The Oakland Ballers walked off with a huge win over the Colorado Springs Sky Sox at Raimondi Park in Oakland on Fri July 25, 2025 (Oakland Ballers photo)

Colorado Springs (2nd half: 6-4, 2025: 15-42) 000 010 010 2 8 1

Oakland (2nd half: 5-5, 2025:43-15) 720 300 11x 14 16 2

Time: 2:48

Attendance: 2,82

Friday, July 25, 2025

By Lewis Rubman

OAKLAND–The Oakland Ballers Thursday night debacle must have been some sort of shock therapy for any complacency tour hometown heroes might have felt on having clinched the home field advantage in all the games they’ll play in the September postseason playoffs.

The drubbing they took last night served as shock therapy for Saturday night’s overwhelming victory of their erstwhile tormentors. The B’s scored early and often, amassing 14 runs in their crushing over the Colorado Springs Sky Sox.

Zach St. Pierre with a little help from three of his friends in the bullpen held the visiting Sky Sox to a pair of tallies.

I often think of a baseball game as a play that, like Caesar’s Gaul, is divided into three parts, each of which contains three scenes. Occasionally there’s an epilogue, which in the case of the Pioneer Baseball League consists of the Knock Out Inning, a peculiarity that often yields an anti-climactic and arbitrary ending. Videlecut, last Tuesday night at Raimondi Park.

Friday night’s performance in West Oakland was something new and completely different. It began with a scene of massive destruction and just kept rolling along until the Ballers had wiped out the Sky Sox, 14-2.

The hosts made ten plate appearances in the bottom of the first, scoring seven runs on five hits against Johann Castillo, the visitors’ starting and losing pitcher, who is the league leader in innings pitched. He lasted five frames Friday night after throwing 127 pitches, to be followed by a trio of relievers, each of whom hurled an inning, with only one of them, Maykol López, emerging unscathed. All told, the beleaguered Sky Sox mound corps threw 191 pitches.

However decisive the Ballers’ triumph was, there was a continuous awareness among the crowd of 2,821 paid attendees that this was a team that blew a six run lead in the ninth inning of its previous encounter with the one it was massacring. The B’s did, after all, make two errors tonight, one of which allowed the Sox to score an unearned run against Sean Kelby in the eighth.

Zach St. Pierre, pinch runner par excellence, held the Sky Sox to one run on five hits, in his six innings of work. His eight strikeouts were a season’s high for him. Tanner Shields, in his first appearance at Raimondi didn’t allow any runs to Colorado Springs and struck out two of their batters but also surrendered a hit and unleashed a wild pitch.

Every batter in the Oakland lineup got at least one hit. Danny Harris and Tyler Lozano, newly returned from the injured list, got three apiece; Tremayne Cobb, Esai Santos, Nick Leehey, two. Santos and Harris hit doubles; Leehey, a triple, his first professional three bagger; and Cobb, Lozano,and Buggs went yard.

The rest is silence.

The tumult and the shouting will resume Saturday afternoon, at 4:35, preceded by a celebration of Native American culture.