Carl Yastrzemski Leads Hall of Fame Inductees
Carl Yastrzemski, the major league baseball great, Billy DePetris, and William Stavropoulos, who won county championships in six-man football, basketball, and baseball under the Bridgehampton School banner in the mid-1950s, the late Killer Bees basketball coach John Niles, and Sandy McFarland, who starred in track at East Hampton High School and at Syracuse University, are to be inducted into Bridgehampton’s Hall of Fame on Nov. 16.
The announcement was made at the Bridgehampton School Board meeting this week.
“We understand that Carl is coming,” Carl Johnson, the present Killer Bees coach and a member of the Hall of Fame committee, said of Yastrzemski, who lives in the Boston area. McFarland, an elementary school principal in Concord, N.C., who was unable to attend her recent induction into East Hampton High School’s Hall of Fame, is expected to attend the Bridgehampton ceremony, which Johnson said would be held at the school at 6 p.m.
McFarland still holds the outdoor 400-meter record at Syracuse, where she competed in indoor and outdoor track, and was the Big East’s indoor 400 champion.
Yastrzemski, who played his entire career for the Boston Red Sox, from 1961 to 1983, led the team to the World Series twice, and won baseball’s triple crown (most home runs, most runs batted in, and highest batting average) in 1967. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, N.Y., in 1989.
Niles coached the school’s boys basketball team, the Killer Bees, to state championships in 1984 and 1986. Niles said his ’86 team, which won with ease the county’s small schools championship and the state championship (Bridgehampton’s fifth such), was a singular one.
The New York State Sportswriters Association agreed. Its weekly newsletter at the time declared that “the Bridgies are too good for Class D ball — the best Class D team we have ever seen.”
Troy Bowe, Julian Johnson, Ronnie Gholson, Darryl Hemby, Chris Parker, and Tim Jackson were among Niles’s players that year.
Carl Johnson, who is the only coach in the state to have won three state championships as a player and three as a coach, said that all members of the Hall’s first class were Bridgehampton graduates.
It was only because of that requirement that the late Roger Golden, credited as the creator of the high-pressure Killer Bees style of play, was not included among the inductees this year, he said.