Jul 9, 2010 By Kevin Harrison for The 3 min read

CONNELLSVILLE – California faced a little adversity in the first game of the Fayette American Legion playoffs at Connellsville, Thursday night. For starters, coach Dave Gonos was late to the game because of a flat tire, and the scorekeeper had to make up the lineup by borrowing from someone’s scorebook.

To top that off, California got off to a shaky start, falling behind 6-1 at the end of the first inning.

Tommy Sparrow took over on the mound in the second and closed the door on Connellsville as California regrouped for a 17-7 win, putting the 10-run rule into effect after eight innings.

“Tommy has a great slider. He did a great job of hitting his spots, mixing in his fastball and keeping them off-balance.” Gonos said. “I can’t say enough about these kids. They came to play and never quit. We were down 9-0 to Connellsville during the regular season and came back to win. I’ve got to give the kids all the credit.”

California took a 1-0 lead in the first when D.J. Martinak hit the first of his three singles in the game and scored on a double by Ty Bell.

Connellsville quickly struck for six runs in the bottom half of the inning. The big blows came from a two-run triple by Ty Domer and a two-run homer from Matt Jaynes.

“We started off playing great baseball and for some reason it died off during the game,” Connellsville coach Bill Dye said. “We made some defensive mistakes, and couldn’t come up with the timely hit. We stranded a lot of runners in scoring position.”

California got their offense going in the third, scoring four runs, with RBI’s coming from Bell and Mike Knox. They added four runs in the fourth with Bell driving in two more runs, and Preston Shaw getting a run scoring single to give California a 9-6 lead.

While Sparrow continued to hold down the Connellsville bats, California added another run in the fifth. Martinak singled and scored on a double from Zac Edmiston to make the score 10-6.

Shaw scored in the sixth to increase California’s lead to 11-6.

They added four runs in the seventh. Clay Roman scored on a base hit from Bell. Edmiston scored on an error. Sparrow helped his cause with a triple to drive in Bell, and came in to score on a hit from Knox to increase the lead to 15-6.

California picked up two runs in the top of the eighth with Edmiston and Shaw driving in runs to make the score 17-6 before Connellsville picked up their final run in the bottom half of the inning.

California will move on to the next round of the double-elimination tournament against Uniontown at 6 p.m. tonight, while Connellsville hosts Farmington at 5:30 p.m.