Fountain Valley PONY All-Stars win Central Region opener

Carlos Molina has been around the PONY All-Star baseball circuit for a while now.

The manager of the Fountain Valley PONY 14-and-under All-Stars B team has seen his son, who also goes by the name Carlos Molina, play All-Stars in all but one season since he competed in the Shetland Division, which is for 5- and 6-year-olds.

Experience taught Carlos Molina, the dad, to have great respect for the Irvine PONY organization, and it was an exciting moment for him to see the outcome of his team’s opener in the Central Region tournament.

After the bats came alive early, Fountain Valley held on late to defeat Irvine 9-7 on Wednesday night at Oak Knoll Park in Cypress.

Fountain Valley earned its second win since the team was assembled for this summer. The team improved to 2-9 overall.

“You’ve got to put an All-Star team together at the very end of regular season, and you’ve got to do it quick,” Molina said. “We’ve taken our lumps, knowing that it’s a process to do so.

“The proof is in the pudding. We’ve worked hard, and we came out here and won.”

Fountain Valley will take on the Newport Beach Baseball Assn. at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday.

Molina used the stage of a big win to encourage his players to believe in themselves, saying, “It’s not the size of the dog, but the fight of the dog” that matters.

Fountain Valley took a 9-3 lead to the bottom of the seventh. Singles by Ryan Williams and Tomoki Matsushita brought in three runs with two outs.

Zane Gohl finished off a one-out save, getting Jake Nakagawa to pop out to Max Garza with the tying runs in scoring position.

When the game began, Irvine’s Kyler Collver needed just three pitches to record the first two outs. Fountain Valley received a gift when Luis Montes reached on an error, and that was all that the local club needed to jumpstart its offense.

Kristion Amos and Carlos Molina, the manager’s son, produced back-to-back singles to bring in the first run. Jaron Squire reached on a hit by pitch, and Garza laced a three-run triple to right-center field to send Sabastian Ugalde to the mound with a 4-0 lead.

“When I’ve got two strikes on me, if there is anything close, I’m swinging at it,” Garza said. “It was close to me, I swung, and something good happened.

“I know we have to score runs, so we felt good about it, but we knew that we still had to stay focused. We stayed focused, we made plays, and we held the lead.”

Irvine answered right back with three runs in the bottom of the first. Dylan Durazo’s run-scoring double to deep center field highlighted the rally.

Fountain Valley scored three more runs in the second, capped by Molina’s second run-scoring hit in as many innings.

“It was really important [to pad the lead] because [Irvine] would have come back and maybe won the whole thing,” said Molina, the Fountain Valley catcher. “That would not have been good for us.”

Amos had two hits and two runs batted in for Fountain Valley. Michael Guerra, Trevor Scott and Elijah Boersma each had one hit.

As hard as outs were to come by in the early going, Ugalde settled in to retire eight in a row through the third inning. The left-hander efficiently set down the side in the third inning, when he used the minimum of three pitches to do so.

Ugalde went three innings to earn the win. He allowed three runs, two of them earned, on two hits and two walks. He struck out two.

Quinn Lopez took over as a reliever in the fourth. He showcased a slow curveball as his out pitch, and it helped him rack up some early strikeouts.

Durazo threw five innings in relief for Irvine. He struck out the side in the seventh as part of a seven-strikeout performance.

andrew.turner@latimes.com

Twitter: @ProfessorTurner