Posted: Sat, 30 May 2009 08:49 PM - 8,178 Readers

By: Lee Goddard

A mistake here or there was going to decide the pitchers’ showdown Friday night at Cavalier Field.

Calallen made a couple of miscues in the field that were costly. Lake Travis made one that hurt even more — a slider that hung a little high in the zone to Matthew Garza.

Garza rallied the Wildcats and capped a three-run fifth inning with a two-run home run that gave Calallen the lead for good. With Jordan John pitching a solid game — even without his best stuff — that was enough to lead Calallen High to a 5-3 victory over Lake Travis in the opening game of the Class 4A best-of-three regional semifinal.

Garza, John and the eight other Wildcats seniors will graduate this morning. Then they will try to wrap up the series, which concludes with Game 2 at 4 p.m. at Calallen. A third game, if necessary, will follow right after.

“Winning Game 2 is foremost on my mind,” said Garza, a leadoff hitter who belted his second home run of the season and third of his career. “We want to try to end it the first game, we want to end it in Game 2.”

The second-ranked Wildcats (33-2) entered the fifth inning down 2-0, surrendering a run on an errant throw and another on a wild pitch. But Hunter Whetsel’s groundout brought in one run. Then, with two outs and Bryden McClure on third, Garza laid into a Dylan Mendoza offering that stayed up a little too long.

It sailed over the left-field fence, the only of the three hits off Mendoza that left the infield. Calallen had a 3-2 lead and would never trail or be tied again.

“Sparked us,” Wildcats coach Steve Chapman said. “Matt Garza’s been a sparkplug for us all season, and he came up big for us again.”

Garza, typical of a player who has swiped 42 bases this season, just wanted to make contact and get on base.

“I thought it may have been in the gap. I hit it, put my head down and was running,” Garza said. “We had been hitting it right at them all night. I was happy that he left something up that I could drive.”

Calallen gave itself a little cushion in the sixth, scoring a pair of unearned runs, including one on a throwing error and another on a safety squeeze by Dustin Vaughan, his second infield hit of the game.

“That home run didn’t beat us. It just put them up 3-2,” said Roy Kinnan, head coach of the third-ranked Cavaliers, who fell to 30-4. “It came down to the little things — they’re up 3-2 and we have an error and a walk and, all of the sudden, they do a few things they had to do and we didn’t.”

That was enough of a cushion for John (13-0), who surrendered a solo shot to Cohl Walla in the sixth. But, even though Chapman and Garza said the Oklahoma signee didn’t have his best stuff, John struck out 13 and walked only two while giving up four hits.

“He didn’t pitch his best, but he pitched well enough to win,” Chapman said of John. “That’s what counts.”

Calallen 5, Lake Travis 3

*  Story Contributed by: Lee Goddard