The student news site of Los Altos High School in Los Altos, California

The Talon

The student news site of Los Altos High School in Los Altos, California

The Talon

The student news site of Los Altos High School in Los Altos, California

The Talon

Baseball Looks Beyond its Early Struggles

The Los Altos Varsity baseball team is rounding second base of their season, and surely they’re not looking back.

With a roster composed of nine seniors, their expectations going into the season were to improve upon last year’s league record of eight wins and eight losses. Currently sitting in second to last place in their division with a league record of three wins and seven losses, the team has not played up to their potential this season.

One of the factors contributing towards their lackluster record this season is their lack of offense. So far, the team has been in somewhat of an overall slump when it comes to hitting and getting players on base. As a team, they get an average of five hits per game, which is very low, especially for a high school baseball team. With a low number of hits, a team shouldn’t expect many runs. The baseball team so far hasn’t scored above seven runs in a single game. Their seven-run game, however, didn’t come until last week when they faced Mountain View in a thrilling walk off win at home that went into extra innings.

For the Los Altos Eagles, the key to start winning more games is to get more hits. With more hits, more runs will come, and with more runs the team should be seeing themselves with a better record this next half of the season. However, that is easier said than done. They currently play in the De Anza league, the better league out of the two leagues that Los Altos is eligible to play in.

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“The offense struggled scoring runs at the beginning of the year, but we’ve started to play offense as a team more and the results have been solid,” junior Patrick McColl said.

Although their offense has been shaky this season, their pitching has been solid from day one.

The starting rotation, which is composed of sophomore Trevor Rogers and senior James Olsen, has pitched fairly decently this far into the stretch of the season.

“Our pitching has been consistent and hard to hit all year,” sophomore reliever Brennan Myers said. “Every once and a while we have a rough inning, but our ability to bounce back from the one bad inning has been our recent key to success.”

Although the consistency and reliability of the pitching squad has been beneficial to the team thus far, the team still has a record that does not reflect on how well the pitching has been for Los Altos this season.

Even with a slow start, the baseball team has a positive mindset as they head into the next half of their season. Varsity baseball head coach Donnie Ecker points out how important the mental aspect of baseball is by trying to maintain a positive attitude and team chemistry. He is optimistic they will turn things around to rebound with more drive and competitiveness.

“The poor league start mainly attributes to the fact that we struggled early playing in our system together,” said Patrick. “I don’t think we need to do a lot to start winning games. We just need to stay calm and really go have fun together playing baseball.”

The Eagles have gone through struggles this season, but are maintaining a positive attitude. They are confident that they have the skills and abilities to compete for their ultimate goal, a CCS championship title.

“Our goal for the rest of this season is just to focus on playing well in the games we have left, because once playoffs start, nothing that happened during the season matters anymore, so as long as we make CCS playoffs, we’re in the position we need to be in,” Patrick said.

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