Roseville rides Ritter's strong outing to beat Santa Cruz

It wasn't their best performance, but Roseville High School's baseball team did enough to get by No. 8 seed Santa Cruz 5-0 on Tuesday to advance to the second round of the CIF Northern California Regional Division 3 playoffs. Even before the game started, Roseville did not have the cleanest in-and-out warmup and though the team's defense was fine during the game, its lack of urgency in doing the little things was evident. With a team's goal to win the NorCal championship, you can bet and be correct it was talked about after the game. "I give credit to Santa Cruz; they had a good game plan," Roseville coach Eli Garcia said. "It worked and they were able to cool us down with the bats, but we were still able to find ways to score. To our standard, though, we know we have to be better. Situationally, there were some things that we didn't execute. We got a little sloppy." The key to the win was Tyler Ritter. Roseville's senior ace pitcher turned in another superb outing, allowing one hit, a leadoff double in the fifth inning, and walking three. Ritter struck out seven in six innings of work. "I felt pretty good," Ritter said. "It was definitely the hottest outing of the year, so I think toward the end of the game the heat was getting to me a little, but I felt pretty good." Garcia added, "Having Tyler Ritter is definitely nice, but we know that's not going to be consistent. Being consistent is going to be constant pressure, doing the little things right and staying within our system." Ritter set down the Cardinals in order in the first inning, just like he did in the fourth inning. In the bottom of the first, Roseville scored three runs on only one hit, Ben Jordan's one-out double. Jordan scored on a throwing error by the third baseman and three consecutive walks to Devin Johnson, Ashton Chang and Preston Cubbler allowed Jacob Welch to score. After the second out of the inning, Johnson scored on another walk to Garrett Wolfe. Roseville scored another run in the second inning when Justin Fischer walked, stole second and scored on another Santa Cruz error. The team's final run came in the sixth inning when Roseville executed a double steal and pinch runner Alexander Lozano scored from third, while Fischer made it safely back to first. That was all for Roseville, as the team only had five hits while benefitting greatly from eight walks and three Santa Cruz errors. Roseville was thrilled to advance but knew it needed to be better on Thursday against Wheatland.