Baseball can be a frustrating game. Getting a hit in 30 percent of your opportunities is considered success. Anything worse than that can feel unbearable.
Even though Jacob Tonascia, Allan Hancock College’s slugging first baseman, went hitless in the three games prior to blasting a grand slam and knocking in five runs against L.A. Pierce College on April 8, he never got too down on himself during the tough stretch.
“That’s just baseball,” Tonascia wisely said. “I still thought I was making some really good swings—I just wasn’t getting the output that I wanted. I can only control that I’m making good swings, and then I have to just hope for the best. Sometimes it just doesn’t work out that way. I just stuck to the process we’ve been going with all year, and I got a hold of one and it worked out pretty well.”
Tonascia’s sophomore season as a whole is working out pretty well too. He’s batting .313—second best on the team—and leads Hancock in doubles and RBIs as the Bulldogs boast a 16-13 record.
A Hollister native, Tonascia spent his first years of junior college at Mission College in Santa Clara, but he suffered an elbow injury during his freshman campaign that required “Tommy John surgery” at the season’s end. That forced him to redshirt the following season, and after that year, the longtime Mission College baseball coach, a mentor to Tonascia, decided to retire.
That left Tonascia at a crossroads.
“At that point, I decided I wanted to look for a new place to play,” he said. “My dad is from Santa Maria and I still had a lot of family in the area. I got ahold of [Hancock baseball] coach [Chris] Stevens.”
Tonascia moved to Santa Maria in the fall and is living with family. He says he’s “really enjoying the experience” on the Central Coast so far. An agribusiness major, he has a vision of continuing his family’s farming business in the future.
“My family has always farmed in Hollister and before that, they were in the dairy business in Santa Maria,” he said. “I’ve always known I wanted to go into agriculture. [Studying] agribusiness will allow me to eventually farm one day and keep the family business going.”
But first, there’s the dream of playing more baseball. Tonascia is working on transferring to a four-year school after this year and continuing his baseball career.
“I’m in the mix with a couple of schools right now, but it’s kind of tricky because they’re in the middle of their season and we’re in the middle of ours,” he said. “I’m going to go see a couple hopefully this weekend, and I’ll go from there.”
No matter what happens, Tonascia said he’s simply grateful for the support he’s received throughout his college journey.
“I’m just really thankful to my teammates, my family, and my coaches,” he said.
This article appears in Apr 14-21, 2016.