Laguna Beach Wins Its Baseball Playoff Opener, 5-2

Heading into its CIF Southern Section Division 4 first-round playoff game Tuesday, Laguna Beach High's baseball team had never won a postseason game on its home field in the program's 73-year history.

The Breakers can finally cross that one off the board.

Erik Peruzzi’s two-out, two-strike, two-run double in the bottom of the third inning gave Laguna Beach the lead for good, and the fourth-seeded Breakers escaped a wild seventh inning to defeat Indio, 5-2, and spark a celebration that was long overdue.

“There’s no pressure,” Laguna Beach coach Jeff Sears said. “It doesn’t matter who we play, when we play them, we’re going to go and compete.”

Coming off its first league title in 48 years, the Breakers sent UC Santa Barbara-bound right-hander Chris Paul (10-1) to the mound. He allowed an RBI double to Jose Lopez with no outs in the second inning, picked Lopez off second and didn’t allow a runner to touch third base until the seventh.

In the meantime, Laguna Beach (26-2) scored three runs in the third and two more in the fifth.  After Larry Stewart reached on an error and Jake Herbert beat out a bunt single, Keaton Jones tied the score, 1-1, with his double to right-center field. Peruzzi then stepped up and hit the ball high off the screen in left center, driving in Herbert and Jones for a 3-1 lead.

“We needed to get those,” Peruzzi said of his RBIs. “I was behind in the count, so I was just getting ready to swing at anything close to the zone.”

Jones led off the fifth with a walk and Austin Paxson then executed a perfect hit-and-run to put runners on first and third. Paul hit a sacrifice fly to score Jones, and freshman third baseman Steven Harrison followed with an RBI double off the fence in center.

The score remained 5-1 until the top of the seventh, when Indio's Lopez led off with a walk and Joseph Rivas reached on a throwing error by second baseman Robbie McInerny. Ricky Lopez then singled over the third-base bag, which should have easily scored Jose Lopez from second, but he ran into his third-base coach and fell to the ground. He got up just in time to beat the throw to the plate.

Sears argued that the third-base coach had helped Lopez to his feet, but the umpires disagreed, bringing the tying run to the plate with nobody out. “I’ve never seen a runner run into a coach and then the coach get to help him back up,” Sears said.

Jones then relieved Paul and on his first pitch induced Kristian Figueroa to hit a grounder to Harrison at third, who threw to second to force Ricky Lopez. On the play, a base umpire ruled that Rivas had interfered with Harrison by sticking out his arm to distract Harrison as he ran from second to third, resulting in a second out on the play. Jones then got Cody Barnhoorn to ground out to second to end the game.

The Breakers will meet El Segundo, a 2-0 winner over Monrovia in its first round game Thursday, in the second round on Tuesday.

“These guys prepare,” said Sears, who's in his fourth season at the school. “We’ll go right back in the weight room tomorrow. We’re not going to change anything because it’s CIF. It’s a game to us, it’s an opportunity for our guys to have success.”

They already have something no other Laguna Beach accomplished, a home playoff win.