New Coach and a New Year for Boys Baseball This Season
M. Owens
It’s a cloudy Thursday afternoon, and Las Lomas is preparing to take on Novato High School to get back on track.
Soon the game will begin and the hopes of the Knights quickly diminish as Novato gets four runs in the 3rd inning. Despite Las Lomas managing to earn one run back in the 4th, they eventually fall to Novato 7-1.
The baseball team has had a middling season, with seven wins and nine losses. “The games we lost we shouldn’t have lost but because of some small errors we did. The season is not going as planned so far,” said Stefan Vargas, who is in varsity baseball.
However, in spite of the current season the team remains optimistic. “We’ve had many unlucky breaks with umpires, which will change. We’ve also been improving our defense over the past two weeks after not having any games,” said Vargas.
Stefan hopes that the new coach John, Stefan who has previous experience with other teams, will pull the team to success. “Our coach is John Stevens, he’s new this year but has brought many great changes to the program. He changed the way we played baseball. We learned the ‘Las Lomas way’ ”
After the loss to Novato a few games lat- er they faced Mt. Diablo and despite looking less than impressive against Novato they washed that memory away with an incredible 19-2 win. After a few disappointing losses this win could be the turning point that Las Lomas needs to turn the season around and with their 9-0 win over Ygnacio Valley, they seem to be doing just that.
Despite some losses, the team has been playing well. In fact, Las Lomas has 52 stolen bases this year which far surpasses the national average. In fact most of their stats are above the national average. Their batting average, on base percentage, home runs are all on par with the national averages and are even going above those averages.
The only real problem with the team, stat-wise, is their defense which is higher than the national average. Las Lomas allows 4.71 earned runs per game which recently with better performances look to cleaning that stat up.
“Something we can improve on is defense,” said Matt Hershey. But with this re- cent spell of good performances they potentially have already made huge strides in doing so.
Hopefully as the season continues Las Lomas will turn it around and make it to NCS.
