By Chuck Mingori
SPORTS CORRESPONDENT

The weather held up long enough Saturday morning for West Seattle to defeat PacWest 10-0 in opening round District 7 Little League Majors age 11-12 baseball action at Tyee.

West Seattle came out swinging early on and never really let up.
“We have some pretty dangerous bats but we haven’t been hitting the ball all so well lately. It was nice to see some of the guys square it up. We can be dangerous at the plate and we have a pretty deep pitching staff so if they compete every pitch and show up ready to play, I think good things could happen. But it’s one game at a time,” said West Seattle manager Jason Woodward.

“That’s a really good team,” commented PacWest Manager Paul Kemp. “They hit the ball top to bottom in their line up. It was a tough draw. They put the ball right up the middle a lot so it wasn’t like our kids were throwing the ball around and committing errors, they were legit base hits top to bottom.”

West Seattle is scheduled to play Seattle Central at noon Sunday while PacWest is playing Monday at 6 pm needing a win to stay alive in the tournament.

West Seattle came out strong with back to back singles by Jackson Sullivan and Jarek Woodward followed by a two run scoring single from Kenji Suzuki who later scored on a wild pitch. Henry Muench drove in two in the second with a home run and Kenji Suzuki had an inside the park home run aided by a throwing error. West Seattle finished up the scoring with three more runs in the third led by singles from Max Debiec, Konrad Gerhardt, Jackson Sullivan and Jarek Woodward. Aside from West Seattle’s strong hitting, its pitchers only used 43 pitches to complete the four inning game.

Although the PacWest All Stars didn’t score in the first two innings, they threatened in the third with a double by Mac Greenan and a single by pitcher Alonzo Zaragoza but were unable to score off West Seattle starting pitcher Jarek Woodward. PacWest relief pitcher Jeremiah Judd came in midway through the third inning to get the final two outs and held West Seattle scoreless in the fourth and final inning due to the 10 run rule.