Moorpark College’s baseball season has come to a close with a final record of 16-19 and 12-11 record in conference play.

The Raiders had high hopes for an improvement last year, but this season turned out to be far from that. The team had great games during the season, like when they defeated Western State Conference-North No. 1 opponent, Cuesta College, 22-1. But late in the season there were costly losses to opponents like Oxnard and Allan Hancock College.

Head Coach Mario Porto has been scratching his head all season with gameplay at times, but is still proud of his team for what they’ve done in practice and games.

“We’re not grinding out here for two and a half to three hours,” said Porto. “We get our hour and a half to two hours, but it’s done the right way.”

Midway through the season, redshirt freshman pitcher Christian Apodaca said the team had to keep things consistent.

“[We] just gotta keep throwing strikes, and pitchers don’t give out free walks,” said Apodaca. “[We] also need to keep hitting consistently.”

The Raiders will be spending their off-season to get those things consistent enough to be a contender throughout the whole WSC next year.

Moorpark will be returning a total of 17 players from this year’s squad next season. Five pitchers, three catchers, four infielders and five outfielders is how it will shake down. This does not include the players who were also redshirted at the beginning of this year.

We will look forward to the return of the Raiders’ winning ways come late February of 2017!