City College baseball put on a strong hitting and pitching performance on Thursday with a 12-1 victory over Ventura at Pershing Park.
The Vaqueros were led by sophomore starting pitcher Sean Barry (No. 12) who pitched six shutout innings with 12 strikeouts and allowed just two hits.
“The guy is just a freak,” sophomore catcher Jimmy Hill said about Barry. “He knows what he’s doing up there, he gets up on the mound with a lot of confidence.”
Barry is from the Ventura area and played against a lot of the Ventura players while he was in high school, so they knew that Barry was capable of a game like this.
“I think they (Ventura) kinda came in knowing that they were in for a long day,” said head coach Jeff Walker.
City College’s offense bounced back with 12 runs after being shutout in a loss to Ventura on Tuesday, when the team only managed to get three hits in the entire game.
“It was tough losing two games in a row,” said Hill. “That’s not something that we’re fond of.”
Ventura’s freshman starting pitcher Jackson Simonsgaard (No. 14) went into the game leading the conference in strikeouts. He didn’t strike out any Vaqueros on Thursday and only lasted two innings before being pulled out of the game. Ventura would go on to use five pitchers in total for the game, four of which didn’t last more than two innings.
The Vaqueros offense was jump-started by sophomore designated hitter Cameron Jones (No. 25) when he led the game off with a triple and would later score on a wild pitch. Jones reached base on five of his six at bats and had two stolen bases in the game.
Later in the inning, Hill would bring in a run with a sacrifice fly to make the game 2-0 after the first inning. He followed that with a two-run double in the second inning. He finished the game 2-3 with three RBIs and a walk.
But the offense was not limited to just a couple of players, four more Vaqueros finished the game with two RBIs each.
“It was really just an all around great team effort,” Hill said.
City College followed the second inning with two runs in the third and three more runs in the fourth to make it a 12-0 lead.
“It’s easy to be comfortable when you score 12 runs,” said Barry.
In the ninth inning Ventura was able to get the bases loaded with just one out. After surrendering a run on an RBI groundout, City College freshman pitcher Jack Spicer (No. 38) was able to finish off the game with a strikeout.
With the win City College improved its record to 13-5 overall, 6-4 in the conference and 9-1 at home.
“It’s either feast or famine with us,” said Walker. “It’s famine on the road and we feast at home.”
City College will play Moorpark in its next game at 1 p.m. on Saturday, March 14 at Pershing Park.
