Saturday,
April 25, 2015
By Cory K. Doviak
NJS.com Editorial Director
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In the span of three innings, senior Neal Calabrese had a home run, two triples and eight RBI as part of Rutherford's 18-14 win over Hawthorne on Friday afternoon. |
RUTHERFORD – Rutherford senior Neal Calabrese is owed some good days. A childhood leukemia survivor and a kid who blew out the same knee twice, robbing him of much of his high school athletic career, the senior shortstop plays with a perspective and a passion much different from many other high school athletes.
“My story is a little different and I don’t take anything for granted. I tore the same ACL twice so I missed football and basketball in my junior and senior years, so when I am playing something I try to give it everything I have,” said Calabrese, who couldn’t get medically cleared to run in time for hoops season this year so he joined the swim team instead. “I am healthy and I am playing and I am a senior, so I want to make a deep run in the county [tournament] and states. That would be a nice way to end it.”
Calabrese is heading to the University of Maryland to study medicine and he will take with him some good memories from his playing days, including Friday’s once-in-lifetime kind of game. He hit a second inning grand slam, a third inning triple and a fifth inning triple before Hawthorne head coach John Passero said ‘No mas’ and intentionally walked Calabrese in his final plate appearance.
It was all part of a 3-for-4 day in which Calabrese scored four runs and drove in eight others, yes eight, in an 18-14 win with the wind blowing straight out to left at Memorial Field on Friday afternoon. There was no way, in those conditions, with the wind howling at a steady 20 miles-an-hour with 30-plus mile-an-hour gusts, that this game was going to be a pitcher’s duel even though both teams threw their talented aces in a key game in the NJIC Colonial Division.
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Hawthorne's Ryan VanderWerf had two hits, two RBI and two runs socred. |
“With this kind of win and a skin infield, we like to say it is like hitting a golf ball in a parking lot,” said Rutherford head coach Carmen Spina. “Both of these pitchers, [Dave] Mascis for them and our guy [Max Maarleveld], are better than they showed but anything in the air was just finding a gap today and I didn’t know if we were going to be about to close this one out even though we scored 18 runs.”
Each pitcher started well enough as the minimum 12 hitters came to the plate in a scoreless first two innings, but once solid contact started being made, Memorial Field played more like a pinball machine without flippers. Everything was getting through.
It was Hawthorne’s turn first as Jimmy Baratta (1-for-3, 3B, 3 R) led off the top of the third with a triple and he scored the game’s first run on Mike Dietrich’s sacrifice fly. The Bears started a new rally with two-out and the bases empty as hit batter and two walks setting up Ryan VanderWerf (2-for-5, 2 RBI, 2 R), who delivered a two-run single to spur a five-run inning.
A hit batter also played a role in the bottom of the inning as Rutherford’s Lima Federico (3-for-4, 4 R, RBI) was plunked to load the bases in front of Calabrese (3-for-4, HR, 2 3B, 8 RBI, 4 R), who got the Bulldogs back to within 5-4 with one swing of the bat. His blast split the left centerfield gap and just kept on rolling as he circled the bases for a grand slam.
Desmond Mateo’s RBI single in the top of the fourth retied the game before Rutherford put together its biggest inning in the bottom of the frame. The Bulldogs sent 11 men to the plate and scored seven times. Connor Clare had an RBI single with the bases loaded, Federico singled in a run to keep the train moving and then Calabrese unloaded with a triple to straight away center that gave him seven RBI in the span of two innings. He then scored on Julian Mis’ home run to left as Rutherford surged in front, 11-5.
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Andrew Podobinsky had a triple and scored three times for Rutherford. |
“With the pitchers that were out there I was expecting a 2-1 game. They are two of the better pitchers in our league and for the first two innings they went at each other, but from the third inning on the ball starting going up in the air and the hitters took over the game,” said Passero. “It’s not like there was a lot of errors. There were a lot of flyballs that just kept carrying.”
With every out at a premium, any extra baserunners allowed were going to come back to hurt and two errors opened the door to another huge inning in the top of the fifth. Mateo reached on a miscue leading off to get things started and Hawthorne went on to score seven unearned runs. Tyler Charles (2-for-5, 3 RBI, R) drive in a run with a single, and Kyle Grosfick (1-for-2, 2 RBI, 2 R) and Carlos Perez (2-for-4, 3 R, 2 RBI) each drove in two with back-to-back base hits. The Bears entered the inning trailing by six and left with a 12-11 lead.
Hawthorne caught a tough break in the bottom of the fifth when Grosfick, the starting second baseman, injured an ankle after making a nice stop on a groundball up the middle hit by Andrew Podobinsky, who legged out the infield single. Grosfick, who was scheduled to start on the mound on Saturday, had to leave the game in the midst of another Rutherford rally.
Matt Kelly singled before Clare moved both runners into scoring position with a sacrifice bunt. Federico put the Bulldogs in front to stay with a two-run single and Calabrese’s third extra base hit, a triple to left center, in as many innings made it 14-12.
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Hawthorne's Carlos Perez coming across with one of his 3 runs scored. |
For all of the hitting, it was the one scoreless inning that senior Justin Lopez threw in the top of the sixth that really made the difference. Using a knuckle that danced wildly in the wind and some sneaky harder stuff, Lopez struck out the side and stranded two runners to hang up that all important zero.
“It was definitely hard because the wind was blowing out and anything hit in the air was going to travel a long way. And it was cold,” said Lopez, who pitched the final 2 2/3 innings to pick up the win. “If a kid hit a bomb you just get over it because we were doing the same thing and I just kept trying to get outs any way I could.”
Rutherford scored four more times in the bottom of the sixth to give itself enough of a cushion to hold of Hawthorne’s final rally, a two-run bottom of the seventh. Lopez got the final out on a called strike three and the Bulldogs improved to 8-2 on the season and 6-0 in the league, now two games up in the loss column over Hawthorne. With games coming up against Glen Rock and Pompton Lakes, this win Rutherford is forcing some good programs to try to catch it from behind.
“What I have learned through my experience of going for a league title is that anything can happen during the course of the year is that you never have it fully locked up or you are never fully out of it until you see what the math looks like in the last two weeks,” said Spina. “We are just going to try to keeping winning games, keep trying to put the pressure on the other teams and make them try to catch us.”
EDITOR'S NOTE: The statistics used in this article are for entertainment purposes only. As mentioned earlier, the wind was howling off the Passaic River, the infield dirt was swirling around like a Middle Eastern sand storm and it was friggin’ freezing. It was like trying to keep score of a men’s slow-pitch softball game played on the home field of Iceland's national team.
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