Calallen High School Baseball

Many photos, when computers stops posting pictures, just hit the Refresh button.

The mighty and fightin' Wildcats win their own Calallen Baseball Tournament for the 9th straight season. Outstanding!

Calallen wins First Game 4-3 in eight innings. 3-Game Series: Calallen 1 Moody 0

Late arrival 
Calallen evens game in seventh, wins in eighth 
By GEORGE VONDRACEK Caller-Times
May 11, 2007 

Fittingly, two of the most storied high school baseball programs in 
South Texas turned in a performance Thursday night that went down to 
a hang-wringing finish in front of 5,088 people at Whataburger Field.
 
Ninth-ranked Calallen rallied from a three-run seventh-inning deficit, 
getting the game-winning RBI single from pitcher Ryan Duke with two 
outs in the bottom of the eighth inning to edge top-ranked Moody 4-3.
 
The come-from-behind win gives the 29-6 Wildcats a 1-0 lead in the 
best-of-3 Class 4A area playoff series, with Game 2 scheduled at 7 
p.m. today at Whataburger Field. The third game, if needed, will be 
played at 7 p.m. Saturday at Whataburger Field.
 
Both teams are seeking a 10th appearance at the state tournament, but 
no one expected them to meet this early in the postseason. But almost 
everyone expected a showing like the teams put on Thursday.
 
"No doubt," Calallen coach Steve Chapman said. "That's what we were 
thinking. We told our kids it's going to be 3-2 or 4-2, something like 
that.
" 
"Certainly, without a doubt," Moody coach Corky Gallegos said. "If I 
thought we were going to run away with a game 3-0, I'd have been a fool.
 I've seen a lot of baseball and I knew it was going to be this way. 

Duke (9-2) laced the first pitch from Moody reliever Justin Meza into 
center field to drive in Jeramie Marek, who opened with a walk off 
Trojans starter Marc Gomez (8-1). Marek was sacrificed to second to 
get into scoring position and cap the Calallen rally. 
The Wildcats scored all of their runs in the final two-plus innings. 

"We showed some character tonight," Chapman said. "We haven't played 
with the type of desire we had tonight in a long time."
 
The Wildcats were in that position because Gomez was astounding. He was 
sailing along with a five-hit shutout through five innings before 
matters turned. Gomez exited after throwing 130 pitches, 86 for strikes.

 
"He owned the plate and was attacking the strike zone," Gallegos said. 
"He did what he was supposed to do." 

But in letting that 3-0 lead slip away, Moody (31-3) uncharacteristically
made three errors 

"You've got your deadliest weapon, defense, and you get beat by it," 
Gallegos said. "It's like taking a 9 mm and shooting yourself in the 
foot." 

The Trojans took their 3-0 lead off Duke in the third, scoring on a 
bases-loaded walk to Josiah Rodriguez and successive sacrifice flies 
from Rudy Flores and Jacob Perales. Duke settled in after that, 
setting down 15 of the final 18 Trojans he faced. Duke threw 131 
pitches, striking out six. 

Calallen was able to threaten in the first, third and fifth innings 
but couldn't get to Gomez until the sixth. David DeLeon walked to 
open the inning and later scored on Kris Guerrero's Texas league 
single to center. 
In the seventh, Moody committed two errors. The first one scored Sean 
Hoelscher when Rudy Flores dropped the throw from Joey Mendoza on 
Duke's grounder to second. Duke later scored on a bases-loaded walk 
to Guerrero with two outs to tie the game at 3.
 
Hoelscher had three of Calallen's nine hits, including two doubles, and 
Guerrero had two hits and two RBI.