The St. Joseph baseball team will get a pretty quick turnaround after a wrenching 9-8 loss to Bakersfield Centennial in nine innings in a wild CIF Central Section Division 1 championship game at Valley Strong Ballpark in Visalia Saturday night.

The Knights drew the No. 2 seed in Division 2 of the CIF Southern Cal Championships. St. Joseph will play No. 7 San Dimas at St. Joseph’s Dave Brunell Field Wednesday at 4 p.m. in the first round. The game was re-scheduled from Tuesday. The San Dimas graduation commencement ceremony will take place that day. 

Each round of the Southern and Northern Cal regional rounds will take place  at the site of the highest seed. Championship games in both regions are scheduled for Saturday. Start times in all games is 4 p.m. unless otherwise agreed to by both schools.    

St. Joseph is 24-7. San Dimas is 19-11. The Saints are coming off a rough loss themselves, 2-0 to Glendora in the Southern Section Division 3 final.

San Dimas rolls mainly behind its pitching. The Saints’ staff ERA is 1.90, the same ERA that freshman Dean Brosterhouse posts. San Dimas sophomore James Rocha is 6-5 with a 1.85 ERA. The Saints bat just .252 as a team but have scored a fair amount, four-plus runs a game.

St. Joseph senior right-hander Niko Peinado is 8-2 with a 1.90 ERA, and sophomore lefty Mason Majewski is 8-1 with a 2.71 ERA. St. Joseph hits .297 as a team and scores four-plus runs a game.

The Knights are ranked 43rd in the state. The Saints are ranked 89th.   

Centennial opted out of the regional championships. The Golden Hawks (25-8) won their second sectional divisional championship in the past three seasons on a sweltering Friday night with game temperatures in the high 90’s.

The game took three hours, 37 minutes and finally ended when the Golden Hawks caught Santana Covarrubias off first place for a double play after Eirhardt Klostermann lined out to second base.

Centennial scored the winning run with two outs in the top ninth. With the top half of the ball out of St. Joseph first baseman Ashton Bluem’s glove on a high throw from shortstop, batter Jadyn Hernandez, on incidental contact, knocked the ball out of Bluem’s glove. Golden Hawks starting pitcher Drew Petty scored the winning run on the play.

Hernandez was the winning pitcher. He allowed only a lead-off walk to Covarrubias in the 12th in two scoreless innings of relief.   

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Down 8-6, the Knights tied the game in the top of the seventh inning of regulation when pinch runners Thomas Jay Dugger and Ethan Resendez scored on consecutive JJ Sipe wild pitches.

St. Joseph reliever Niko Peinado, the team’s starting catcher, kept the Golden Hawks scoreless in the bottom of the seventh, but Centennial broke through in the ninth. Petty drew a lead-off walk then eventually scored the winning run.

Two strong starting pitchers, Petty (1.12 ERA going in) and Majewski did not last past the fourth inning. Sipe relieved Petty to start the top of the fourth inning, and freshman Rhysse Schaffer relieved Majewski with two outs in the bottom fourth.

In just his third appearance this year, Schaffer appeared to get out of the inning unscathed when Luke Camps hit into a would-be ground out. However, the ball was dead since it hit Camps’s foot in the batter’s box. Camps then hit a two-run single to complete a five-run Centennial fourth after the Golden Hawks had tied the game with three runs in the third.

Alex Hughes started the Centennial scoring in the fourth with a three-run triple.

Schaffer got the third out then starting shortstop Jayson Rodriguez and Peinado combined to keep the Golden Hawks scoreless until Centennial scored in the ninth. Peinado came in 8-1 with a 1.88 ERA as a pitcher.

Centennial made three errors over the first four innings, and St. Joseph took a 3-0 lead into the bottom third. Erik Furness scored on an error in the first, and the Knights scored twice in the second on back-to-back doubles by Peinado and Furness.

St. Joseph re-took the lead briefly, 4-3, when Petty balked home a run. The Knights drew within 8-6 in the fourth on an error and a Covarrubias single.

Sipe shut out the Knights until he uncorked the two wild pitches in the seventh, and Hernandez finished the job for the Golden Hawks.