West Park drills Granite Bay in regular-season finale

Friday saw the last game of the baseball regular season for West Park and Granite Bay; two teams seemingly heading in opposite directions as the postseason is set to begin next week. West Park (23-5) has won its last five games, including a 10-1 win over Granite Bay on Friday. The Grizzlies (16-12) meanwhile, lost three of four games this week and have won three of their last seven games over the last nine days. As has been the case for the Grizzlies lately, they've been falling behind early and then are faced with climbing out of a big hole. On Friday, both West Park and Granite Bay scored one run in the first inning when Jayden McNeal walked, stole second, advanced to third on a fly ball and then scored on a wild pitch. Granite Bay, meanwhile, rallied with two outs, as Derek Asnicar doubled and then scored on an error from West Park. The Panthers, however, then scored four runs in the top of the second and never looked back; added another run in the third inning and two more in the fourth to open up an 8-1 lead. In the second, Jace Oliver led off with a double and one batter later, Aiden Joosten hit a home run to put West Park in front 3-1. Later, McNeal singled and raced all the way home on Ethan Silva's double. In the third inning, Oliver hit a two-out solo home run, and in the fourth, Ryan Alemi singled, McNeal followed with a double before Silva singled to drive in one run before an error allowed a second run to score. West Park scored two more runs in the sixth inning when Joosten doubled and scored on Silva's single followed by an RBI double from Ayden Deome. Things are going well for the Panthers. "This is the best team I've coached talent wise," West Park coach Ben Petersen said. "The sky is the limit for them. We talk about making the right choices. They really are good ball players and it's hard to make the right choice to work hard, but when they do make the choice to work hard they're better than anybody. "Every team wants to be the team that wins it all. There are new challenges this year. Last year we were in Division 3 and this year we're in Division 2. It's going to be a step up and it will be a challenge, but we are definitely learning from year to year. One of our mantras this year is 'finish the job (FTJ). Last year we felt like we didn't finish the job. Last year we didn't. In the end, you want to say you did everything you could. Last year, we definitely felt like we could have done more in terms of effort and being mentally present, so we're poised to do that better this year. Finish the job." Granite Bay, meanwhile, hopes to recover over the weekend and be ready to compete when the playoffs start next week. "This was a bad week for us," Granite Bay coach Pat Esposity said. "It's partly my fault. I scheduled an extra game and I don't think our guys were ready for that. Considering that we've played seven games in nine days, that's a lot of baseball I guess. We're not tough enough yet to get to that point. "We've got to work on being more of a team-oriented offense and thinking about what we can do to score runs instead of thinking about our batting averages. Take nothing away from West Park. They're a very good ball club. They had 13 hits today. We're going through it at the moment and hopefully we work out of it before next week."