Excellent weather during spring break made for a perfect day for baseball, as the Mission Bears competed with the Balboa Buccaneers on the turf of Silver Terrace.

It was exciting just to play — rain and muddy fields have significantly altered the Bears’ schedule this season. The match-up in itself, however, did not offer up much excitement, as the Balboa Buccaneers were able to take advantage of Mission’s defensive woes to cruise their way to an 18-3 victory in five innings of play.

A lot of things could be said about what Mission did wrong. Among those things: committing four errors, allowing five stolen bases, and walking a staggering total of 15 batters!

Starting Buccaneer pitcher Alex Arnold was able to flat-out dominate the Bears’ offense as he threw a gem to silence the Mission bats.

Mission would be held scoreless all the way to the fifth and last frame. There, Mission hitting showed a spark of life and scored three runs. Junior Miles Prescott sent a thunderous liner to left field to score senior Oscar Ramirez, who had reached base via a walk, for an RBI triple.

“I just had the adrenaline going,” Prescott said. “I had my teammates behind my back. Coach told me to just do my thing and I hit it. It was natural instinct.”

The junior followed up his triple with a successful steal to home plate. Junior Francisco Chin drew a walk to reach base, where he was able to showcase his speed with three steals, to score all by himself!

This win for Balboa improves their league record to 6-0. No team around the AAA seems to be able to slow down their impressive run. Mission’s record falls to 1-1. Tomorrow, the team will go on to lose another game, against Lincoln, 2-9.

Despite these discouraging numbers, Mission’s head coach, Dan Grossman, isn’t too worried.

“We’re just going to flush it. That’s been our motto when we make mistakes.” Grossman went on to talk about the mental toughness of his team.

“We’ll just come back. Tomorrow’s a new day. I can give you all the sports clichés in the world, but these guys are resilient. They’re just going to get right back to it.”

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Richard Lee is a just another ordinary child. He chose to start off reporting mainly to write about Mission High School sports. The primary intent to why he started journalism was to cover basketball games to inform parents and fans of the games when they were not able to attend scheduled contests. His most vital goal is to have more individuals read his works to show that various insights and intellectual thinking can be emitted and purveyed by not only educated adults, but by the budding youth as well.

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  1. Hey,baseball’s back and no ace reporter in sight? I read about the Freak in the New York Times mag and get front page coverage of Spring Training from the Chron (they don’t waste space on the Arab Spring training). But nothing from Mission Loco. Did you fire the guy, Mark something or other? Less restaurants, more sport!

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