McMahon’s won its third straight East Hampton Town men’s slow-pitch softball league championship at the Terry King ball field in Amagansett on Oct. 25, besting Sand & Sea Construction 17-10, thus winning the best-of-five final series three games to one.
McMahon’s “mercied” Sand & Sea in the first and third games, and lost the second, taking the three-time runners-up to extra innings before yielding 16-13 — this in spite of the fact that the defending champs could only field eight players because of vacationing absentees.
The score was tied at 3-3 on Oct. 25 when McMahon’s, the home team, went to bat in the bottom of the second inning. Jeff Sztorc, hitting eighth in the order, singled to lead off, and an infield error allowed Pete Vaziri to reach first base safely, after which Jamie Wolf, also benefiting from an infield error, drove in a run. John Pizzo, McMahon’s leadoff hitter, flied out, though Pat Silich followed with a sacrifice fly that put his team up 5-3. The Plumbers were not to trail thereafter.
Hunter Fromm, Sand & Sea’s leadoff hitter, beat out a hard comebacker to the pitcher, Bryan Seekamp, as the third inning began. Diego Palomo then lined a pitch toward right that the first baseman, Tom Thorsen, speared before tagging Fromm on his way back to the bag, a deflating unassisted double play. Chris Pfund followed with a single, but Nick Knobel made the third out, lofting a high foul ball off the third-base line that Riley McMahon, the catcher, chased down.
McMahon’s tacked on three more runs in its half of the third, getting r.b.i.s from Seekamp and Vaziri (two), and, after Seekamp shut Sand & Sea down in the top of the fourth, the champions-to-be added four more thanks to two-run home runs by Thorsen and Seekamp in the bottom half that extended McMahon’s lead to 12-3.
Sand & Sea pared that lead to 12-8 — and thus made a game of it — in its fifth. Ray Wojtusiak, the team’s player-manager, who bats ninth in the lineup, singled to lead off. Rob Nicoletti, Sand & Sea’s 66-year-old pitcher, tried to drop one into shallow left field, but A.J. Bennett alertly came in to catch the ball. Subsequent singles by Fromm and Palomo loaded the bases for Pfund, who doubled in Wojtusiak and Fromm, after which a base hit by Knobel scored Palomo with Sand & Sea’s sixth run. Jack Spillane and Hayden Ward drove in Sand & Sea’s other two runs before Leonel Santiago popped out to Pizzo at short and Keith Steckowski hit into a force play at second.
Two eye-catching defensive plays by Spillane, Sand & Sea’s shortstop, and by Pfund in center field, diving catches that robbed Pizzo and Silich of hits, kept McMahon’s at bay in the bottom of the fifth.
The stage seemed set for Sand & Sea, trailing as it was 18-12, to make a run for it in the top of the sixth, but that didn’t happen. Wojtusiak singled through the hole between third and short to start off, but Nicoletti grounded into a 6-4-3 double play, and after Fromm and Palomo each had singled, Pizzo’s diving catch of a hard line drive off the bat of Pfund retired the side.
McMahon’s scored five more runs in the bottom of the sixth to put the game and the series away. A head-first slide into home by Thorsen, who had been walked and had advanced to second on a single by Bennett before Keeler Otero, with one out, drove him in, put McMahon’s up 13-8. Four more runs followed with Riley McMahon, Sztorc, Vaziri, and Wolf getting the r.b.i.s.
Sand & Sea, thanks to a one-out home run by Ward over the left-field fence that scored Spillane ahead of him, got two back for the three-time runners-up, but that was to be all she wrote.