LAKE BALBOA — Granada Hills pitcher Easton Hawk ensured that Birmingham coach Matt Mowry’s 18-season streak without winning a West Valley League regular-season baseball title will continue.
At least for two more days.
On Tuesday, Hawk allowed just three hits and tossed a complete-game shutout in a 2-0 victory over Birmingham in the penultimate West Valley League game.
Hawk’s pitching, along with Granada Hills’ defense, combined to prevent any Birmingham player from reaching third base. Birmingham pitcher Mike Figueroa dueled Hawk, allowing just four hits and two runs, but his run support was nonexistent.
The Highlanders broke through in the top of the fifth inning and added a run in the seventh.
Their victory makes the teams’ rematch Thursday a one-game playoff for the league title.
Before the fifth inning, the Highlanders (19-8, 12-2) struggled to reward Hawk’s brilliance. Despite matching Birmingham (17-9-1, 12-2) with donuts on the scoreboard, Hawk remained stoic.
“I always have trust in them to contribute and get runs,” Hawk said.
He was a part of that effort in the fifth. After Jack Donohoe singled — breaking up Figueroa’s streak of retiring eight straight Highlanders — Hawk blooped a pop-up into the sun that second baseman Chris Martinez was unable to track down.
Donohoe advanced to third after Figueroa walked Alex Schmidt and scored the game’s first run on a sacrifice fly by Diego Monreal.
“I was really confident we’d find a way to get it done,” Granada Hills coach Matthew Matuszak said. “A lot of just great at-bats by our guys, just working counts. Even though we might have flown out to right field or center field or something, just making that kid work.”
‘That kid’ — Figueroa — contained the Highlanders’ bats on March 5 in the same way Hawk did the Patriots. Matuszak, though, said that wouldn’t change the Highlanders strategy for Tuesday’s game. That Figueroa’s presence on the mound wouldn’t dictate their approach. That if they focused on themselves and played clean baseball the results would follow.
Matuszak felt they did that through those first four innings, despite it not showing on the scoreboard. They turned double plays to end frames. They applied hard contact and worked counts.
Monreal hit a single in the second. His fourth-inning strikeout came on a seven pitch at-bat. It forced Mowry to pull Figueroa before he could finish out the seventh inning, giving way to Jackson Lyons to single off Allen Olmos and drive home John Barnett for the second run.
“I was just really proud of our maturity,” Matuszak said. “We got it done when we needed to. Big senior moment getting a sac fly to drive that guy in. Then my leadoff guy punched that base hit into right field, insurance run, and then Easton was big today.”
Mowry, who has won five L.A. City titles at Birmingham but no league titles, thought he might be.
With runs coming at a premium, he dialed up bunts and substituted pinch-runners. None of it punctured Hawk’s poise.
“We were just trying to get on the board,” Mowry said. “We knew we weren’t going to get a whole lot of runs off of Easton.”
Hawk’s fastballs whizzed past Patriots’ hitters. His off-speed painted the corners. He struck out four, three looking. He got Sebastian Valadez to ground into two inning-ending double plays. He pitched an ice cream sundae of a game. The cherry on top, his resiliency to keep it at 0-0 and believe that his teammates could scoop up runs when it mattered most.
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