By Ed Piper
La Jolla's baseball team, coming off two tattered years of COVID delays, postponements, and cancellations in 2020-2021, entered a 2022 baseball season that began in a rough way: four straight losses to initiate the schedule.
Over time, as Coach Gary Frank has emphasized, different players contributed in different ways. At one point late in the City League season, the Vikings won 10 of 11 games and with it clinched a share of the league co-championship with rival Mission Bay.
Which leads us to the CIF playoff game Fri., May 20 at Rancho Buena Vista High. Not only were the host Longhorns the champions of the Avocado North County League, but they also received the number one seed in the Division 3 playoffs.
"It was an odd game," someone on the RBV side said at Friday's game. RBV stumbled in losing its first-round game to Mar Vista.
Every school had to deal with the turmoil COVID-19 presented, and every team has injuries and ups-and-downs, so I'm not going to argue that point for the "poor, old Vikings".
What they brought to the game Friday, facing their second loss and the end of their stay in the double-elimination tournament, was a devil-may-care attitude that got them to the brink of a 5-4 win.
Kevin Steel, 6'5" and 9-2 on the mound this season, peppered a bomb beyond the 320-foot sign in left in the top of the fifth, a two-run shot for a temporary 4-3 lead. Spirits were rising on the La Jolla side, looking ahead to the possibilities of another playoff game the following day.
The entire dugout was loud, and encouraging as each batter came up and took their licks. Spence Carswell, closer deluxe, had to go three innings instead of his normal shorter stint at the end of a game. His first inning relieving Cole Roberts, the bottom of the fifth, went well.
The rest, you can read about in my game story. (See other entry.) But my point is that many moments in this playoff game were riveting, bringing someone who had substitute-taught all day without a break earlier, to pay attention and track each bunt, each passed ball, all of the excitement.
We wish, of course, that the result had been different. But this moment, this day seemed to bring all the energy together and put the '22 Vikes at the edge of some more glory.
As I said, the strongest point of the whole season was the 10-wins-in-11-games streak to wipe out most of the rest of their opponents in the City League. The first league title since 2014 is a credit to the present stable of Vikings who stuck through a season, the first one back from two years of mishaps due to COVID.
Belated though it was, I was glad to connect especially some of the younger team members with their names, having missed most of the last two seasons due to restrictions on exposure and movement.
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