Baseball: Simi Valley’s Cody Ramer goes five for five

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Simi Valley projects as one of the top baseball teams in Southern Section Division 1 for next season, and the Pioneers showed off their hitting attack on Monday, collecting 18 hits in an 11-3 victory over Harvard-Westlake in a quarterfinal game of the VIBL playoffs.

Leading the way was shortstop Cody Ramer, an Arizona commit who went five for five with four RBIs. Nick Vigo had two doubles and a single. Dylan Alexander had four singles. Pitcher Reece Schmidt threw five shutout innings, allowing two hits.

Simi Valley will host El Camino Real in a semifinal game on Wednesday.

The good news for Harvard-Westlake is that ace pitcher Lucas Giolito threw a scoreless seventh, retiring all three batters with his fastball clocked at 93 to 95 mph. And that was after he spent the day at the beach.

And even more important for the Wolverines, there was a Max Fried sighting. Fried, the standout pitcher from Montclair Prep, watched a couple innings of the game. He still hasn’t made a final decision what school he’ll be attending, but the Wolverines remain the favorite. He’s also getting opinions whether he should skip his senior year and enroll early at UCLA.

Montclair Prep has dropped sports, resulting in players scrambling to find a new school.

-- Eric Sondheimer