Wolverines beat Pecos for 3A title

CMI correspondent

ALBUQUERQUE — Texico baseball coach Ty Thatcher saw how his team jumped on a struggling pitcher early in the game, and decided he wouldn’t let his starter’s potential troubles snowball into a rally for the opposition.

It paid off, as Texico beat Pecos 6-2 on Friday afternoon at Isotopes Park for the Class 3A state championship.

“We’ve had a pretty strong starting team,” Thatcher said. “They play with a lot of emotion. They’re a tight-knit group that trusts in each other.

“When somebody’s down, they know that somebody behind them will do their job.”

He knew that too, electing to bring in sophomore Nathan Phipps in relief of sophomore starter Ben Crist, who gave up just one earned run in 3 1/3 innings of work.

“We weren’t really on a short leash, but I could tell that he was getting up in the zone just a little,” Thatcher said. “We needed to get somebody in to change up the pace.”

Phipps accomplished that goal and then some, pitching the rest of the game and allowing only one earned run on four hits. He also struck out four and walked one.

Texico’s bats came out blazing, assaulting Pecos starter Daniel Saenz for three runs and three hits in the first, with some help from a porous Panthers defense that accounted for two errors in the inning.

Phipps started the damage at the plate before being called to the mound, hitting a first-inning single to right field that should have only plated Rafael Maldonado. Instead, it also brought Dalton Thatcher, as Panthers right fielder Louis Sanchez was unable to cleanly field the ball as it rolled towards the wall.

Phipps, who later crossed home plate on a single to center by Matt Odegaard, drove in two more with a second-inning single to make it 5-0. He finished 3-for-5 at the plate for the Wolverines (25-4).

The Panthers (17-11) were kept hitless by Crist for the first three innings before catcher Tomas Duran doubled to lead off the fourth. After walk one out later, Thatcher decided to make the switch to Phipps.

Phipps and batterymate Brock Thompson ended the Panthers’ bid for a rally in the fourth on a strike-em-out, throw-em-out double play. Pecos added another run in the fifth, but the early hole proved too much to overcome.

The victory capped a dominant title run for the Wolverines, who outscored their opponents 37–8 through their four-game tourney run. They allowed more than two runs only once en route to their first title since taking the then-1A crown in 2005.