MC baseball rides vintage McGhee to victory

Nate McGhee is still working his way back into form.

After turning in a 7-2 freshman campaign, the Merced College right-hander missed all of last season due to ligament issues in his pitching shoulder. The rust showed in the redshirt sophomore’s first start of the season as he struggled with command and didn’t make it out of the fifth inning.

McGhee was a little sharper in a relief performance his next time out. He seemed to build upon that success on Monday afternoon, turning in his best start since April 2015. McGhee retired 18 of the 19 batters he faced, allowing just a lead-off double in the fifth inning. He struck out three, allowing one run on one hit, and received plenty of run support in a 9-3 victory over Lassen at Blue Devil Field.

“The funny thing is, going through warmups, I didn’t feel very good,” McGhee said. “The first couple innings I was battling. I just didn’t feel very good on the mound. Fortunately, I was able to hit my spots and then I finally settled in during the last few innings.

“We’ve started kind of slow in most of our games and then turned it on later, so to put up some zeros early was a good feeling.”

If McGhee was laboring early, it never showed.

The sophomore needed just 55 pitches to work his way through six complete innings. His early dominance was a nice change of pace for a Blue Devil (3-3) squad that has yielded 18 of the 27 runs they’ve surrendered on the year in the first three innings.

MC flipped the script on Lassen (5-4), striking for seven total runs in the second and third innings.

Trevor Chaney drew a lead-off walk in the second inning and came around to score on a wild pitch. Zach Beal would follow a short time later, stealing home as Gavin Gaffaney’s aggressive base running on a pitch in the dirt drew a throw to second. Alex Pallios capped the rally with a two-out, run-scoring double.

The Blue Devils expanded the lead their next time up, opening the third inning with five straight hits. With runners on second and third, Chaney (2 for 3, three runs) blooped an RBI single over a drawn-in infield to make it 4-0. Beal (2 for 3) drove in two more runs with a single and Gaffaney pushed the lead to 7-0 with an RBI fielder’s choice.

“I felt like we did a good job of making things happen offensively today,” Merced College coach Chris Pedretti said. “We got a couple bunts down when we needed them. Guys were aggressive on balls in the dirt and we were able to take a couple extra bases that way. We didn’t crush a lot of balls, but we did come up with timely hits to take advantage of the opportunities we created.”

The only real hiccup on the afternoon came in the seventh. Not wanting to push McGhee too far too fast and needing to get some of his other pitchers work before the start of conference play, Pedretti went to Evan Estes out of the bullpen.

Walks continue to plague the right-hander as he issued three and an RBI double to the first four batters he faced. The sophomore battled back, however and managed to limit the damage to just two runs in the inning. He got a big strikeout followed by a comebacker. Vic Tiscareno ended the inning with a diving catch in center to save a couple more runs.

“We certainly could have gone longer with Nate if we needed to, but guys need game action,” Pedretti said. “Evan Estes is someone we need to get going. He is going to figure it out, but he needs innings to do that. Trevor Chaney and Derek Molina are two guys that are going to be big for us at the back of the bullpen and they need innings.

“Now’s the time to find out exactly what we have and what roles they execute best in.”

MC put the game away in the bottom half of the inning.

Coleton Horner helped push across two runs with a sacrifice fly to center. Lassen opted to throw to third on the play, but tossed the ball out of play, allowing a second run to score and make it 9-3.

Chaney and Molina each tossed 1-2-3 innings to close out the game.

This story was originally published February 13, 2017 at 8:56 PM with the headline "MC baseball rides vintage McGhee to victory."