Two days later, Cal baseball coach David Esquer still didn’t quite know how to explain Justin Jones’ performance against North Carolina.
“I don’t think it was just ‘one of those games’ because he’s never had one of those games,” Esquer said yesterday. “I think … he felt the weight of the world on his shoulders, maybe trying too hard. It was pretty unusual … very unlike him.”
In Friday’s 12-3 loss to open the Norman Regional, Cal’s freshman ace failed to record a single out before being replaced – a postseason debut that, like the Bears’ 2010 NCAA stint, was all too brief.
Jones struggled from the beginning at Oklahoma’s L. Dale Mitchell Park. He started off with a four-pitch walk, a hit batter, and a three-run home run to North Carolina’s Dillon Hazlett.
Two baserunners later, Kevin Miller entered the game in relief – though he would not escape the first half-inning before the Heels held a 6-0 advantage.
Saturday’s elimination match versus Oral Roberts was not decided until the bottom of the ninth, yet the end result was identical. After the Bears scored a pair of ninth inning runs against the Golden Eagles to knot the game at 8-8, Cal was poised to take their first lead of the tournament. But with the bases loaded and one down, Danny Oh and Marcus Semien both struck out to end the top of the final frame.
“We had the game in our hands, and the conditions were right,” Esquer said. “Even contact would have scored us a run.”
Instead, it was Oral Roberts (36-26) that came up with the big hit.
With one out, Tyler Garewal took the Bears’ Dixon Anderson deep into left center field – giving the Golden Eagles a 9-8 victory and sending Cal home.
It was a heartbreaking way to end a valiant effort by the Bears, who reeled off five straight runs after trailing 6-1 in the fifth inning.
“In that situation, it was win or go home,” said right fielder Tony Renda, who had a team-high six hits on the weekend. “None of us wanted to go home. We had to dig deep and scrap some runs together.”
Cal (29-25, 13-14 in the Pac-10) began its comeback in the top of the sixth, as Chad Bunting followed up Brian Guinn’s solo home run with a two-out, two-run shot of his own.
Renda reached home off of a left field error to make it 6-6 in the top of the seventh. He had doubled to score Semien earlier in the inning.
Yet Garewal’s heroics made it all for naught, and Renda did not mince words in expressing his disappointment.
Asked what the Bears could take from their weekend experience, the freshman was blunt:
“We can take the feeling of getting beat – knowing what it’s like to go 0-for-2 and how bad that felt, and to use that as motivation.”