Thursday, May 8, 2014

By Cory K. Doviak
NJS.com Editorial Director

Jerry D'Andrea threw 6 2/3 innings of two-hit baseball to get Ridgewood past Paramus Catholic, 2-1, in the opening round of the Bergen County Tournament.

PARAMUS – This year's Bergen County Baseball Tournament is going to be a free-for-all. Take the first round match-up between No. 16 Paramus Catholic and No. 17 Ridgewood. The truth was either team could win it and go on to make a deep run or either team could suffer a disappointing first round loss and regardless, it was pretty much assured that the game was going to be close. There is not much separating the Top 20 teams in Bergen County this season and the difference on Wednesday afternoon was a mere two throws, one good and one not so good.

The bad one came in the came in the top of the fifth inning with a runner on first base and two outs. The count went full to Nick Copolla, which gave Kawahara a running start when Copolla rolled a ball back toward the mound. When the ball was thrown down the right field line for an error, Kawahara circled the final three bases to give Ridgewood a two-run lead.

The good throw came in the bottom of the sixth inning right in the midst of Paramus Catholic's lone real rally of the game. There were runners on first and second when Mike Cattani ripped a double down the left field line for the only extra base hit by either team in the game. Because hits of any stripe, let alone clutch hits in key spots, have been so hard to come by for the Paladins this season, PC head coach Scott Luna waived home Steve Shanley from second and then kept his arm rotating to signal home Dave Sdrougais, who started his journey at first base.

Paramus Catholic senior Tom Saffioti went the distance and allowed just one earned run.

Cameron St. John dug the ball out of the left field corner and hit the cutoff man chest high. Nico Symington, Ridgewood's Tulane-bound shortstop, wheeled and threw a strike to the plate where Copolla slapped a tag on a diving Sdrougais. The perfectly executed relay in close similarity to one the Maroons used earlier in the week to help seal a win over Paramus, this time put a lock on Ridgewood's 2-1 win at Paramus Catholic.

Symington had made the error that allowed Shanley to reach with two outs to start the rally and then made the throw that abruptly ended it.

“It was a little bit of a flashback to the Paramus game, same type of play with a ball right down the line. I heard their coach yelling, 'You're scoring, you’re scoring' [to Sdrougais] when I got the ball. I turned, reared back and fired we got him out,” said Symington. “I wanted to make up for the error I made in that inning and I hope my teammates feel like I did that on that play, but really you have to give all the credit for this win to Jerry.”

Jerry is Jerry D'Andrea, Ridgewood's left-hander starting pitcher who was locked in a duel with Paramus Catholic starter Tom Saffioti from the first pitch each one threw in the game. D'Andrea allowed just two hits in the game, Cattani's double in the sixth and a leadoff single in the third that he erased by picking the runner off of first base while the next PC hitter was squaring for a sacrifice bunt. D'Andrea went 6 2/3 innings and struck out six. He did walk five batters, but none of them came around to score and one of them one erased by a 5-4-3 double play started by Mitchell Campbell at third base with two on and one out in the fourth.

Connor Van Caugherty had Ridgewood's lone RBI with a single on this swing in the fourth.

“I have a great defense behind me and wherever the ball was hit I knew that somebody was going to make a play behind me,” said D'Andrea, who did not allow an earned run. “I tried to mix it up against the middle of the order, but my main struggle was throwing strikes. If I could have spotted my fastball a little bit better then I might have been able to finish the game.”

Instead he finished just one out short of a complete game as Kyle Finnerty got the only hitter he faced to ground into a fielder's choice to notch the save. That made it a tough-luck loss for Saffioti, who was equally as brilliant on the mound. The senior right-hander who will play at Central Connecticut next year, went the distance on a five-hitter and struck out nine against just one walk and only one of the two runs scored against him was earned.

“It was a great pitching performance by both guys, just what you'd expect in the county tournament. We had to scratch for everything. We had one RBI, we scored the winning run on a ball they threw away and we threw out a guy at the plate,” said Ridgewood head coach Kurt Hommen. “Jerry [D'Andrea] did a great job hanging in there. He fought through a couple of plays that I thought we could have made behind him and he never lost his composure. He almost went the distance and it was a great job by him.”

There was only one leadoff hit in the game and Ridgewood used it to perfection to take the lead in the top of the fourth. Symington singled back through the box for the Maroons' first hit of the game, he stole second and got to third with one out when Eric Lewis hit behind the runner in grounding out to second. Connor Van Caugherty then delivered a run scoring single through an infield drawn halfway in.

PC's Mike Cattani hitting the double that drove in a run and also led to the game-deciding play at the plate.

“I knew I was going get a lot of curveballs in that at bat. [Saffioti] is a great pitcher with great velocity and he mixes up his pitches and throws them all for strikes,” said Van Caugherty, the Maroons' right fielder who will play next season at University of Cincinnati. “I got down in the count but I knew that all I had to do was shorten up my swing and get it through the infield and luckily enough it got past the diving shortstop.”

This season has been a bit of a Groundhog Day scenario for Paramus Catholic, which can pitch with any team in North Jersey but has had trouble with the bats all year long. The Paladins fell to 7-9 on the season with just about all of those losses of the one or two-run variety.

“We only had two hits and on one of them the kid missed the sign, ran on his own at first base and was picked off. That was a key play and when we did hit a ball hard they turned it into a double play [in the fourth]. The play at the plate was close, I thought he might have gotten in but the call is the call,” said PC head coach Scott Luna. “We pitched well again, but we made a couple of errors and the throw that sailed into rightfield was kind of the decisive blow. We have been in every game and we have been one hit away so many times, but our bats just have not come around like we hoped they would.”

The win moves Ridgewood (12-5) in the Round of 16 where it will face top-seeded Bergen Catholic on Saturday at 10 a.m. at Emerson High School. The Maroons might have been under-seeded in this tournament which pushed them into back-to-back games against parochial powers, but Bergen Catholic, the top seed, is probably not all that happy either as its first game of the tournament will be against a Group 4 public school that has won eight of its last nine games. Although that will be a 16 vs. 1 matchup, it is still hard to pick a clear favorite to win.

“There are people talking about how we are under-seeded and that we should be playing with a chip on our shoulder, but you can't look at the seedings. You just accept the situation that you are in and all we can really do to make it right is to keep winning baseball games,” said Lewis, Ridgewood's designated hitter. “We know we have Bergen [Catholic] next, but this year in particular, everybody feels like they have a chance to win and we do too. [St. Joseph graduate and St. Louis Cardinals first round draft pick Rob] Kaminsky is gone and there is really nobody like that out there this year. Any game is up for grabs and the team that executes best is going to win.”

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