PREFACE: Yes, this is late. I should have posted three days ago, and then probably again since then. Feel free to call me lazy and worthless. Both of those would accurately describe my weekend (and it was wonderful, I might add).

Anyway...

You had to be there, at Stan Bledsoe Field on Clovis West's campus, to really get a feel for what Stockdale was up against in last Friday's Central Section baseball championship.

Say what you want about the Clovis Unified School District and its rabid fan base (and rabid administration, for that matter), but they know how to put on a sporting event. The stadium holds 3,000 or 4,000 people, and it was filled just about to capacity, with the Clovis West side of the crowd hooping and hollering like nobody's business. Stockdale calmly went about its business in the pregame, but the environment was nothing if not hostile.

This probably is a good time to bring up a perception that might or might not be justified but definitely is present: That Clovis is full of itself. The Clovis teams are proud, there's no doubt about that. But are they over the top? They do win an overwhelming majority of the section's Division I championships, so maybe a bit of hubris is warranted.

Whatever the case is, it wrankles a lot of the Bakersfield teams. I've had that said to me directly and indirectly many times. So when K.C. Hobson stepped into the batter's box with one man on, one out and the crowd still buzzing with every Clovis West pitch, what happened next had to be a beautiful moment for high school sports fans in Bakersfield.

Hobson drilled one. I mean drilled it. Over the right-field wall, over the trees that are beyond that wall and into the unseen abyss. 2-0 Stockdale.

Hobson didn't hush the crowd with his finger (he just put his head down and ran around the bases like he's done 14 other times this year), but he could have. It got that quiet, that fast.

And it didn't really ever get loud again, at least not on the home side. Philip Valos made sure of that. He spun a four-hitter, allowing just two unearned runs and escaping trouble with a timely strikeout or double play a few different times against CW's high-powered attack. Isaiah Turner, the Ridgeview transfer they call Zeke, and Kyle Desimone also both homered, and Stockdale rolled to a 6-2 victory that all the usual suspects had a hand in.

Valley championships don't normally come that easy, and they don't come back-to-back very often, especially in a mercurial sport like baseball. They also don't often come three years in a row to Kern County (Centennial won in '07) in a sport that Clovis fancies it dominates. So let's celebrate this special Stockdale team.

Congruatulations, boys. It was a hell of a run.

A couple of other notes:

— The Southern Cal Regional Boys Golf Championships are Wednesday morning in Murrieta. Seven locals have a chance to advance to next week's state tournament if they finish in the top six.
They are: Pete Fernandez, Stockdale (who did advance last year and finished second in state)
Manav Shah, Centennial (newly crowned section champ)
Stephen Harmer, Garces
Riley Scott, Garces
Bryce Keene, Stockdale
Richard Gilkey, Liberty
Gunner Kirschenmann, Garces

— The state track and field championships are this weekend in Clovis, in case you didn't know. We'll be talking that up on the blog and in the paper over the next several days. It's an enormous event with some very talented locals (epically so, in one case) headed up to compete.