Baseball eliminated from playoffs after scoring one run in 29 innings

By Christopher Mo

The baseball team ended their season following a 1-0 loss against Orange Lutheran High School in the quarterfinals of the CIF Southern Section (CIF-SS) Division 1 playoffs May 9. The team finished the season with an overall record of 22-9 and a league record of 14-7.

This loss came after their 1-0 victory against Palos Verdes High School in the first round of the CIF-SS playoffs, where they managed to secure a win in a game that lasted two days and went into the 14th inning. The one run scored on a wild pitch in the top of the 14th inning against Palos Verdes was the only run the Wolverines scored in their final 29 innings of the season.

Despite being swept by Notre Dame early in the season, the team bounced back from their early season losses with a 12 game winning streak that spanned from late March to late April. Last season, the team finished 22-8-1 and made it to the semifinals of the CIF-SS playoffs, where they fell short against JSerra High School.

Catcher Thomas Lieb ’24 said the team did not have an ideal start to the season.

“We started out the gate pretty slow, not winning as much as we wanted to,” Lieb said. “Then we came together as a group, identified our problems and because of that, we were able to win more games.”

Pitcher Tommy Bridges ’24 said the team was able to find their rhythm as the season progressed.

“This season started out rough but gradually started to improve,” Bridges said. “We started to find our groove as a team and performed way better than the start.

An aspect of the season that stands out is the team’s ability to forget all of the past games and just focus on the current.”

Bridges said the team has developed chemistry by playing baseball together for years on other teams.

“Our team has always been super close,” Bridges said. “Most of us grew up playing baseball together. We all bonded around the same thing our whole lives and that led to the strong friendships that we have on and off the field.” tion to the athletic department comes as a result of the switch from VEX to FRC (First Robotics Competition). Reed said the format for FRC is different from VEX. In VEX, students would compete in small teams with two to five members, while in FRC, each team has anywhere between 15 and 200 members. Kaito De Anda ’24 said the team needed to adjust to the increased complexity of FRC.

The team will graduate 13 seniors this year. Lieb said a major part of his role as a senior next year will be to guide the younger freshmen and sophomores on the team.

“We have to show the younger guys the ropes again next year and make sure that they can step up in the big situations,” Lieb said.

“FRC is a much larger scale robotics league with much more complex and advanced robots than VEX,” De Anda said. “It wasn’t until we went to our first FRC [competition] that we realized the orders of magnitude by which we needed to advance [the robotics program].”

Team member Milo Messenger ’25 said joining the athletics department will give the team more access to much needed materials and space.

“We get access to some of the resources the athletic department has, like transportation, which was a big problem for us last year, and space on campus, and more funding,” Messenger said.

The robotics team is the 26th team of the athletics department.

Reed said the team joining FRC meant that it made sense for the team to become a part of the athletics department.

“When the administration took a closer look at the structure of the FRC program, they determined that robotics had a similar progression to most athletic teams,” Reed said. “The move to athletics unified the program across both campuses. Students arriving in 7th grade will have a clear path for developing and improving their engineering, design and programming skills.”