By Don Eskins
Chapter 2 of the 2025 Cavemen baseball book continues this weekend at the Hobbs Invitational. The tourney, which opened up on Thursday, March 6, will run through Friday and Saturday, March 7-8.
The Hobbs Invitational is a round-robin tournament matching up teams from the south against teams from the north.
Carlsbad was scheduled to take on the Belen Eagles on Thursday. On Friday, they’ll meet the Farmington Scorpions at 2:30 p.m. and the Cleveland Storm on Saturday at 10 a.m.
“This week’s tournament in Hobbs,” said Caveman head coach Mike McGaha, “is going to be a very important one for the Cavemen.
“Naturally, we want to win out, but however things work out for us, it’s really important that we at least split with Farmington and Cleveland,” he said. “The outcomes of our efforts against these two northern teams could show up big time for us when the NMAA gets together to figure out seeds for this year’s state tournament.”
The Hobbs Invitational will mark the second straight tournament for the Cavemen this year. CHS, who opened up the new season at the Cleveland Storm Invitational during the week of February 27-March 1, entered the Hobbs tourney at 1-2.
At Cleveland, CHS dropped a close 6-5 decision to Piedra Vista and then topped Los Lunas 9-5 before falling to the host Storm 2-1 in their final game of the tourney.
“We competed well at Cleveland. As a matter of fact, during the 21 innings we played there, we dominated 17 of them,” said McGaha. “We just let four innings get away from us. Although just four, they proved to be very costly.”
CHS, who lost four cornerstone seniors to graduation last year, has been working hard to fill the spots left vacant by the departed Cavemen.
“Yeah, we lost pitchers Hazen Wright and Fabian Hernandez along with catcher Delmonico Granger-Moreno and speedster Hunter Dowdy to graduation, all exceptional athletes,” said the CHS pilot. “Although we’ve had some success filling most of the spots they vacated, we’re having a bit of trouble filling positions for the players we’ve had to shuffle around.”
Presently, the Cavemen seem to have fielded a very competitive pitching staff. Last week, they got some quality innings from several of this year’s hurlers, highlighted by the efforts of Jonas Molinar on the mound to pick up the win against Los Lunas and Eloy Lopez. Also seeing time on the mound were Garrett Fuentes and freshman Wade Cozart.
“Although we’re wrestling with some injuries right now and trying to shore up some of the areas we struggled in last week, we did see some good things from our kids at Cleveland,” said McGaha. “Now, we just have to keep working hard every day to get better.”
Cleveland Invite Recap:
Game 1-
BHS 0-0-0-0-0-0-6--6
CHS 0-0-0-0-0-0-5--5
Eloy Lopez 5in; LP- Garrett Fuentes 2 in
Game 2-
LLHS 0-0-0-4-0-0-1--5
CHS 2-2-0-4-1-0-x--9
WP- Jonas Molinar 4.2 in; Save- Wade Cozart 2.1 in.
Game 3-
C-bad 1
CHS 2
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