El Capitan baseball runs way to first Sac-Joaquin Section playoff win

Coach Aaron Ruiz has no illusions about what type of offensive team he has.

El Capitan High School has no shortage of players who can handle a stick but without much power in the order. It’s why Ruiz says the Gauchos need to take every extra base they can get.

It’s something the team practices regularly, getting clean reads on balls in the dirt so they can get a good jump. Practice made perfect Wednesday evening at Tony Zupo Field as El Capitan ran wild on Placer. The Gauchos stole five bases, scored four runs on wild pitches and pretty much made the Hillmen pay for every mistake in a 7-1 victory.

It was the first playoff victory in El Capitan history as the second-seeded Gauchos advanced to the Sac-Joaquin Section Division IV semifinals. They will take on No. 3 Bear River in a best-of-three series that starts Saturday at noon.

“This game was the perfect display of our offense. We have to be a scrappy team that finds ways to manufacture runs,” Ruiz said. “We’ll press our advantage with passed balls all day. It’s something we work on. We have to see the ball cleanly and be aggressive when we do. The guys did a great job of that today.”

Ruiz’s squad also did a nice job of working the count. El Capitan (20-7) came up empty in the first two innings but made Placer ace Radd Thomas throw more than 50 pitches. On a warm May evening, that heavy early workload began to wear on Thomas, who had games with 17 and 15 strikeouts this season, in the third.

Braiden Ward and Mark Sellers were particular headaches for Thomas. The Gauchos’ tablesetters reached base seven times, getting the rally started in the third on a Placer error and a Sellers bunt single. Both scored on the same wild pitch to put El Capitan ahead 2-1. Ward (3 for 4, triple, two runs, RBI) came in standing and Sellers scored from second when the ball was thrown away.

The Gauchos used another wild pitch and Ward’s two-out, run-scoring single to plate two more runs in the fourth.

“Coach likes to call us his silent assassins,” Ward said. “We have a couple big guys but no one that’s going to really be putting balls over the fence, so we’ll small-ball you to death.

“We could tell early that their pitcher had a high leg kick, or that he’d give one glance over and go. Once we had that stuff figured out, we really began to run on them. We kept that pressure on the rest of the game.”

The four runs were more than enough for Gauchos ace Sai Davuluri. He yielded a two-out RBI single to Austin Silva in the second but held Placer scoreless the rest of the way. It was all the more remarkable a performance since the junior didn’t have a 1-2-3 inning in the game. He calmly pitched around eight Hillmen hits and four El Cap errors.

Placer (15-10) stranded eight and went 1 for 8 with runners in scoring position.

“I’m generally a pretty calm guy out there,” Davuluri said. “I came in treating it like it was any other game. The four errors we had were all tough plays, but my defense picked me up. I only had like four strikeouts, so I really relied on them. They made the plays when we needed to.”

El Capitan put away the game with a run in the fifth and two in the sixth, scoring seven runs on six hits.

This story was originally published May 18, 2016 at 10:58 PM with the headline "El Capitan baseball runs way to first Sac-Joaquin Section playoff win."