Sweep Ends Season for St. Anthony's Baseball

To lose to the same team twice in a season may be simply chalked up to bad luck. To lose three times they call that a sweep.

But when you lose five straight– to a rival no less – as  baseball team did 9-7 Tuesday night to , ending their season and catapulting the Flyers into the Nassau-Suffolk CHSAA finals, Friars head coach John Phelan might have another word for that: Frustration.

Frustration that his bats, which scored only three runs in the , fell 2 runs short after managing to put a five spot on the scoreboard at Farmingdale State, shut down by a Flyers bullpen whose pitches at times had better luck finding the dirt then they did a strikezone but managed to limit St. Anthony’s to five hits and no additional runs.

And frustrated that his pitching has allowed 22 more runs to their archrival and been outscored 40-18 across the entire season.

“For a program that was expected to come in sixth or seventh… to come in third, to sweep St. Dom’s the first-place team, we’re a program that’s developing,” Phelan said. “We’re further along than we expected at the beginning of the season”

Frustration alone would have been enough to derail any team’s year, but when combined with the fatigue that comes at the end of a baseball season it makes for a potent mix.

Especially when you consider the Rivalry, which erupted on the field when St. Anthony’s Ryan D’Alessandro got into a shoving match with Chaminade second baseman Thomas Roulis after getting caught halfway to third in a 2-6-4 rundown, which capped off the 5-run outburst from the Friars.

“Its just been the whole series,” Phelan said. “A lot of pushing and shoving, a lot of trash-talking.”

That shoving got the Friars' catcher removed, but not before the benches had emptied onto the field.

Weissheir had frustrated the Friars for three straight innings, bringing a perfect game into the fourth. The no hitter was gone with a swing from first baseman David Groenveld who tripled into center over the head of Flyer centerfielder Michael Ferranti.

“You could see that he was fatigued at that point, because it was a long inning that he sat here and he must have gotten a little tight,” Chaminade coach Mike Pienkos said of his starter. “It just seemed like fatigue set in, so that was the unfortunate thing. They were tired. We’ve worked them a lot but the bullpen didn’t do a bad job really tonight.”

Chaminade managed to hang seven of their nine runs on starter Jake Kurtz’s three-plus innings of work. Reliever Billy Massa managed to retire the Flyers in order in the sixth and seventh.

 WP: Weissheir. LP: Kurtz.