A repeat was not to be for the Sag Harbor Whalers in the Hamptons Collegiate Baseball League this year, given their semifinal-round series loss last week to the South Shore Clippers of Bellport.
The Clippers, a team made up largely of Long Island players, cruised to an 8-0 win on July 26 in the first of three games played at Sag Harbor’s Mashashimuet Park. Max Hart, who had the league’s second-lowest earned run average, at 1.61, in the regular season, started for the Whalers, but was touched for seven runs and six hits in the first three innings.
Jake Tobin, the Whalers’ co-head coach, then brought in Danny Kerr, who pounded the strike zone, striking out five (and giving up one run) before giving way in the seventh to Wyatt Benson. Benson held the Clippers scoreless thereafter, but the Clippers’ pitchers that day, Kyle Salvati, the starter, and Myles Scarry, who relieved him in the sixth, were very good.
The Whalers rebounded the next day, defeating the Clippers 5-3. They scored one run in the top of the first, two in the third, and two more in the sixth. Jackson Kossow, Sag Harbor’s starter, went four innings, giving up one run and two hits, “a masterful job,” said Tobin, who replaced him with Cole Forcellina (who was to get the win) in the fifth.
The Whalers took a 3-2 lead into the sixth, during which sacrifice flies by Daniel Laderman, the leadoff hitter, and T.J. Werner, who batted after him, upped their lead to 5-2.
Jack McLaughlin relieved Forcellina in the seventh, but got into trouble in the eighth. With one run in, one out, and with runners on first and second, Tobin brought in Steve Mazza, who walked the first batter to face him on a 3-2 pitch, loading the bases. But Mazza then retired Peter DeVito on a flyout to left field and struck out Aidan Larkin, ending the threat.
The sixth inning in Friday’s finale, won 6-2 by the Clippers, also proved to be key, though this time it was the Clippers who led 3-2 going into it. After the Clippers loaded the bases with no outs in the top of the sixth, Tobin replaced Mateo Sucre, who was pitching at the time, with Ryan Seaver.
After falling behind 3-0 on Brady Steinert, Seaver induced Steinert to fly out to Tucker Genovesi in center field. He then went up 0-2 on Ryan Ferremi, a left-handed hitter, who floated Seaver’s next offering into shallow right, a dying quail that, as the Whaler dugout groaned, enabled the Clippers’ fourth run to score. Soon after, it was 6-2, the result of a two-run single by Larkin. A strikeout and flyout followed, but the damage had been done.
Tobin then went to Kerr again, who again pounded the strike zone in the final three frames, allowing no runs and striking out four while his teammates were being handcuffed by the Clippers’ formidable reliever Dante Morabito.
“I made a mistake — it’s definitely on me,” Tobin said afterward. “I should have had Kerr,” who performed so well the day before, “come in for Sucre. . . . We were a better team, I got out-coached.”
Tobin used 10 of his 13 pitchers during the course of the series, Kerr, a Rowan College of South Jersey junior, being the only one he called upon twice.
Asked if it had been a good season, the coach, who would like to return next year, said, “It was a great season.” Though the team did not make the playoff final, it had finished with a 20-17 record over all, and the fact that his players loved Sag Harbor could mean at least some of them will come back next year, thus improving the team’s chances in 2024. He had begun the summer with a roster of 25 and had ended with 30.
Contrariwise, in Newark, where he once coached, “I began with 35 and ended with 12 — everyone wanted to leave after the first week.”