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Busters baseball opens season with 17-0 victory
Published 2/15/2013 in Sports
By ADAM HOLTaholt@gctelegram.com
It doesn’t necessarily mean a lot, but the Garden City Community College baseball team opened its season with a 17-0 win on the road against Northwestern Oklahoma State’s junior varsity on Thursday.
The Broncbusters saw 15 players get at-bats en route to 17 hits, and took advantage of some Rangers miscues to take extra bases and score runs.
Eight GCCC pitchers combined to throw nine shutout innings, allowing just two hits and walking four, against eight strikeouts.
“We scripted everyhing a little bit today, just to give guys, get guys at-bats, get guys innings, give them a taste of college baseball,” GCCC coach Chris Finnegan said in a phone interview. “The speed of it, how to act as a college student athlete, the whole nine yards. It worked out well.”
Garden City scored in every inning but the third and ninth, and posted an eight-run fifth.
The Busters’ first two batters notched hits to start the fifth, and were driven in by sophomore Kevin Czarnecki’s single. The Rangers committed three errors and a passed ball resulted in another run, as Garden City got six hits and a walk in the frame, en route to a 12-0 lead heading into the bottom of the inning.
First baseman Nolan Barrientos was 5-for-5 with two runs, four RBI, a walk and a double. Right fielder Alex Buechler and shortstop Tyler Alitz were both 4-for-5 with two runs and two RBI, and Alitz had a pair of doubles.
“We swung it well today, to be honest with you,” Finnegan said. “We really did. We made some adjustments. The wind was blowing in, about 15, 20 miles per hour. We hit a lot of hard line drives, a lot of hard ground balls that got through.”
GCCC’s Jake Eikleberry pitched the first two innings, issuing a walk and striking out one. Chris Bonk and Bradley Spires each had two strikeouts in their innings of work. Mitch Franek, Garrett Bryant, Brooks Trujillo and Oscar Gamboa also pitched an inning each for Garden City.
The plan will be much the same when Garden City hosts Western Iowa this weekend — getting lots of playing time for lots of guys. The Busters play at 1 and 3 p.m. both Saturday and Sunday at Williams Stadium.
“We’re gonna stick with kind of what we did today,” Finnegan said. “The first part of the year is trying to get everybody — you hate to say an equal amount of playing time, because not everybody gets an equal amount of playing time. But everybody needs their reps, everybody needs their at-bats.”
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Garden City 120 181 220 — 17 22 0
NW Okla. 000 000 000 — 0 2 3
Eikleberry, Franek (3), Bonk (4), Spires (5), Bryant (6), Trujillo (7), Gamboa (8), Kibler (9) and Lobato, Mohr (6); Unknown. WP—Eikleberry, 1-0. L—Unkown. 2B—Garden City, Ragias (1), Barrientos (1), Desantis (1), Zimmer (1), Alitz 2 (2).
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