Tati Foor
Staff Writer
In a chilly home opener at Ben Hines Field, the Leopards pulled out a win against the East Texas Baptist Tigers on Wednesday. The match up was a battle with a lot of back and forth scoring, but after the Tigers tied it up, 7-7, in the eighth inning, the Leopards were able to come back and seal the deal with a final score of 9-7.
“It was gritty,” head coach Scott Winterburn said. “They kept fighting the whole game and ended up pulling it out…I thought our team battled hard.”
Ethan Galindo, senior starting pitcher for La Verne, gave his team a strong start with no earned runs in 3.1 innings of work.
During the bottom of the third inning, Leopards senior outfielder Benny Vogel got things going when he singled to right field, driving in junior shortstop Ryan Vosika and senior outfielder Logan Reese. On an error, Vogel was able to advance to second which caused another fielding error on the Tigers, which brought junior outfielder Nolan Anguiano home to put the Leopards in the lead, 3-0.
“I was just trying to go up there and get a good pitch to hit,” Vogel said. “My teammates did the job before me getting on base so I was trying to get up there, get a good pitch to hit, and put a good swing on it.”
With a 7-2 lead for the Leopards in the seventh inning, things started to get a little rocky when the Tigers had three hits and four runs scored off of the Leopards’ graduate student pitcher Austin Klopfenstein.
“All we were worried about was making the next play and having confidence in our pitchers,” junior second baseman Aidan Salcedo said. “We knew we had to make something happen.”
The Leopards looked to switch things up to knock the Tigers’ bats off their rhythm by putting in senior relief pitcher Garret Halbeisen in during the seventh inning. With the help of the Leopards defense, he was able to slow down the Tigers’ offense, allowing only one run to tie the score in the top of the eighth.
The Leopards claimed their lead back in the bottom of the eighth when Anguiano scored on a wild pitch thrown by Tigers sophomore pitcher Trip Barron, bringing in Vogel who was still on base.
Salcedo singled to center field, sending Vogel home to add another run for La Verne.
The Leopards then had a quick one-two-three inning to end the game, and Halbeisen earned his first win for the season.
“I thought I was going to come out after the eighth inning,” Halbeisen said. “But I was glad that I could go out there and finish it, and do the job that I wanted to do.”
The victory marks a strong start to the Leopards’ season. Despite any first game mistakes, the team showed resilience, throughout the Tigers’ comeback.
The Leopards will look to carry this momentum into their next game, the last of their three-game series with the Tigers at 2 p.m. Friday at Ben Hines Field.
Tati Foor can be reached at tatiana.foor@laverne.edu.
Tati Foor is a junior communications major with a concentration in public relations, and a staff writer for the Campus Times.
