Spartans’ comeback falls short in D2 baseball tourney

GREAT BARRINGTON – Monument Mountain may have been fortunate to have the number one seed in this year’s Division 2 Western Mass. tournament, however, their fortunes ran out when Southwick came to town on Monday.

Southwick built a 9-0 lead in the sixth inning as the Spartans battled back to score five runs in the bottom half before falling 11-5, ending their Western Mass. title aspirations.

“It wasn’t much of a comeback – we didn’t come to play today, and it’s extremely disappointing,” said Monument Head Coach Tom Hankey. “Southwick took it to us and they deserved to win the game.”

Monument committed five errors on the day and was plagued with spotty pitching performances from Peter Oggiani, Christian Callahan, and James Allentuck. All three battled keeping the ball down in the zone as Southwick pounded out a RBI double in the first and a RBI triple in the third to build a 3-0 lead.

“We weren’t executing our pitches and they took advantage of every mistake we made, whether it was on the pitch or some errors we made, and this time in the tournament, you can’t do that,” Hankey said.

Southwick built a 4-0 lead in the fourth when a shortstop error and an overthrow at first by the Spartans’ catcher on a sacrifice bunt led to an unearned run.

Monument went on to allow three more runs in the fifth, when Nick Fortini hit a two-out single followed by another Spartan error, with both runners scoring when Bob Hamel hit a double down the right-field line.

“We weren’t sharp today,” Hankey said.

One person who can be omitted from that comment was senior first baseman Dan Meandro, who had four hits on the day, including two doubles. Meandro’s last double gave the Spartans their first two runs of the game.

“I am very proud of Danny – he worked the whole off-season and it showed today – so I was proud to see him finish off his career with a four-hit day,” Hankey said.

The future is still bright for the Spartans, who will lose only Meandro next year and will return their entire pitching staff rotation.

“We are a young team, and we are going to be better next year – all those young guys you saw out there, we are going to be so much better next year,” said junior shortstop Bobby Kinne.

Posted by Tim Davis on June 6, 2013. Filed under High School Sports,Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry