Brandon Rowley361 pitches, 29 batters, 14 pitchers and nearly four grueling hours of baseball resulted in a 15-15 tie between the Santa Ana Dons and the Glendale Vaqueros on Friday afternoon.
The surreal and sloppy game, which included 19 combined walks, nine errors, and eight batters hit by pitches, was called a draw only because the 2 p.m. game stretched into the evening hours when it was too dark to play.
“Our pitchers forgot that the point is to throw the ball over the plate,” said SAC head coach Tom Nilles. “You’ve got to throw strikes and force people to have to beat you, not just freebies.”
The game started seemingly normal, with the Dons striking first in the second inning, scoring three runs with a Ben Melendez home run lasered over the right field fence.
“I felt really good today,” said Melendez. “Just put some good swings on the balls, and things ended up working out.”
He would tally three hits, four RBIs, and two runs of his own.
Dons’ starting pitcher Zach Ireland tossed for four innings without allowing an earned run, even getting out of a bases-loaded jam in his fifth start of the season so far.
“I’m happy with how I performed,” said Ireland. “I got a bunch of teammates behind me that I know are going to make plays, and I’m happy with how the guys hit today; we really slugged the ball.”
By the end of the sixth inning, Santa Ana sported a 15-6 lead, looking like it was all but over for Glendale. Then, the seventh inning.
The Dons limped through a 51-minute, nine-run inning that drained their morale with every pitch, their lead bleeding out as the Vaqueros got 11 batters in a row on base, eventually tying the game at 15.
The Dons didn’t fare much better in the eighth as the Vaqueros scored three runs to open the inning, which was immediately followed by the umpire calling the game as the sun set.
This saved the Dons since calling the game due to darkness resets the score back to that of the last completed inning, the seventh, ending the game in a tie.
“We need to be more precise,” said Melendez. “We need to do more during practice to better ourselves in the game.”
The Dons close out their three-game series against the Vaqueros and will head into Orange Empire Conference play 14-1-1.
“They’re a good team. We won the first two, and they were all dogfights,” said Coach Nilles.” “Even though it was ugly as it was.”
Santa Ana will face off against Saddleback next at home on Thursday at 2 p.m.
