Update, Friday, July 28: The South Shore Clippers advanced to the Hamptons Collegiate Baseball League final with a 6-2 win over the Sag Harbor Whalers Thursday at Mashashimuet Park. The Clippers will face the Westhampton Aviators, who beat the Southampton Breakers 3-2 in the other semifinal on Thursday.
Thursday, July 27: The Sag Harbor Whalers set about defending their Hamptons Collegiate Baseball League playoff title at Sag Harbor’s Mashashimuet Park Tuesday versus the South Shore Clippers, whose home field is at Bellport High School.
The Whalers, who lost 11-8 to the Southampton Breakers Sunday, finished the regular season in second place, at 19-15, behind the 21-11-2 Westhampton Aviators, the playoff runner-up to the Whalers in 2022. The Clippers, at 18-14-2, were third, followed by the Breakers at 16-17-1, the Shelter Island Bucks at 13-19-2, and the North Fork Ospreys at 11-22-1. The Bucks and Ospreys didn’t make the playoffs.
“The big news,” the Whalers’ co-coach, Jake Tobin, said Sunday night, “was that we swept the Aviators in a doubleheader yesterday.”
Playing in Westhampton, the Whalers rode Garrett Bolwell’s “phenomenal” pitching to a 5-2 win in game one, and prevailed 8-6 in the second, a game in which Olivia Pichardo hit a two-run home run. Bolwell came out in the fifth inning; Danny Kerr finished the final two and got the save.
Tobin used “a lot of different pitchers” in the second game. When asked how many he had on the staff, he said, “I’ve got 13 pitchers, but, considering how many games we play in such a short time, that’s not enough.”
Asked about the Whalers’ playoff chances, Tobin said they were good. “All the guys are getting hot at the right time. . . . The Clippers are a really good team, but we’re a good team too.”
The winner of the best-of-three series (which should end this evening at Mashashimuet if it goes the distance) will advance to the H.C.B.L. final.
The Whalers went 6-3 on the week. On Shelter Island Friday, Tobin and Bianca Smith’s team, after spotting the Bucks to a 3-0 first-inning lead, came on to win the doubleheader’s 2 p.m. game 12-6, chiefly owing to the cleanup hitter Ethan Sarmiento’s six r.b.i.s.
Sarmiento, who was rested in the second game, which the Whalers wound up losing 3-2, drove in two runs in the bottom of the first with a single to left-center field after the leadoff hitter, Daniel Laderman, singled and T.J. Werner was hit by a pitch.
Mateo Sucre, a Southampton summer resident who relieved the starter, Nick Buchman, in the second, pitched into the sixth, giving up two hits and striking out two during that skein. Meanwhile, in the bottom of the second, Sarmiento, with runners at the corners and two outs, launched a fastball over the center-field fence 390 feet away, treating the Whalers to a 6-3 lead that they were not to relinquish.
The Sag Harbor team made it 7-3 in its third, Tucker Genovesi, an East Hamptoner, coming home from third base on a third-to-first groundout. The Bucks got one back in their fourth, though a sac fly by Sarmiento — his sixth run batted in of the game — re-established the four-run lead in the bottom half, and so it went.
Steve Mazza relieved Sucre in the top of the sixth, and finished up. A Bucks relief pitcher with good stuff that he couldn’t control enabled the Whalers to pad their lead to 12-5 in the bottom of the inning, one coming home from third on a passed ball and two more scoring as the result of bases-loaded walks.
Other Leagues
Postseason play also loomed this week in the Hamptons Adult Hardball league, and in the East Hampton men’s and women’s slow-pitch softball leagues.
The women’s playoffs were to have begun Tuesday at the Terry King ball field in Amagansett, with the pennant-winning East End Land Planning team paired with fourth-place Montauk Dental, and with the Police Benevolent Association and Groundworks, which each wound up the regular season with 5-4 records, contending in the night’s second game. The best-of-three semifinal series are to continue at Terry King tonight.
Rich Schneider, the slow-pitch leagues’ spokesman, said in an email Saturday that Harold McMahon, the three-time defending champion, led the East Hampton men’s league at 4-0, followed by Wainscott Landscaping
(5-1), Sand & Sea (3-2), Corner Bar (3-3), Uihlein’s (2-3), Montauk Rugby (1-3), McGuire Landscaping (1-3), and Shelter Wanted (0-4).
Gigshack led the Montauk wood-bat softball league at 9-0 as of Monday, after which came Nero (7-1), Dirty Dogs (5-4), Shagwong (5-4), Big Tunas (4-4), Liars (3-5), Leftovers (2-8), and Montauk Fire Department (0-9).
The Hamptons Adult Hardball playoffs are to begin this evening, at 5:45, with the Brewers and Royals playing in the first of a three-game series at Bridgehampton High School. The winner is to face the defending-champion Kraken at 10 a.m. Sunday at the high school.