77 pitches to wrap up a tidy four-hit shutout. He didn’t walk a single batter, while striking out four. The whole process took just an hour and 23 minutes.

“I try to pitch to contact until I get two strikes, and then I’ll go for the strikeout,” Joaquim said. He painted his masterpiece with well-place fastballs, interspersed with an unsettling curve ball that he used with more frequency as the game wore on.

“Joaquim was huge,” said Casa Grande coach Paul Maytorena. “He kept the ball low in the zone, and he pitched with confidence. This may have been his best game.”

Joaquim was so accurate and baffling that he didn’t require much in the way of extraordinary glove work behind him, and his Gaucho teammates made all the plays required with the exception of one harmless infield error.

Casa’s infield, anchored by senior shortstop Tyler Moore, was ball tight. Moore made the play of the game when he dived to his left to stop a would-be hit by Campolindo’s Johnathon Chu and threw the hitter out in the second inning. The shortstop later snuffed out a budding Cougar rally in the sixth inning by initiating and turning a 6-3 double play.

Then there was the bomb struck by linebacker-strong catcher Casey Longaker in the first inning that provided the only runs of the game.

The blast, belted into the teeth of an inward-blowing breeze, was one of only a handful ever hit over the Casa left-field fence when the wind blows in its protective barrier. It also, happily, spoiled some impressive strategy by Maytorena and the Gauchos.

Moore started the Casa first with a walk, Maytorena then had Blake Berry put down a very nice sacrifice bunt. When Spencer Torkelson was grazed by a pitch to put two men on, Maytorena had both move into scoring position with a daring double steal.

The coach needn’t have bothered.

Longaker hit a two-strike fastball squarely on the bat’s barrel and fans from both sides held their breath as the ball defied the wind and carried over the fence to provide what were to stand as the game’s only runs.

“All I was trying to do was hit it deep enough to get the runs home. I guess good things happen when you try to be a team player,” Longaker said.

The senior catcher is in the midst of a great season, batting .431 with 31 RBIs in 27 games, but the homer was his first of the season.

It was also all the Gauchos were to get in the way of offense.

Three batters later, still in the first inning, Campolindo starting pitcher Brendan Gordon was replaced by curve specialist Kyle Hinds, and he shut the Gauchos down the rest of the way, allowing just one more hit over the final five innings he worked.

Hinds and the Cougars’ problem was that Longaker’s bomb had already given Joaquim all the hitting help he needed.