STRANGE DAYS—Moorpark High’s baseball team celebrates its 7-5 win against Ayala in the CIF-Southern Section Division 2 playoff semifinals on May 14 at the friendly confines. The Musketeers, who reached the CIF finals for the first time in team history, lost 7-6 to Hart on an overturned home run call on May 17. Courtesy of Moorpark Unified School District
Moorpark High’s baseball team celebrated a CIF-Southern Section Division 2 championship win.
Taylor Busch launched a walk-off home run in the bottom of the seventh inning that cleared the fence in left field. Greg Lareva, a senior captain and outfielder, crossed home plate first. When Busch touched home, the Green Machine celebrated with a dogpile at Diamond Stadium in Lake Elsinore.
“It was literally the best time of my life. I was so happy for Taylor,” said Carson Cerny, a Moorpark sophomore outfielder and left-handed pitcher. “It was probably the best five minutes of my life.”
The Musketeers were champs—then they weren’t.
In an unprecedented turn of events zapped from Rod Serling’s “The Twilight Zone” b-roll, umpires huddled together and overturned the home run call into a ground-rule double—minutes after Moorpark thought it had just won the biggest game in school history.
Moorpark, suddenly faced with runners on third and second and no outs, had to try to win a CIF title for the second time without time to process what had just transpired.
“Those three outs were probably the quickest three outs of my life,” Cerny said. “If they called it a ground-rule double right off the rip, we would have been fine.
“The whirlwind of emotions just killed us. . . . We didn’t have time to take a break, reset and try and win this baseball game.”
Hart held off the Moorpark rally for a 7-6 decision on May 17, but the game has morphed into something bigger than baseball. Moorpark Unified School District is protesting the final with the Southern Section, arguing that the umpire crew broke protocol by changing the outcome of a decided game, among several issues.
Five Tool California’s original video of the Busch home run has been seen by more than 1.2 million people on social media at press time. Armchair experts with degrees in Fritos, Cheetos and Doritos weighed in with their own opinions while squawking over doctored Zapruder clips from the Bigfoot archive. In Acorn country, the only words that matter are those from the Musketeers (20-10-1 overall record).
“I think I’m processing it,” Busch told the newspaper on May 21. “I’ve seen the video. I know it’s viral. I know it’s crazy. . . . It’s just pretty weird, the whole situation. To see everything online, everyone’s divided. It’s kind of crazy to see how far it’s gone.”
In one of several silver linings from this fiasco, baseball fans across the U.S. know that Busch, a junior shortstop, is a superstar.
Busch, a scholar athlete with a 4.8 GPA this school year, sports a .305 batting average with 25 hits, 19 runs, 11 RBI and nine extra base hits entering next week’s state regional tournament.
The superstar talked about baseball’s most controversial home run/ground-rule double, and Moorpark’s first trip to a CIF final in program history.
“That whole game, I was popping out. I knew if I got on top of something, it was going to go pretty far,” Busch said. “As soon as I hit it, I knew it was over the left fielder’s head. . . . I put my head down. I was more focused on running the bases.
“We got a lot of recognition we deserved all season, especially with Aaron (Garcia) being a first-year head coach. We get the spotlight of making it all the way there. I want the world to know, we were meant to be there. We’re a good team. Don’t count us out.”
AJ Mai, a sophomore second baseman who also excels at basketball, talked about the controversial game.
“Now, I’m pretty fine. I can’t really do much about it. I know it’s already over,” said Mai, a scholar athlete with a 4.1 GPA. “I know it’s going to drive us to win more and make us more confident to win in the next tournament and try to blow every team out.”
Mai saw Busch hit a game-winning home run.
“I was at home plate jumping up and down. I thought it was over (the fence). I thought it was gone. I thought we just won CIF,” Mai said. “After the game, it was definitely devastating. I had tears down my eyes. I didn’t know if it was going to be the last year with my seniors. It’s really devastating. After seeing all the angles, I have mixed feelings. Some angles, it’s not totally clear it’s a homer. I still think it was gone. It’s just devastating how you ripped a CIF title out of a team’s hands and a walk-off homer from Taylor—he’ll probably never get that moment back.”
Cerny, a 4.0 GPA scholar athlete, was still processing the CIF final on Tuesday night when he talked with the newspaper.
“The next day on Twitter, I was trying to find out, ‘Wait, did this ball bounce? What was going on?’ I just couldn’t do it. It was mentally draining. I’m going to stay off every part of social media and leave it up to the district and CIF,” Cerny said.
“We realize the game’s a lot bigger than us. We don’t play just for us, but the city of Moorpark and everyone that comes out to every game, even our announcers and everyone that works the snack bar, everyone who pitches in a little bit, we want to win it for them. It means a lot for this city.”
The Musketeer (his older sister, Makenna Cerny, a softball senior center fielder committed to William Jewell College) kept the moment in perspective.
“High school baseball is supposed to be fun. I know the umps made some mistakes. OK, that’s fine,” Carson Cerny said. “My main thing is that the umps can’t determine the game. We can still win this ballgame. We were still able to score four runs (in the sixth inning) and come down from 7-2 and stay in the ballgame.”
Cameron Johnson, a junior pitcher and third baseman, shared his perspective on the surreal game.
“It’s a crazy turn of events. You go from, you just won the CIF championship to, you’ve got runners on second and third with no outs. We dogpiled. We thought we won. We thought we were on top of the world.”
Johnson did not blame the loss on the umpires. He took accountability.
“We knew the umpires blew a call and messed it up. We were focused too much on the umpires, who made a mistake, and not that we had a chance to win it with a base hit,” Johnson said. “It’s a very mental game. We just got too much in our heads.”
This has still been a historic postseason for Moorpark.
“We were underdogs,” Johnson said. “Nobody believed we would be there. Nobody had us going past the first round. Being doubted put a chip on our shoulders— and we exceeded expectations.
“We deserved that moment. We were robbed of it. People do make mistakes. That was a mistake (the umpires) made. We can’t give them too hard a time for making an incorrect call. People do make mistakes. Taylor Busch, he is the most hardworking guy on the team, and he deserved it the most.”
Aaron Garcia, Moorpark’s first-year skipper, gets the last word.
“We’ve never seen this before,” he said. “This is an eye-opener for what sports is about. It’s human. It’s human error. It’s human instinct. It’s human emotion. It’s bringing out emotions you never knew existed. . . .
“This can’t happen. It’s an impossible situation, and I want that answer. I’m OK with the world knowing what the rules are, and where they were broken: They overturned a call after the game was over.”