Neither howling winds nor a rocky start could hinder Brendon Shoemake on Tuesday as the SBCC right-hander pitched eight strong innings in a 6-2 baseball win over Moorpark at Pershing Park.
It was the first WSC North game of the year for the Vaqueros (7-8, 1-0), who are the defending conference champs.
“The wind was blowing really hard, I even fell over a few times,“ said Shoemake. “After the first two innings, I didn’t think they could hit me.”
The Vaqueros fell behind 2-1 on a pair of mental errors in the first two innings.
Shoemake limited the Raiders (5-11) to two runs on seven singles over eight innings. He struck out 10 and walked two.
Shoemake fanned five in a row at one point, including striking out the side in the sixth.
Leadoff hitter Eli Michaels went 2-3 with two stolen bases and three runs. Steven Reveles was 2-4 and scored twice, including an alert dash home in the sixth after a wild pitch caromed about seven feet to the right of home plate.
“This is the windiest I’ve ever seen it at our ball park,” said Michaels, a sophomore left fielder from Torrington, Conn. “We were trying to make things happen on the bases.”
In the fifth, Michaels was hit by a pitch, stole second, went to third on a groundout and scored on a wild pitch. That put the Vaqueros ahead to stay, 3-2. Brandon Laubhan had an RBI fielder’s choice in the first and drove in Joey Gonzalez with a single to right in the seventh.
“It’s one win in a 20-game conference season, so we’re not going to get our pom-poms out too early,” said coach Jeff Walker. “We came out a little slow and tentative. Brendon turned in a dominating pitching performance.
“In conditions like this, you have to keep the ball out of the air. The difference in the game was the way we ran the bases. We had a couple of good ball-in-dirt reads, stole some bases and put pressure on them defensively.”
The Vaqueros have two more home games this week — Thursday against Moorpark at 2 p.m. and Saturday against Ventura at 1 p.m.
Moorpark …… 110 000 000 — 2 7 0
SBCC ……….. 100 111 20x — 6 8 1
Brown, Coats (7), Hawes (8) and Bishop; Shoemake, Turner (9) and Dinges. W–Shoemake 4-1. L–Brown 1-1.
