The playoff news baseball-wise was not good for East Hampton High School’s team, which lost to Mount Sinai and Miller Place last week, and thus was ousted from the county’s Class A bracket. For the Pierson (Sag Harbor) Whalers, however, the news was good.
After losing to Southold 14-6 on May 18, and after the Settlers had lost last Thursday to top-seeded Port Jefferson, Pierson, behind its ace, Dan Labrozzi, defeated Southold 5-1 on Friday, eliminating the North Fork team and setting up a best-of-three county Class C final series with top-seeded Port Jeff that was to have begun Monday. Gavin Gilbride, the catcher, drove in three runs in Friday’s win.
Port Jefferson won two of three games against Pierson in the regular season, both of which were shutouts. “It’s going to be very difficult,” the Whalers’ coach, Jonathan Schwartz, said in an email over the weekend. “I’m sure they have their ace lined up to pitch two games, possibly. . . . We’re the underdogs, but we’re looking forward to the challenge. If we pitch well and play defense, we will be competitive.”
Game two was to have been played at Sag Harbor’s Mashashimuet Park Tuesday. According to Section XI’s website, a third game, if needed, is to be played at Port Jefferson tomorrow.
In other playoff news, East Hampton’s boys tennis team bageled Hauppauge 7-0 here on May 18 in a first-round match in the county team tournament. The visitors didn’t bring their doubles teams inasmuch as the players had Covid, thus forfeiting three points off the bat. All four Bonac singles players — Kiefer Mitchell, Nick Cooper, Jagger Cohen, and Henry Cooper — won that day. The Coopers and Cohen won in straight sets. Mitchell’s match went to a third set, which he won 7-6 (7-4).
Max Astilean, East Hampton’s number-one, did not play against Hauppauge because he, too, had Covid. He tested negative the next day, however, in time to play in the county’s individual tourney, but, after winning first and second-round matches, lost 6-4, 6-2 in the quarterfinals “to Walt Whitman’s number-one,” Kevin McConville, East Hampton’s coach, reported. “He demolished Harborfields’ number-two in the second round, a match that drew a large crowd, but he didn’t play well in the quarters.”
Because of flu-like symptoms perhaps owing to high pollen counts, McConville couldn’t take two other singles players and two doubles teams to the individual tourney.
His fourth-seeded team was to have played fifth-seeded Harborfields here in the second round of the county team tournament Tuesday. The winner was to have played at top-seeded Ward Melville yesterday. The final is to be played Tuesday at Bay Shore’s Casamento Park.
The coach said he thought East Hampton should have gotten the county’s third seed given the strength of his doubles teams, which would have set up a quarterfinal match with second-seeded Commack instead of with Ward Melville. “Our five through 10 players are very strong — that’s where other schools experience a drop-off,” the coach said.
Vinny Alversa, East Hampton’s varsity baseball coach, said in reporting his team’s two playoff losses that “we had our chances” at Mount Sinai, which won 5-0, and at Miller Place, a 3-1 winner last Thursday.
Jack Dickinson, who had suffered a strained oblique muscle while pitching against Sayville on May 3, started for East Hampton in the game at Miller Place. “He did great — he gutted it out for five innings,” Alversa said. At Mount Sinai, East Hampton’s hitters faced a pitcher whose fastball topped out in the low 90s, yet still put the ball in play, leading him to conclude that “we’ve just got to get bigger and stronger.”
The season, Alversa continued, had nevertheless been a great one, “a big step forward” given the fact that this year was the first since 2011 that an East Hampton baseball team had made the playoffs.
Moreover, he and his fellow coaches, Henry Meyer and Andrew Rodriguez among them, are making sure that the program continues on the upswing. “The only time these kids are not playing ball is between the second week of November, say, and the beginning of January, when we begin to work out in the gym.”
Meyer is coaching East Hampton’s varsity entry in the Brookhaven summer league, Alversa is coaching the under-14s, Rodriguez the under-13s, James Foster the under-11s, and Colin Ruddy and Tucker Genovesi the under-10s.
The coach has his eye on a number of eighth-grade pitchers coming his way, a group that includes his son, Kai, Victor Diaz, Trevor Meehan, Finn O’Rourke, Harrison Jenkins, Luke Rossano, Cole Assogna, and Andrew Brown.
“We’re getting it together — we’re coming together for sure,” Alversa said.