Although East Hampton High School’s varsity baseball season ended last week with two playoff losses, at Mount Sinai and at Miller Place, Vinny Alversa, the Bonackers’ head coach, is not only pleased by the big step forward the varsity took this spring, but is also looking forward to the coming years, given the potential he and his fellow coaches see in many of the younger players here who are as equally serious when it comes to the game.
Ample evidence of the seriousness with which these eighth and seventh graders play was provided Friday afternoon at the Montauk School in the second meeting of Will Collins’s Mustangs and Bob Maier’s Springs Ospreys, a game that drew a crowd of 70 or so spectators.
Though the home team wound up winning 7-1, it was, Collins said later, thanks to small ball. “That was the only way we were going to win,” he said, referring to the Springs team’s flame-thrower, Victor Diaz, who before he left the game after five innings on the mound had struck out 12 of the 22 batters he’d faced, had given up two hits, and while the Ospreys were trailing 3-0 at the time, only one of those runs had been earned.
A dropped fly ball that Trevor Meehan hit to left field enabled Finn O’Rourke, who had singled and had stolen second base, to come home with Montauk’s first run in the bottom of the first inning, after which Diaz fanned his opposite number, Kai Alversa, for the third out.
Collins’s crew made it 2-0 in the bottom of the fourth. After one out, O’Rourke, the third hitter in Montauk’s lineup, got his second hit off Diaz, a grounder to short that he beat out, and, with Meehan up, O’Rourke stole second and came all the way around on the cleanup hitter’s subsequent 6-3 groundout.
“Let’s manufacture another one,” Collins was heard to say during the huddle preceding the bottom of the fifth.
Sully Matthews led it off by reaching first base safely as the result of an error. Dante Speranza, who’d fouled off a couple of bunt attempts, then grounded to Diaz, who wheeled and rifled a throw to the shortstop, Harrison Jenkins, that forced Matthews at second. After Diaz notched another strikeout, and with Chase Ivory up, Speranza stole second. Moments later, he almost got caught off that base in a rundown, but slid back in under the throw. When Diaz wild-pitched Ivory, who was hitting ninth, Speranza advanced to third and Bryce Prado was brought in to run for him.
Ivory drew a full-count walk, one of two free passes Diaz issued that afternoon, prompting Collins, with runners at the corners, to give Ivory what he said afterward was “the early break sign.”
“The idea,” said Collins, “is that once the runner at first has gotten the sign and once the pitcher is back on the rubber, the runner’s to step off the base and double his lead, with the idea of drawing a rundown throw as the runner from third sprints for home. Chase saw me give the sign, but as soon as I gave it he went off! A very early break on his part. . . . Still, Bryce scored and Chase got into second, so it worked.”
Despite the final score, the Ospreys made Alversa, the Mustangs’ starter, work. They loaded the bases with one out in the top of the first, but he got out of it with a strikeout on a 3-2 pitch and a popup to Meehan at first.
Springs had runners at first and second with one out in the top of the second, and runners at first and third with two out in the fourth, but the longhaired lefty got out of it without giving up a run both times. He gave way to Meehan in the top of the fifth after having given up no runs, three hits, and two walks. He struck out three.
Maier said he would have loved it if Diaz could have stayed in, but by the end of five innings he’d reached his 75-pitch count.
Springs threatened again with Meehan pitching in the top of the sixth, loading the bases with one out, but Meehan, a left-hander, got out of it with only one run scoring, as the result of a two-out walk that preceded an inning-ending strikeout.
Things went a bit south for Springs after that as Montauk scored four more times in its sixth, benefiting from three walks, three hits, two stolen bases, a wild pitch, and a hit batsman.
As a result of the win, the Mustangs improved to 7-0, and the Ospreys dropped to 4-2.
“I’ve never had an undefeated team,” said Collins, who has coached eight years at the Montauk School. With two games left going into this week — at Pierson in Sag Harbor on Monday and at Southampton yesterday, he was very close.
In the meantime, he said he’s been telling his players not to get too full of themselves, to take it one game at time, and reminding them that “all it takes is one day when you hit the ball right at people and make a couple of errors.”