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April 6, 2025
By Loren Kopff • @LorenKopff on X
CYPRESS-Last season was a breakthrough season for John Glenn High, falling a game short of an automatic playoff berth in the 605 League as it had to settle for a fourth place finish. Meanwhile, Oxford Academy once again battled with Cerritos High for the top spot but was swept by the Dons and finished in second place.
This season hasn’t gone according to planned for both teams and when they met last Friday in the back end of a home and home series, the Eagles were looking for their third straight win over the Patriots and a season sweep for the first time as members of the league. But Glenn could not add to its 4-0 lead after two innings and surrendered four runs in the bottom of the fifth and two more in the sixth as the hosts rallied for a 7-6 victory, leaving the Eagles at 5-10 overall and 1-1 in league play. Glenn pitchers also threw two wild pitches, hit two batters and the defense committed two crucial errors.
“We knew Oxford is a really good baseball team,” said Glenn first-year head coach Ken Mason. “Their record doesn’t indicate what they are. They’re a really good baseball team; they’re going to win a lot of games. We knew we had to jump on them early; we had the momentum after our last win and we knew if we jumped on them early, we could put a little pressure on them, and we did. We were really in control, and then we had some mental mistakes.”
Glenn defeated Oxford Academy 3-1 on Apr. 1 with all three runs coming in the bottom of the fourth off Mac Tiettmeyer, who would have something to say in Oxford Academy’s late rally. But Glenn sent seven batters to the plate in the first, getting singles from junior shortstop Evan Perez and junior pitcher Bert Rodriguez to left field and a run-scoring single to center from senior catcher Raymond Acosta. Perez would score the game’s first run on an error and the Eagles would strand a pair of runners on base with one out.
In the next inning, sophomore designated hitter Marcos Quiroz was hit by a pitch and two outs later, senior left fielder Matthew Sy, in just his third game, was also hit by a pitch. Rodriguez then won an 11-pitch battle with Logan Lavoie and deposited his second hit into center, scoring Quiroz. Four pitches later, a base hit from junior second baseman Jonah Mason increased the score to 4-0.
Again, two more runners were left in scoring position, but the Eagles were looking good considering how Lavoie was up to 53 pitches after two frames while Rodriguez had thrown 49 pitches through three innings, struck out five straight batters at one point, yielded a pair of hits and had not allowed a runner to get past second base. But in a blink of an eye, the pendulum shifted to the third base dugout and the guys decked out in their white jerseys.
Rodruguez walked Lavoie, gave up a single to Tiettmeyer down the third base line and hit Adrian Mejia on the first pitch to load the bases to begin the bottom of the fourth. After striking out the next two batters, Jude Kim tagged Rodriguez for a single for Oxford Academy’s first run.
In the next inning, the wheels came off for Rodriguez, who yielded consecutive doubles to Bear Spessert and Sora Suzuki before being lifted for junior Josiah Alcala, He would hit Lavoie on the first pitch and surrendered an infield single to Tiettmeyer to load the bases.
“I think he just ran out of gas,” said Mason of Rodriguez, who was bidding for his fourth win this season. “The two [doubles] were hit really hard, and he was starting to miss his spots. He was really in command; I was really proud of him. But we can’t expect Bert to pitch a shutout against good teams.”
Rodriguez finished with seven strikeouts in four innings, gave up half a dozen hits and walked two while throwing 90 pitches, 49 of those coming in the third and fourth innings combined. Two pitches later, Alcala hit Mejia to make it 4-3 and following another pitching change, Zachary Padilla reached on an error, allowing Lavoie to tie the game at 4-4 and an error allowed Tiettmeyer, who is the great, great grandson of Tommy Griffith of the 1914 Boston ‘Miracle’ Braves World Series team to come home for the lead. The third pitching change of the inning was quickly followed by a double play to prevent further damage.
The Eagles would regain the lead in the sixth as Tiettmeyer, who became the third pitcher for the Patriots, walked senior right fielder Angel Aguilar. After striking pout Perez, Sy singled to center and both runners advanced on a wild pitch. A groundout from Rodriguez plated Aguilar and on an 1-2 count to Mason, a wild pitch allowed Sy to score the go-ahead run. However, that didn’t last long as Lavoie’s two-out first pitch triple to the right field gap drove in Brendan Lee and Spessert for the game winner.
“I’m real proud of the guys; they’re learning how to battle, but at this point, I just told them there’s no moral victories,” said Mason. “It’s not 11-year old Little League baseball. We’ve got to figure out how to close games. I was really proud of them for taking the lead, but we could have gotten out of that last inning [when] they took the lead.”
Glenn still had an opportunity to score more runs in the seventh as Alcala doubled to the left field gap with one out. But in a strange situation, senior first baseman Brandon Rivera, who pitched a three-hit complete game against the Patriots in the first meeting, was called out for batter’s interference on a 2-1 count, which grew the ire of Mason and the Glenn spectators.
“There were a couple of really bizarre calls today,” said Mason. “The umpire told me he could be out two ways. One, his backswing hit the catcher; he said he’s automatically out if the backswing hits the catcher. And then he said [Rivera] also stepped across and interfered with the throw down to second.
“The other bizarre call, which I felt I got a really poor explanation, was on the dropped third strike [in the third inning], Jonah was on first base and started to come back to the bag, and they called interference on Jonah,” he continued. “It was a dropped third strike where Raymond Acosta struck out; there was a throw down and we would have had the fifth run score. The field umpire let it go, and the home plate umpire overturned it.”
While Oxford Academy entered the game with a 2-12 record, Glenn seems to have turned the page after a six-game losing streak to begin the season. The Eagles had a three-game winning streak after the six-game skid and walked into last Friday’s contest winning consecutive games after being surprised by Whitney High 9-4 on Mar. 25.
Glenn, which lost two players off last season’s team to graduation and one other who transferred, will host Cerritos on Tuesday to begin a critical home and home series with the Dons. The second game will be on Friday before the Eagles entertain Pioneer High on Apr. 15.
“We’ve had a hard time filling those holes,” said Mason. “Those were three really big key players to our offense. We’re trying to figure out how to replace those and you saw today that we have some holes. That 0-6 [start]…a lot of that was self-centered play.
“I still think we’re right in the mix [in league],” he continued.” Now, we need help from other teams. But I feel like we’re a playoff team. If we don’t make the playoffs, that will be a disappointing year in my mind. I think we let a couple of games slip away. So, we easily could have been 4-0, but we’re 2-2 and it is what it is. We’ve got to try to battle against Cerritos next week and maybe knock them off; split with them and then we get right back in the mix.”
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