Raiders Romp To Second Round With 10-0 Win Over CS Jaguars

After giving up six runs in two games earlier in the week, things were looking pretty good for the Raiders to advance to the second round of the HSBN Fall Classic as a wild-card team.

Things were looking even better when they went up 6-0 after the first inning Saturday against the CS Jaguars en route to a 10-0 win that secures a second-round spot for them.

The Raiders finish the first round as the eighth seed and will have to face the number one seed Falcons in a best-of-three series beginning Tuesday at Flanagan High. The Falcons secured their spot with an 8-0 win over the Bengals to win Bracket A.

Ross Thibault smacked a three-run double with two outs to key the six-run first for the Raiders. Brady Acton and Chris Schloss also had hits and scored in the inning. Schloss finished with three hits and Acton two hits on the day.

The six-run cushion made for a fine start for the Raiders’ Frank Rubio, who pitched three innings, giving up two hits while walking three and striking out four.

“Definitely it was good to have that cushion,” Rubio said. “You always want to come out on top, start the game on a good note. You just have to come out and throw strikes and don’t try to do too much.”

The Raiders tacked on a pair on runs in the second with run-scoring singles by Schloss and Carter White, the eight and nine batters.

“We just wanted to come out and give it our best and put us in the best position to move on,” Rubio said. “We can’t determine the tournament, but we just want to put ourselves in the best position to succeed and that’s what we came out and did. And we feel like we accomplished that.”

The Raiders, who also scored in the third and seventh innings, banged out 14 hits for the game.

“We came out with a lot of energy and we just played a solid game the whole game,” said first baseman Alec Byrd, who went 3-for-4 with a run and RBI. “It’s great when you have everyone stepping up and getting hits. It was a great team effort. Not one player had an extraordinary game. The whole team played a solid game.”

The offensive outburst was a relief for Raiders coach Troy Cameron.

“We haven’t really been swinging the bats as well as we would like,” Cameron said. “So today we came out swinging the bats well, so that made me happy. We figured a few things out from an offensive standpoint and hit the ball well.”

Seeing his team play the complete game that it did was part of the overall plan Cameron has in his first season as the Raiders’ manager.

“The one thing I’m trying to do here is create a competitive atmosphere internally before we even step on the field against someone else,” Cameron said. “So today, the kids knew if we had a good game and we kept the runs down, maybe we had a chance of getting into the next round. And we played that way. We jumped out to an early lead, but it was never really the score that we were playing to. We were playing more towards let’s try not to give up any runs for multiple reasons, for the kids to get some good confidence going and also give us a chance to go on to the next round.”

Jaguars coach Jorge Miranda said his team has room for improvement before the spring season.

“As a team, there are many things that we need to tweak to get ready for the spring,” Miranda said. “We are still a team that needs to learn to fight through adversity in order to reach out ultimate goal and break through.”

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