Conner Rehage homered in his first two at-bats on Tuesday but SBCC couldn’t take advantage of late opportunities and dropped its WSC North baseball opener to Oxnard 4-2 at Pershing Park.
Rehage belted a solo homer that twisted around the right-field foul pole in the second inning and extended the lead to 2-0 with a homer down the left-field line in the fourth. He took over the WSC home-run lead with seven and went 3-for-3 but his teammates only managed five singles.
Left-hander Zack Edgington held the Condors’ potent offense to two runs on two hits over six innings with six strikeouts and four walks. Oxnard entered the game as the highest-scoring team in the WSC North at 10.2 runs per game.
Justin Bricker tossed a complete game for Oxnard (9-5, 1-0), allowing eight hits and striking out four. The Vaqueros had seven runners on base in the sixth, seventh and eighth frames but couldn’t score. In the last of the eighth, Bricker intentionally walked Rehage to load the bases with two outs but Harper White made a sliding catch of a Steven Keller fly ball near the left-field line to end the inning.
“We had our chances,” said coach Teddy Warrecker. “The most frustrating aspect was our inability to adjust to the pitcher. With a guy that was predominantly offspeed, we didn’t use the right side of the field at all. Consequently in the last innings, he has the exact same pitching pattern, yet we’re still being fooled and still being out front.
“There was a distinct lack of commitment by our hitters to make an adjustment.”
Oxnard went ahead on a sacrifice fly in the eighth and made it 4-2 in the ninth on Jake Mahan’s RBI single.
The Vaqueros travel to Oxnard on Thursday.
OXNARD 4, SBCC 2
Oxnard ……. 000 002 011 — 4 7 2
SBCC ………. 010 100 000 — 2 8 1
Bricker and McDonnell; Edgington, Gunderson (7), Turnbull (8), Gardner (8) and Keller. W–Bricker. L–Gunderson 1-1.
2B–O: Geve. HR–SB: Rehage (6), 2nd inn., none on; Rehage (7), 4th inn., none on.
Records–OC 9-5, 1-0. SBCC 7-7, 0-1.
