San Marcos baseball came through with six runs in the seventh inning with its back against the wall to pull out a 10-5 win over Santa Barbara High and clinch a share of the Channel League title on Friday at Eddie Mathews Field.
The Royals (16-11, 10-4 Channel League) will share the championship with Dos Pueblos (18-10, 10-4 CL), who defeated Oxnard on Friday.
“They so deserve it with how tight they are,” San Marcos first-year head coach Richard Schroeder said of his team. “A bunch of these guys have been playing baseball together since they were seven years old. I played up through college and on, and the (team) I remember is the one I had with my guys, before it was a job.
“These guys have a lot of heart. [Santa Barbara] never gave up… They were a legit team, and it took everything we had to pull this out. I told them to take this in and enjoy this because it’s not a common thing.”
The league title is San Marcos’ first since 2023 and its fourth in the last six seasons.
Heading into the top of the seventh inning, the Dons led the visiting Royals by a score of 5-4. San Marcos quickly erased that deficit as Landon Johnson singled, Miles Herbert was hit by a pitch, Grant Hoover was walked and Gunner Martinez drew a bases-loaded walk to tie the game at 5-5.
“You just can’t give up freebies,” Santa Barbara High head coach Steve Schuck said of the seventh inning. “[San Marcos] wasn’t out of it. Give them credit, they stayed in it, and it just snowballed on us. When you’re up, you’ve just got to let them hit. You can’t give up these free walks because that’s how momentum builds.”
After a strikeout, Patrick Foster chopped a ground ball to the first baseman, who turned and fired a low throw to second that was dropped to bring a run across and give SM a 6-5 lead.
The next batter, Levi Monson, sent another grounder to first but this time the throw came to home, which the umpire ruled pulled the catcher off the base and allowed the runner to slide in safely to make it a 7-5 game.
While the home crowd was unhappy about the call, the game went on and San Marcos’ Quinn Melton broke the game open with a two-run single into right field. Mason Crang followed with a run-scoring fielder’s choice to round out the scoring at 10-5.
“With all that pressure to go up and just have good at bats and make them throw pitches and have us get our pitch, there’s a lot of maturity in that, and that’s what these guys show,” Schroeder said. “Everybody added to this thing. It’s really a whole team win.”
Herbert then climbed onto the mound in the bottom half and worked around a pair of walks to slam the door, secure the league championship and allow the celebration to ensue.
“Miles, I think he’s the best closer in the Channel League,” Schroeder said. “He’s such a competitor, and I don’t think there’s any moment that’s too big for him.
The Royals wasted no time jumping out in front as a Foster single and a Melton double set the stage for an RBI base hit by Crang to take a 1-0 lead.
The Dons immediately responded, as Jetner Welch led off the bottom half by depositing the first pitch he saw over the center-field wall to even the score.
Max Weddle walked and made his way to third on a stolen base and wild pitch, before Griffin Arnold roped a two-out RBI single to take a 2-1 lead into the second.
After a scoreless second, the Royals tied the game up in the third when Johnson came through with two outs with an RBI double down the right-field line.
That score held until the bottom of the fourth when Derek Jaye walked and Welch singled to put runners on the corners with one out. Weddle then provided the biggest swing of the day, lining a two-run triple into the right-center field gap to give his team a 4-2 lead.
Weddle added another run when he scampered home on a wild pitch to end the fourth. Weddle drove in two runs and scored twice just two weeks after suffering a mouth injury against Dos Pueblos.
“It was awesome to see [Weddle] do that,” Schuck said. “We thought we were gonna be without him for the rest of the year, but it’s his senior year. It just shows you the grit that he has and the toughness that he has.”
The Royals got one of those runs back in the fifth when Hoover was hit by a pitch with the bases loaded, but the score remained at 5-3 as Tosh Whitworth struck out the next batter.
After Crang worked out of a jam in the fifth, San Marcos continued to chip away with another run. This one came on an RBI single from Melton to score Foster, who bolted all the way around to score from first base to make it a 5-4 game.
Herbert came into the game in relief and supplied a scoreless sixth to set the stage for the dramatic seventh inning.
While the Royals will now await their CIF-SS playoff draw next week, the Dons (11-14, 5-9 CL) still have some work to do if they want to reach the postseason. Santa Barbara will take on Nordhoff, Santa Ynez and San Luis Obispo in the next week as it attempts to get to .500 and earn the ability to petition for an at-large bid into the playoffs.
“I’ll be honest with you, if this team showed up in February, this team’s really hard to beat,” Schuck said of his group. “They learned some things in the last couple of weeks, they started believing in themselves.
“This is a good a good team. I think if we can get into the playoffs, we’re going to scare some people.”