El Capitan’s Sellers stifles Pacheco’s bats

Throwing strikes is half the battle for a high school pitcher.

Most offenses lack the consistent punch to punish someone who lives in the strike zone. If there’s a sound defense behind him, maintaining count leverage and pitching to contact yields success more often than not.

It’s a philosophy that El Capitan’s James Sellers embodied Wednesday afternoon in the Gauchos’ 11-1 road victory over Pacheco.

Primarily using a fastball-changeup combo, the sophomore right-hander peppered the lower half of the strike zone, inducing ground ball after ground ball. Sellers limited Pacheco to two hits, struck out seven and forced 14 ground balls from the Panthers.

“The ump had kind of a tight zone, so I just focused on staying in there,” Sellers said. “I used my offspeed pitch to get them on their front foot, and fortunately it got me a lot of ground balls today.

“I’m very confident in my defense behind me, so I just needed to let them put the ball in play.”

Pacheco’s Michael Valenzuela suffered through the other end of the pitching spectrum early. The junior walked three in the first inning and constantly pitched behind in the count.

The Gauchos (11-8-1, 7-2 Western Athletic Conference) took advantage. Tyler Skelton opened the scoring with an RBI double and Dustin Greggains (2 for 2, two RBIs) added a two-run single as El Capitan batted around and scored four runs in the inning.

It was a world of difference for Valenzuela the rest of the way as he settled in. The junior found the strike zone and kept the Panthers (4-15, 2-7 WAC) in the game by following up the first with four consecutive scoreless innings.

“It was kind of a rough start as Michael struggled with his command,” Pacheco coach Chauncey Lee said. “He did a nice job of bouncing back from that, though, and gave us a chance.

“We just couldn’t do anything against their guy. All day long we were either late or we rolled over the ball. We didn’t get a ball out of the infield until the last inning.”

The game unraveled for the Panthers when Valenzuela exited in the sixth. Walks and poor defense sparked the Gauchos.

Kobe Nguyen delivered a bases-loaded single to plate two runs and an error would help El Capitan score two more. The Gauchos added three more runs in the seventh to go up 11-0.

“We don’t have a guy that’s going to hit a big one, so we need to take advantage of when teams give us extra bases,” El Capitan coach Aaron Ruiz said. “I thought we did a good job today of working the count when we were in those situations and then hitting our pitch.”

This story was originally published April 22, 2015 at 9:46 PM with the headline "El Capitan’s Sellers stifles Pacheco’s bats."