Progress shown in Apache non-district loss

GONZALES — The score may indicate otherwise, but the young Apaches are showing progress as they soon enter the district portion of the season. Gonzales lost 13-0 in five innings to their rivals, the Cuero Gobblers, but Apaches’ head coach Lance Alford sees that spark in his players and is now hoping to find some “gasoline” to stretch out said spark to seven innings of baseball.

“You just [got to] pour gas on it and make it into a big fire,” Alford joked. “It’s a learning process.”

The head coach sent out his young pitchers to the mound, with Tanner Blundell starting and Albert Camarillo as relief.

“Tanner, when he threw his curve ball and it was on…it had a good break to it,” Alford said. “It was just a matter of him gaining maturity.”

Blundell would pitch two innings, getting to the third before he was relieved by Camarillo who finished out the game.

Camarillo started off slow, hitting three of the first four batters he saw. Despite the early struggles, the side-arm pitcher found the strike zone and ended the inning with a strikeout.

“He can’t throw the ball straight, which is a good thing,” Alford explained. “He brings it from down [low] and we’re going to work with finger pressure and grips and we’re going to make this ball do a lot of different things as he gets older and is able to control it better.”

On the field, the Apaches had four errors, two came from one play on an infield fly ball situation. Even with the errors, Alford believes his team has improved exponentially, especially compared to their games earlier in the season.

“At the beginning of the year it was a train wreck,” he admitted. “It was balls flying everywhere, we couldn’t catch a cold. Now you see the progress that we’re making here. Garrett [Rickman] kept the ball off the screen all night, Matthew [Velasquez-Banda] is flagging everything down out in centerfield.”

“[Losing] 13-0 to a really good Cuero team? Not bad when you consider a lot of these kids were playing little league baseball last summer. I’ll take that. It’s looking good.”

One of the biggest issues for the Apaches Tuesday night was their at-bats. It may go without saying, but in order to score runs, you need baserunners. Unfortunately, the Apaches only had four baserunners in the five innings of play, including two from utility man Ty Oliver.

“He put some balls in play,” Alford said of Oliver. “I want 16 ‘dirt bags’ … kids that will do anything it takes to help the team and Ty does it.”

A “dirt bag” in baseball terminology simply describes players who are consummate hustlers. One of the biggest indicators of a “dirt bag” is a player who constantly gets his uniform stained with sweat and dirt from the field.

“That’s contagious,” Alford continued, “the kids buy into that and see that’s what we’re trying to get.”

The Apaches still struggled from the plate and the Gonzales head coach knows that it takes a bit more aggression to put the ball in play.

“We have to be aggressive — controlled aggression — at the plate,” he said. “We have to hunt the fast ball. We’ve been preaching this all year, you go up there looking for the fast ball and we’re going to adjust to the curve ball. If you look and sit on the fastball and you can time it right, you’ll hit it hard but you got to go up there hunting for it.”

The Apaches combined for seven strikeouts out of the 19 at-bats.

With their final warmup before district behind them, the Apaches now have their eye on a tough road ahead to a playoff berth. Tonight, Gonzales begins with La Vernia, a perennial playoff contender.

“We’re going to start [Kolby] Kifer, our senior,” Alford said. “Going to see if he can ‘tame the beast.’”

The game is scheduled for 7 p.m. at home.

CHS 606 10x x – 13 12 3

GHS 000 00x x – 0 0 4