Cal Poly hosted San Diego State in a preseason series two weekends ago. I was feeling sick and had a lot of stuff to do with finals being the next week, so I only made it out to one game. This was on a cold Saturday night, and it turned out to be the only game the team won that weekend.

Prior to the game, there was a moment of silence for Augie Garrido, who coached Cal Poly for two seasons before his prolific stints at Cal State Fullerton and Texas. Two women who were sitting behind me were laughing the whole time, which was seriously not cool.

Trent Shelton got the start for the Mustangs, and did not throw as well as the last time I saw him throw. He went just five innings and gave up three while notching only two strikeouts, a shadow of his seven, zero, and ten line in his start against Pacific. It seemed pretty dismal for Cal Poly until the bottom of the sixth when they broke through with a pinch-hit, RBI single from Josh George, scoring catcher Nick Meyer. Later, in the bottom of the eighth, they scored three to tie the game.

An interesting occurrence from a scorekeeping aspect happened in the eighth as well. In college baseball, all games are played with the designated hitter rule in effect, but after San Diego State removed Justin Goossen-Brown (I spelled his name incorrectly on my scorecard) from the game, they elected to replace him with the third baseman, Casey Schmitt, thus forfeiting their ability to use a designated hitter for the remainder of the game. This also led to a double switch, which I rarely get to score because I rarely watch games in which the pitchers bat, and I thought that it was pretty cool and rare.

It’s not immediately clear exactly what happened in the bottom of the ninth from the scorecard, so I’ll really spell it out. Nick Meyer was at third with two outs in a tie game in the bottom of the ninth, so San Diego State went to walk the bases loaded to set up a force at any base and face the number nine hitter with the game on the line. However, on the fourth ball to leftfielder Colby Barrick, Schmitt overthrew the catcher and allowed Meyer to advance from third and score the winning run. Kind of a crummy ending, but a win is a win, I guess.

I felt like these were pretty mediocre scorecards in terms of how they look. Again, these scorecards are in the Bob Carpenter Baseball Scorebook fan version, and since I forgot to post a link last time, they can be found online here. I’m not paid to do this, just a really good scorebook that I’ve been using for the past five seasons. The next blog post should be a good one, and I’ll try to have it out by Thursday at the latest.