LONG BEACH, Calif. — Long Beach State hadn’t hit the ball well all game. The Dirtbags only runs had come in an inning where they had three infield hits and a grounder that snuck past the glove of a diving defender.
But with the assistance of six walks and a hit by pitch, Long Beach was able to score two runs to tie the game in the ninth inning and got the game-winner in the 10th on a walk-off base on balls to defeat Loyola Marymount 5-4 Saturday evening at Blair Field.
Johnny Bekakis provided the game-tying RBI single in the ninth with two outs and a full count and Jeff Yamaguchi watched Ryan Hawthorne’s 3-1 pitch sail wide with the bases loaded in the 10th.
[full recap to follow]
Check out the 15-shot photo gallery from Saturday evening’s Long Beach State/Loyola Marymount matchup below:
About Shotgun Spratling
Shotgun Spratling covers the Southern California area where he attended 75 games during the 2012 season.
He attended grad school at USC where he covered USC sports for Neon Tommy, South LA Intersections, Annenberg TV News, KSCR and the Trojan Vision debate show Platforum Sports. He has worked with the Princeton Devil Rays minor league team, written for daily and weekly newspapers and done freelance work for publications such as ESPN, NBC Los Angeles and the SC Playbook magazine.
After being a 3-sport letterman in high school, he was a 4-year letterman at Division III Maryville College where he concluded his collegiate career by inducing a ground out to end the 2007 Great South Athletic Conference Tournament and gave the Scots the GSAC championship.
He also spent the 2010 summer in Cape Town, South Africa covering sports for the Cape Community Papers during the first FIFA World Cup held on African soil.
