PASADENA — The La Verne baseball team completed a series sweep of Caltech with a pair of road wins on Saturday at North Field and with the Leopards' 11-0 win in the first game of the doubleheader, head coach Scott Winterburn earned his 400th career win.
The Leopards cruised the milestone win.
Christpher Peres got the start on the mound and struck out a season- and career-high nine without issuing a walk in 5.2 innings. Peres also bat cleanup and went 2-for-5 with a run and an RBI.
Nico Gonzalez took the ball in the sixth inning and pitched 1.1 scoreless innings to close the game.
Jakob Thomas continued his hot streak at the plate, going 3-for-4 with four RBI and two runs scored. Christopher Ligot also notched three hits and Isaiah Cruz was 2-for-3.
The Leopards got on the board in the second inning on run-scoring singles by Anthony Gonzalez and Cruz and broke the game open with a four-run fourth. With the bases loaded, Thomas cleared the bases with a single and with some help from Caltech catcher Mark Burleson, who committed an error on the play, to give the Leopards a 6-0 lead.
La Verne tacked on two more runs in the sixth on another error by the Beavers and a well-executed double steal play that got Andrew Douglas out at second but allowed Mark Abbate to score from third.
The Leopards added three more runs in the seventh a they started the inning with four straight hits to invoke the run rule.
The second game started out much tighter as Caltech starter Cortland Perry held the Leopards to just three hits in six innings.
But the Leopards tagged reliever Tim Menninger for four runs on five hits in the final three innings to claim a 6-2 win.
The teams battled each other to a draw for the first four innings before the Leopards struck first in the fifth. Douglas led off with a walk and Aaron Fong and Jacob Benson hit back-to-back singles to load the bases with no outs. Cruz then hit into a fielder's choice to score Douglas and Thomas followed with a sacrifice fly to deep right to give to Leopard a 2-0 lead.
Caltech got one back immediately as Connor Moffatt hit a solo homer in the bottom of the fifth but Perry gave way to Menninger to start the seventh and the Leopards took advantage of the reliever's shaky control. Douglas led off with a walk and scored on a wild pitch and Cruz beat out an infield single to score Michael Watson to give La Verne a 4-1 lead.
Ligot and Dylan Lowenstein scratched together back-to-back two out hits in the top of the ninth to get the Leopards up by five runs.
Christopher Arcos (2-1) earned his second win of the season after giving up just one run in 5.2 innings. He scattered five hits and struck out three.
Cody Norman, who has emerged as a shutdown late-inning reliever for La Verne, earned a five-out save while striking out four.
The Leopards return to action next weekend against Claremont-Mudd-Scripps and will open the three-game series at Arce Field on Friday at 2:30 p.m.
