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DOUGLAS — As chairs were being set up on the campus lawn and the final preparations were being made for tonight’s graduation ceremony, the mood was much more somber at the nearby baseball field.
Shortly before Game 1 of their best-of-three NJCAA Region I championship series with Central Arizona, the Cochise College Apaches learned of the death of one of their fellow Apache athletes.
With little time for an in memoriam gesture, the Cochise baseball team fashioned leg bands and wrist bands out of trainer’s tape and wrote “J.A. #22” on them. This was done as a tribute to Josh Armendariz, a freshman on the Cochise College men’s basketball team, who was killed in a one-car accident while driving Wednesday evening from Cochise to his hometown of El Paso, Texas.
“Our guys found out just before the game,” Cochise head baseball coach Todd Inglehart said. “I don’t think it affected (our play), but it’s absolutely horrible. It definitely puts this game into perspective. All the teams here know each other. They live with each other in the dorms. It definitely hits hard when it’s so familiar.”
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The Apaches dropped the opener 6-5 in 10 innings.
Today at Cochise at 3 p.m., the Apaches will try to even the series and force a decisive Game 3 at noon on Saturday.
Josh Spence, the ACCAC player of the year, pitched all 10 innings for Central Arizona and struck out the side in order in the bottom of the 10th for the win.
“We did a very good job against him through the first six innings, but then we went back to how he’s had so much success against us. We tried to pull everything and if you do that, he’ll thumb you to death.”
Early on, Cochise had success against Spence. Edder Morales singled in Michael Onwumere to put Cochise up 2-0 in the second. Central tied the game with two in the fourth, but the Apaches retook the lead in the bottom of the inning when Morales, a freshman third baseman from Venezuela, doubled in Onwumere.
Central tied it again, but Cochise went on top 5-3 in the sixth, on an RBI single by Kevin Hussey and a successful squeeze bunt by Diego Marquez that plated Rafael Valenzuela.
That would be the end of the Apache offense against Spence, as they managed just three hits and four base runners the rest of the way.
Central knotted the game at 5 in the top of the sixth against reliever Jorge Martinez, who replaced starter Carlos Chavez in the fifth after Chavez took a line drive off the shin.
Jesus Arzaga doubled to left to score one, but when the throw of Cochise left fielder Kenji Hagiwara went awry, Evan Rayley was able to trot home with the tying run.
Martinez settled down from there and Spence rediscovered his dominant form as neither team scored until the top of the 10th.
Central designated hitter Ryan Pilgrim hit a one-out double against Diego Soto, the third Cochise pitcher of the day.
Soto then narrowly missed on a pair of two-strike pitches to Tony Pecheck and those near-misses proved devastating to the Apaches when Pechech hit a hot grounder to the right of short that got past a sliding Valenzuela to bring in the go-ahead run.
The game of inches continued to haunt the Apaches in their final at bat. Hussey belted a Spence offering over the fence in left, but it was a few feet foul.
On the next pitch, Hussey watched strike three paint the inside corner. Marquez and Onwumere followed suit and the Apaches found themselves on the brink of elimination.
“They played better than us,” Inglehart said. “There were a couple of balls in the outfield where I’m not sure what was going on and we didn’t do much offensively from the fifth inning on.”
Today, Brandon Orr, a freshman from Palo Verde High School in Tucson, takes the mound. Orr (9-4) was outstanding in his last start, a 7-0 win over Pima in Game 3 of the semifinals on Saturday. Central will counter with Joe Anson, who Inglehart said, is very similar in approach to Spence.
“He throws strikes and he does a good job changing speeds,” Inglehart said. “They’re somewhat the same.”
Tim Winslow went 2-for-4 at the plate to lead the Apaches and Hussey and Morales also went 2-for-4.
Alex Gaynes wrote on May 14, 2007 11:27 AM: