CYPRESS – Everything that could go right went right for the Cypress baseball team.
The Centurions collected 16 hits and senior pitcher Drew Slevcove threw a four-hitter with 11 strikeouts in an 8-0 win over Sierra Canyon on Tuesday in the third round of the CIF Southern Section Division 1 playoffs.
Cypress (23-8) will play at Harvard-Westlake (25-5) in the quarterfinals Friday. The Centurions lost to Harvard-Westlake, 3-0, in late February.
For the first time, Division 1 of the CIF-SS playoffs is a 16-team group that was divided into four pools of four teams each. Each team was guaranteed two games in the double-elimination format.
Cypress and Sierra Canyon both were 1-1 in the first two rounds of pool play, making Tuesday’s game an elimination game.
Sierra Canyon concluded the season 24-7. The Trailblazers finished second to Harvard-Westlake in the Mission League.
Cypress junior center fielder Tyler Vladic went 4 for 4 with two RBIs. Feshman third baseman Ivan Ortiz had three hits and three RBIs. Senior shortstop Jake De Laquil, senior left fielder Jae-Ho Park and freshman second baseman Hibiki Suzuki had two hits each.
“It was great watching the hitters do their thing,” said Slevcove, who committed to UC Santa Barbara. “It’s having run support. It makes it easier.”
Cypress coach John Weber was somewhat stunned by the team’s offensive production.
“I don’t know if we’ve had 14, 15 hits in a game all year long,” said Weber, who has coached Cypress to 447 wins in his 21 seasons as the school’s baseball coach. “There’s probably been stretches of 10 games where we didn’t get 15 hits total.
“What a great time to play your best baseball.”
Cypress took a 1-0 lead in the first inning when Ortiz singled and eventually scored on a Noah Johnson ground out.
The Centurions scored two runs in the third inning. De Laquil led off the inning with a double and scored on Ortiz’s double. Ortiz later scored on a double steal to make it 3-0.
Cypress stretched the lead to 6-0 with a three-run fourth inning that included an Ortiz single that drove in Suzuki and a Vladic single that drove in De Laquil and Isaac Pompa.
In the fifth inning a Suzuki single sent home Park and a Landon Anderson single drove in Ben Martinez.
All of this was more than Slevcove needed. He struck out the side in the second and fourth innings and walked only two over seven innings. He threw 105 pitches.
In Cypress’ other pool-play games, the Centurions lost to St. John Bosco, 2-1, in 11 innings and beat Oaks Christian, 8-2.