La Cueva outlasts Rio Rancho in metro matchup of 1 vs. 2

The record will reflect that the La Cueva Bears won the 2025 Albuquerque Metro Baseball Championships.

Nothing on the giant metro trophy will reflect how much the Rio Rancho Rams were complicit in all of this.

But they were.

The first coaches’ poll of the season was unveiled on Monday, with La Cueva and Rio Rancho atop the Class 5A rankings. And they shared a field Monday at La Cueva.

The second-ranked Rams donated seven runs, either through error or wild pitch, and the top-ranked Bears gladly ran with that donation bin and held off Rio Rancho for a sloppy-on-both-sides 9-7 victory.

“Sometimes,” La Cueva coach Gerard Pineda said, “you just have to take advantage of what the other team gives you.”

The Rams (10-3), unfortunately for them, gave until it hurt. Three first- inning errors led to three unearned runs, part of a four-run at-bat for La Cueva (8-3).

On a pair of consecutive sacrifice flies from the bottom of the order, Rio Rancho cut the deficit in half in its next at-bat. But Rio Rancho never was able to overcome that early four-run deficit.

La Cueva scored single runs in the second and third for a 6-2 lead, the sixth run coming off yet another Rio Rancho error. The Bears added another uninsured run on Rio Rancho’s fifth error of the game in a two-run sixth for an 8-2 edge.

A La Cueva error played a key role in the Rams’ three-run sixth, highlighted by Jackson Roybal’s two-RBI double down the left-field line. Another Bears error led to Rio Rancho’s seventh run in the top of the seventh.

The Rams had runners at first and third with two outs in the seventh when La Cueva reliever Everett Burdett picked off the runner at first, an unusual conclusion.

“We’d like to have been a little bit sharper with some of the stuff late,” Pineda said, adding that La Cueva’s inexperience at some positions was showing. “We didn’t play as clean as we would like.”

Rio Rancho coach David Gomez was of a similar mind.

“That’s been our thing. We have three losses, and in those three losses, that’s been the tale of the tape, shooting ourselves in the foot defensively,” Gomez said. “They put the ball in play and we didn’t make the plays. That’s baseball.”

Junior Dylan Blomker, an LSU commit, drove in runs in the first and second innings to lead the La Cueva offense.

“Sometimes we don’t have our best stuff. That happens to everyone,” the first baseman said.

La Cueva is in the midst of a brutal stretch. Counting Monday, the Bears have played eight games in 13 days, including four in Phoenix for an elite tournament the week prior to metros where they went 2-2. (The metro final was played Monday because of a high wind event last Tuesday that pushed back the entire schedule).

Moreover, La Cueva only got into the final because Sandia forfeited after closing out what the Matadors thought was a 3-2 semifinal victory on Saturday. A pitch-count violation led to a forfeit.

There were a couple of minor silver linings for Rio Rancho.

First was that the Rams got the tying run on base in the seventh after being down six. Second, Rio Rancho could get another shot at La Cueva this weekend, since both teams are in the Rams’ Sal Puentes Invitational starting Thursday.