Offensive problems continue for 'Hawks

Lancaster managed only six hits
as a season-opening hitting slump continued.

The largest opening night crowd in the Cal League this season - 5,833 - packed the Epicenter to watch a mascot pop out of a helicopter with the game ball before the game and enjoy the fireworks after the game.

In between? They watched the Rancho Cucamonga Quakes leave the JetHawks already suffocating offense gasping for air in a 5-1 Quakes victory.

The JetHawks continued their early season trend of hitting the ball at the most conveniently located fielder. That is, when they were hitting the ball.

"We're 3-5 and if you look back on it, we really could be 1-7, the way we won the first two games 1-0," Lancaster manager Rick Burleson said. "We just haven't put anything together offensively and the day we did, we're up 7-2 and that's the game we didn't pitch very well and we ended up losing 13-8 (to Rancho Cucamonga).

"I'm sure the bats are going to come around."

Maybe today. Maybe on a day when the JetHawks could take batting practice at the park they're playing in, instead of ceding it to the Etiwanda High band, as they did Thursday.

Maybe then, Lancaster will muster more than six hits. Maybe then, it will improve on its .188 team batting average.

Lancaster's fifth loss in its last six games came in familiar fashion. Of the JetHawks' six hits, two came from Adonis Harrison. The other four came from four different players, including outfielder Mike Burrows, whose seventh-inning single was his first hit of the season.

"Right now, a big inning for us is one hit and a walk," Burleson said. "And you're not going to push too many runs across with that kind of offense."

The Quakes did just that for their go-ahead run. Rancho Cucamonga broke a 1-1 tie in the third, when Brandon Pernell walked, went to second on Lancaster starter Patrick Dunham's errant pickoff throw and scored on Cesarin Carmona's double down the left-field line.

This typified Dunham's night. So sharp with his control in his first start against the Quakes last week, when he didn't walk a batter in five innings, Dunham walked three, hit a batter and seemed to be deep in the count to every batter.

He did, however, keep Lancaster in the game for his 5 2/3 innings, striking out four and allowing five hits.

Pernell filled both categories. Two innings after walking and scoring, he scored Rancho's third run. This came after Dunham hit the Quakes' center fielder, yielded a hit-and-run single to Brian McClure, then watched third baseman Jason Regan make a brilliant diving stop of A.J. Johnson's grounder.

Regan turned that into the inning's second out, but Pernell turned it into the Quakes' third run.

Runs four and five came much quicker - via Pete Paciorek's two-run homer that greeted reliever Brian Sweeney with two-out in the sixth.

If it were only so easy for the JetHawks.

Such are the offensive struggles among the JetHawks that the bottom four hitters in the Lancaster lineup: Jason Regan, Matt Sachse, Karl Thompson and Mike Burrows - entered Thursday night a combined 9-for-77.

And such was the nature of Thursday night that two of those players - Regan and Sachse - played integral parts in Lancaster's first run.

The JetHawks answered Johnson's first-inning home run in lengthier fashion - and without a ball leaving the infield.

Cirilo Cruz Jr. opened with a walk and, one out later, moved to second on Regan's infield single.

Sachse followed with a slow grounder to second baseman Brian McClure. He flipped to shortstop Carmona. . . who threw the ball away trying to finish the double play.

Cruz scored from second on the error.