The Cal State San Marcos Cougars (1-7) baseball team earned the programs’ first victory with an 11-8 win over the Point Loma Nazarene University Sea Lions (4-1) Thursday, Feb. 8, at Carroll B. Land Stadium. The loss for PLNU comes after the team defeated San Marcos 4-3 Feb. 4 in the bottom of the ninth inning. The Cougars’ win evened the series 1-1. The first game of the series was rained out.
“We’re going to have growing pains as a new program but we can make it work. We have good kids,” San Marcos head coach Dennis Pugh said of his first-year team. Pugh is currently making the transition from high school icon, as he spent 27 seasons as the Mission Bay Buccaneers skipper. Pugh won 18 League titles, made 12 CIF Final appearances, won 8 CIF titles and a state championship at Mission Bay, but he realizes that a baseball dynasty will not be built overnight.
“It took about five to six years to build the program at Mission Bay, but college is much different because you don’t get to recruit the players. Lack of scholarships just magnify things along with the facilities,” Pugh said.
After a scoreless first inning, outfielder Adam Ricciardelli led off with a home run to put the Cougars up 1-0. They added five more runs in the fifth inning on a Baird single up the center and a grand-slam home run courtesy of Austin Way to take a 6-0 lead halfway thru the game. Sea Lion starter Johnnie Lowe was removed after he gave up the grand slam and then hit a batter. Lowe gave up six runs, five hits in 4.1 innings and faced a total of 23 batters.
“Overall [Lowe] threw all right but he made a couple of mistake pitches,” PLNU assistant coach Joe Schaeffer said.
Meanwhile San Marcos starter Jeff Stephenson had a fine outing. He faced 15 batters, gave up only two hits and allowed only four batters to reach base.
Point Loma cut the deficit to 6-3 but San Marcos pulled away in the seventh inning with five more runs. The Sea Lions again made it close, scoring five runs of their own in the bottom of the ninth inning, but the young Cougar pitching staff was able to save the game.
In the previous game Feb. 4, San Marcos’s first victory eluded the team, which lost 4-3 in the bottom of the ninth inning. PLNU had led off the inning with a triple by Travis Wiley but the Cougars decided to intentionally walk the next two batters, Kaohi Downing and Jesse Gill, to create a force out situation. But pitcher Grant Harrell hit the next batter Trevor Andrews.
“That was a great game against Point Loma on Saturday, but when you have mostly a freshman pitching staff, you don’t know what you’re going to get from day to day,” Pugh said.
San Marcos has 40 players on its roster, 23 of which are freshmen and 15 of those are pitchers.
Despite splitting the series with PLNU, San Marcos made drastic improvements from its first five games when they lost by a combined score of 79-34. The loss drops PLNU to 4-1.
“It is hard to say why we played so flat against San Marcos. To be honest, the intensity level isn’t always there. We’re a young a team with a lot of new guys,” Schaeffer said.