JetHawks fly south in loss to Quakes

On Canada Day at The Hangar, Patrick Dunham had his third straight subpar outing as Rancho Cucamonga defeated Lancaster

LANCASTER - Rick Burleson felt your pain Wednesday night.

"If I was a paying customer, I would have left in the fifth inning," the Lancaster JetHawks manager said. "That's how poor we played tonight."

Had you followed Burleson's advice Wednesday night, this would have spared you watching the 10-5 beating the Rancho Cucamonga Quakes inflicted on the JetHawks in the first of a three-game series at The Hangar.

"We're not playing well and we're playing horrid defense," Burleson said, barely containing his fury. "If we weren't playing in our park, where the wind was blowing, we wouldn't have had any hits."

Instead, the JetHawks had 10, but only three after the first two innings.

This meant the 2,652 fans who showed up on Canada Day, the North American warmup for this country's Independence Day, watched the JetHawks break out a 4-0 lead, then give up seven runs in a three-inning span.

All at Patrick Dunham's expense.

The JetHawks most consistent pitcher during the first half, Dunham was torched for 10 hits and seven runs in five innings.

It was his third consecutive subpar start, coming on the heels of a 10-run (six earned) torpedo Dunham took last Thursday against Modesto.

Not to be confused with the five-runs in five-inning outing on June 20 against these same Quakes.

If you're scoring at home, that's 18 earned runs in his last 14 2/3 innings. In those starts, he's 1-2, after an 8-3 start.

Wednesday, Dunham need look no farther than the fifth inning, when the Quakes strung together five straight hits, each harder and less dependent on the wind than the one before.

And none harder than the final one - Gus Kennedy's approximate 440-foot rocket over the 410 (or 125 meters for you Canadians) sign in left-center field.

The three-run blast chased home Brian Loyd (2-for-3, two runs, two RBI) and A.J. Johnson (2-for-5).

Kennedy, who had only one of the Quakes' 13 hits, drove in four runs.

All this made a winner out of Rancho starter Stevenson Agosto, who deserved a similar fate as Dunham. And had the JetHawks finished the way they started, he would have experienced it.

The JetHawks started on Agosto right where they left off in all three of his previous starts against them. In those outings, the JetHawks rocked Agosto at a .350 clip and rolled him for a 16.81 ERA at The Hangar and a 10.61 ERA in all three starts.

The first three JetHawks - Anton French, Joel Ramirez and Cirilo Cruz - all singled. French, who stole second, came home on Cruz's single. And it could've been worse, but Brendan Kingman lined into a double play.

The next inning opened with three more hits - singles by Karl Thompson and Matt Sachse and what should have been Ramon Vazquez's second home run of the season.

Vazquez's shot bounced off the second row of billboards just right of the right-field scoreboard and pinballed off the lower wall. Then, it hit off the top wall again before falling on the warning track.

A token argument from Burleson with base umpire Ryan Bleiberg did nothing to change Vazquez's double to a home run, which is what it should have been.

Instead, it scored Thompson. Sachse came home on French's groundout and Vazquez followed on Cruz's second of three hits for a 4-0 lead.

And, that could've been more. Ramirez and Kingman sandwiched walks around Cruz's single. But Regan slapped into a 5-4-3 double play.

Thompson's RBI triple in the fifth capped the JetHawks' highlights and provided a feeble answer to the Quakes' four runs in the top of the inning.