LA PUENTE — The La Salle baseball team kept its Del Rey League title hopes alive with a 6-5 come-from-behind win over Bishop Amat on Tuesday afternoon.

The win pulled La Salle (16-7, 7-3) within two games of Bishop Amat (19-6, 9-1). La Salle hosts games against Amat today and Saturday at Arcadia Park that will finish their three-game series. La Salle needs to win both games to force a share of the league title with Amat.

La Salle trailed 5-4 entering the seventh inning and scored two runs to take the lead. It then got out of a bases-loaded-jam in the bottom of the seventh to pull out the win.

La Salle junior third baseman Drew Ward scored the go-ahead run in the top of the seventh, then made a Brooks Robinson-type diving catch that he turned into an unassisted double play to end the game.

“I was mainly thinking that with the bases loaded, I gotta get two two outs here,” Ward said. “Thankfully, I’m a gifted enough athlete to get that play there.”

Peter Callihan got La Salle started in the seventh with a single. Ward followed with a line drive single over the first base bag to put runners on first and second.

Andrew Luna laid down a two-strike sacrifice bunt to move the runners over.

A wild pitch scored Callihan to tie the score, and Frane Flores’s RBI single through the drawn infield brought in the go-ahead run.

“I kind of came up short in the first few innings,” Ward said. “I just stuck with my training and my preparation and got the hit.”

Amat hit for a “team” cycle and scored all five of its runs in the first inning.

A walk, a triple by Santiago Ramirez, an error, a double by Omar Arretche, a home run by Diego Briones and a single by Justin Peinado produced five runs for the Lancers, but the La Salle bullpen shut them down the rest of the way.

Morgan Sullivan pitched four innings for La Salle.

“I was just thinking, first pitch strike and repeat that,” Sullivan said. “When you get ahead in the count, good things happen. Every year we’ve had great games with them. It feels really good coming out on the winning side.”

There was no quit in Amat as it loaded the bases with one out in the bottom of the seventh.

Back-to-back singles by Roman Spencer and pinch-hitter Raymond Castro led off the inning. Roman Miranda moved them up with a sacrifice.

An intentional walk to Jacob Campos loaded the bases and set the stage for Ward’s sensational play to end the game.

“It’s one win,” La Salle coach Andy Nieto said. “They’ve got depth, they’ve got experience and, I’ll tell you what, that Amat mystique is real. Kids get off the bus and they feel it. Just when you think you’ve got them, it’s like there is some mysterious baseball saint that hangs around. I just want my guys to fight. In the end they made the right pitch, they made the right play and they got the right hit.”

Nieto knows about that mystique. He won four CIF-SS titles, between 2007 and 2017, as Bishop Amat’s coach.