Perfect day for Palm Springs against Team San Diego
- Updated: June 30, 2015
Team San Diego
By Chris Davis
© East County Sports.com
EL CAJON (6-30-15) — The Palm Springs POWER of the Southern California Collegiate Baseball League (SCCBL) is traditionally a group of high level NCAA Division I players. Palm Springs is where players go when they don’t make the Cape Cod League or the Santa Barbara Foresters. Those are the top six to seven places to play summer collegiate ball.
Luke Barker (Chico State) came into Monday’s (June 29) game against Team San Diego (7-16, 3-12 SCCBL) with a 1-0 record in only six appearances and 13 innings of work. During the collegiate season at Chico State, the graduate student was 4-3 with a 1.73 ERA over 78 innings. But never in his life has he ever had the day that he did at Grossmont College’s Noel Mickelsen Field. He didn’t just throw a nine inning complete game. It was not a shutout or even a no hitter. No, Barker threw a perfect game, 27 batters up, 27 batters down (Palm Springs won 15-0).
Barker was never really in trouble as he never got to a full count the entire day. Only once, did he even come close to losing the perfect game as his center fielder had to dive to catch a sinking fly ball in the sixth.
Former Grossmont College Griffin DYLAN GARCIA (Chico State, Grossmont College, Granite Hills) stepped in for his first at-bat back in his old haunts in the top of the fourth. The first pitch was something that he was looking for as he took it and hit a no-doubt home run (first of the season for the POWER) to put the POWER (19-7, 8-2 SCCBL) up 8-0. Two innings later, he came up and like he did several times with the Griffins, drilled a line drive to the left center gap. The former Eagle would finish the game with those two hits, raising his season average to .310 (18-58).
Game two of the double header saw the POWER only score eight runs to cruise to an 8-1 victory. In the second game, MATTHEW LAWRENCE (RBI) went 2-for-4 as well.
Team San Diego will start a nine game road trip against the Inland Empire Pirates in a double header on Friday at Cal Poly Pomona. Games are scheduled for 1:00 and 4:00 p.m.
