A historic marker honoring Carl Yastrzemski as “one of the greatest baseball players of all time” was unveiled at Bridgehampton High School’s new baseball field on April 5 before an appreciative crowd numbering around 100, many of whom stayed to see the first varsity baseball team that Bridgehampton has fielded since 1979 shut out Shelter Island 6-0 behind the pitching of Scott Vinski.
Yastrzemski, a 1957 Bridgehampton High graduate who played his entire career for the Boston Red Sox, was inducted into Major League Baseball’s Hall of Fame in 1989. Dan Shedrick reported that his former Little League teammate was sorry he was unable “to join you today for this special honor. Thank you. My thanks also to my coaches, teammates and members of the Bridgehampton community for their longstanding support, and, most importantly, my congratulations to the Bridgies’ new varsity team. Learn from your coaches, play hard, and have fun.”
Chris Vaccaro, executive director of Suffolk’s Hall of Fame — Yastrzemski was one of its inaugural inductees in 1990 — said afterward that he had come up with the idea for placing such a marker two years ago, after putting up one at the Long Island Ducks’ stadium in Central Islip. “At around that time, I heard Bridgehampton” — thanks chiefly to Lou Liberatore, the Killer Bees’ head coach — “was bringing baseball back, so it seemed a perfect thing to do, Bridgehampton having been Yaz’s birthplace,” Vaccaro said.
Yastrzemski was inducted into Bridgehampton’s Hall of Fame in 2016 along with two of his former teammates, Billy DePetris and Bill Stavropoulos. That trio posted pretty much unheard-of numbers when it came to scholastic sports.
The six-man football team on which they played won four straight county titles, between 1954 and 1957. The rarely-beaten basketball and baseball teams won three straight county championships, the baseball team posting a 29-1-1 record between 1955 and 1957, and the record of the basketball team, which at one point rode a 35-game win streak, was just as impressive.
“I’ve been a Yaz fan from the beginning,” said one of the attendees, Claude Beudert, whose email address is [email protected].
“It was nice to see a plaque put up honoring a small town hero . . . there was a nice enthusiastic feeling there — a nice community event. I also came to watch a high school baseball game. I’m going to go to an East Hampton one too.”
To inaugurate the new field, Carl Johnson, a New York State basketball Hall of Famer who played for and coached state-championship teams (and who threw a mean knuckleball when he pitched for Bridgehampton’s 1979 baseball team), tossed out the first ball, which was caught, on one hop, by the combined Bridgehampton/Ross team’s catcher, Milo Tompkins.