Good morning!
The MIAA’s new tournament format resulted in a plethora of baseball and softball games that were played this week in Northfield, Turners Falls, Greenfield and South Deerfield. “It’s working the way we hoped,” said MIAA media liaison Nate Bonneau, “we’re finding large and excited crowds.”
The format was implemented to offset the fate of western Mass. champions who invariably got toasted in state finals. “Almost always their enrollment was significantly smaller and they just didn’t have a fighting chance,” said Bonneau. “We worked on the idea of a statewide tournament. We broke them into similar sizes by enrollment so if Nantucket has to go to Greenfield, that’s what it is.”
Actually, the Northampton boys tennis team wound up in Martha’s Vineyard but maybe got a glimpse of James Taylor or Spike Lee.
The Division 5 softball tournament was composed of 39 teams including top-seeded Greenfield, No. 2 Turners Falls and No. 4 Franklin County Tech. At this writing all three were advancing toward the title game next week at Sortino Field at UMass, plus No. 21 Frontier was seeking an upset on Friday afternoon at Tech.
Five local baseball teams played in the tourney but Pioneer was the only one to advance into the Round of 16. The Panthers’ run continued into the quarterfinals after a 10-6 upset over Oxford on Thursday. The others included Tech, which was vanquished by Tahanto Regional of Boylston, Turners Falls, which lost to Smith Voc, and Frontier, which was upset by the Bromfield School of Harvard.
Meanwhile at Vets Field on Monday, a good crowd turned out to watch Tom Suchanek’s Green Wave play Mystic Valley, a regional charter school from Malden about 10 miles north of Fenway Park. Athletic Director Mike Kuchieski was watching infield practice from his golf cart near third base when Deion Brewington and Ryan Pulizari strolled past. “Hi coach,” one of them said.
The longtime grid coach returned the greeting, pleased they were being true to their school. I spotted Brewington in the grandstand near the GHS dugout and asked him what position he’d be playing this season. “I want to run the ball but they might need me on the line,” Brewington said between bites from his plate of chicken and rice that he’d purchased at Tito’s.
The rank-and-file sat in foldout chairs near Kuchieski, and hardcores like Jerry Burgess, Tom Bresciano, Colin Cloutier and Rob Charboneau stood behind the backstop hearing the pop of the ball into the catcher’s mitt.
GHS was hosting three teams in two days from distant locales, but Kuchieski said no one complained about travel expenses. “The umpires are the ones griping about the gas,” he said.
Umpires get $104 for a seven-inning game, not a lot considering Newt Guilbault League umps in Turners Falls are getting $75 for six-inning games in their backyard. Monday’s home plate umpire Andy Rogers drove 70 miles roundtrip from South Hadley to call the balls and strikes. Gas is $5 a gallon, costing him $15 out of pocket and the tax deduction next April means he’ll net about $70. That’s barely enough for two lobster rolls and a $6 tip at the 99 Restaurant.
“Andy’s the parks director in South Hadley,” said Burgess, whose friendship with Rogers likely stems from being a high school and college basketball official. “Don’t call him there though, call him on the golf course.”
It wasn’t long for the faithful to know it wasn’t Greenfield’s day. The gaffes included a balk, a runner got picked off second base, the third baseman and catcher collided on a dropped popup, and the Wave’s Jackson Petrin had the team’s only two hits. “You can’t win many games with two hits,” Suchanek told the Recorder’s Thomas Johnston after the 2-0 loss.
Meanwhile uphill from the Connecticut River in Northfield, Braeden Tsipenyuk, Hugh Cyhowski, Sean Allen, Ian Simpson, Peter Loud, and the brothers Ethan and Jason Quinn were wearing out the bases and pitcher Jared Hubbard had retired the first nine batters during Pioneer’s 11-2 win over Saint Joseph Prep.
“Up and down the lineup we’re used to stringing a lot of hits together,” Panthers coach Kevin Luippold told the Recorder’s George Miller.
Over 300 townsfolk turned out to support their local nine, fascinated by a 19-1 ballclub that had caught lightning in a bottle.
The new format gave schools the opportunity to show off their campuses to new opponents. Greenfield and Turners Falls both boasted freshly mowed athletic fields underneath towering light standards. At Franklin Tech, the lush green softball field was the result of the school’s underground irrigation system. “You can see where the pipes end,” chuckled landscaping instructor Kurt Richardson, pointing to the brown grass beyond the outfield. Richardson said carpentry students had built the dugouts, hewn from hemlock taken from the nearby forest.
At Pioneer, the coaches and players tried to make their field presentable. It was a valiant but fruitless effort to cover up for the school district’s failure to fund capital improvements.
Saint Joseph Prep is a private Catholic school in wealthy Brighton, and the parents arrived in Volvos. What they saw probably made them wonder if they were in Schitt’s Creek. The scoreboard is a broken relic, a black tarp was used as an outfield fence, and a batting cage against the backstop prevented seniors from seeing the game from their cars.
“I’m going to look at the grounds situation from a glass-half-full perspective,” emailed Pioneer superintendent Patricia Kinsella. “Despite any shortcomings there’s a feel-good story about the field. What you saw as deficiencies may be thought of as tasks yet to be addressed.”
Many tasks indeed, and procrastinating is no longer an option. The Panthers host No. 13 Sutton for a spot in the Div. 5 semifinals today at 2 p.m. in Northfield.
Recently we reported that the UMass baseball team’s only appearance in a College World Series was in 1969, but Greenfield’s Bill Pedigree says his brother Bob captained the 1954 team that went to the CWS under coach Earl Lorden. “They won the Regionals at Pynchon Park in Springfield and went to Omaha,” said Pedigree, adding that his brother batted .376 that season.
According to the record book, UMass was 15-7 in 1954 and beat Springfield College, Boston University and Amherst College to advance to the CWS and beat Oregon, but lost to Michigan State and Missouri.
“Earl Lorden was cream of the crop, a nice, nice, nice man. Dick Bergquist was on the team and the catcher was Yogi Wisnewski,” said Pedigree who added that his brother spent five years in the Indians organization.
According to baseball-reference.com Pedigree was an infielder and career .258 hitter who played for teams in Quebec, Illinois, North Carolina, Alabama and Pennsylvania.
Baseball historian Brian Miner adds another name to the short list of major leaguers who were born in Franklin County. Ladislaw Waldemar Wittkowski was born in Orange on September 28, 1895. “His name would later be recorded on a major league lineup card in 1915 for Philadelphia A’s manager Cornelius McGillicuddy (aka Connie Mack, born in East Brookfield). Mack shortened it to Witt and added “Whitey” due to Witt’s blond hair. He was traded to the Yankees and became the first batter to step to the plate inside the House that Ruth built.”
UMass has landed quarterback Ahmad “The Problem” Haston, who will be a senior this year at Palm Beach Central High School in Wellington, Fla. Haston was recruited by defensive backs coach Darrell Perkins to play at UConn, but then Perkins was hired by Don Brown and convinced Haston to join him in Amherst. The talented youngster doesn’t lack for self confidence, telling 247sports.com’s Mike Traini: “My ability to run and throw at an extremely high level is where I got my nickname “The Problem” for opposing defenses.”
Chip Ainsworth is an award-winning columnist who has penned his observations about sports for four decades in the Pioneer Valley. He can be reached at chipjet715@icloud.com