High School Baseball : Bonita Vista Can Run, but It Can’t Score : Barons Strand 14 in 5-0 Loss to Sweetwater; Both Teams Make Playoffs

CHULA VISTA — Fourteen times, a Bonita Vista High School baseball player reached base Friday.

Each, though, was doomed to wander without reaching home safely. Sweetwater, which had two freshmen and four sophomores starting, coolly produced a 5-0 victory and gained the Metro-Mesa League’s second berth for the San Diego Section 3-A playoffs.

Bonita Vista, which beat Sweetwater Thursday to force Friday’s game, later received an at-large berth.

If the Barons (17-10, 8-5) needed to purge themselves of any bad karma, they should no more.

Consider:

- After the first two Bonita Vista batters walked in the second inning, both were forced out at third.

- The next inning ended when Sweetwater catcher Juan Price threw out a runner who was trying to steal second.

- The next inning, after his teammates loaded the bases with one out, Jeff Narlock faked a bunt as part of a fake squeeze designed to get a pitchout. They got a pitchout, all right, but the runner’s “fake” was too real, and Price nabbed him with a peg to third.

- The next inning ended with a double play.

- The next inning, the sixth, ended with a ho-hum fly ball-to-right, throw-to-home double play.

“Why do you think I sent that runner?” Bonita Vista Coach Ron Pietila asked rhetorically. “We were staggering. We had to get on the board somehow, and that kid threw a strike.”

Host Sweetwater (15-12-1, 8-5) scrounged a run in every inning except the third. Price, who scored twice, had two of his team’s seven hits against three pitchers.

“When we beat them earlier this year, their coach had the same look on his face as he did today,” Price said. “It was like somebody wanted us to win.”

Pietila, a third baseman in the Cleveland Indians’ farm system for five years, has transformed the program into a winner. Last year Bonita Vista went 9-16. Friday, the first-year coach said, proved that coaches have off days, too.

“I think today we hurt ourselves more than Sweetwater did,” Pietila said. “I also blew a significant percentage of the decisions. I didn’t feel like I coached well.”