Things May Go Better on Bonac’s Diamonds

Win or lose, things are expected to go better this year on East Hampton High School’s baseball and softball diamonds.

Annemarie Cangiolosi Brown, the new head softball coach, and her assistant (and first cousin), Melanie Anderson, said they were pleased with what they’d seen following a scrimmage here with Pierson High on March 19.

By the same token, Vinny Alversa, the baseball team’s coach, said following an 11-3 nonleague loss here to Mattituck on Friday — a game that the Bonackers led 3-1 going into the fourth inning — that “if we can continue to put the ball in play, and if our pitching is consistent, we should be able to play with anybody.”

“Mattituck had 12 hits, we had 10,” Alversa said, “but we left 13 on base, so, obviously, we need to get more timely hits.”

Pitching-wise, it could have been better. Kurt Matthews, a senior and, along with Austin Brown and James Foster, one of the team’s captains, got through two bases-loaded jams without incident in the early going, but things began to unravel in the fourth after Matthews loaded the bases again. Jackson Baris came on in relief, but he had control problems too.

Alversa and Henry Meyer, once teammates, and pitchers, on the Islandwide semipro-champion East End Tigers, can be expected to help Matthews, who at times has been spot-on, and Baris, whose delivery is smooth, brush up on their mechanics. They’re both hard-throwing. “You want them to be pitchers rather than throwers,” Alversa said, adding that in a summer league game Matthews had totaled only 103 pitches in 10 innings. On Friday, in four innings, he totaled 92. 

“For half the game, we did quite well,” the coach said. “Now, we’ve just got to play the full seven.”

It should be added that East Hampton turned a 5-4-3 double play that day, an around-the-horn D.P., the ball going from Elian Abreu, who started at third base, to Brown, to Colin Ruddy, the tall freshman who’s playing first base, prompting this writer to say he hadn’t seen that in a while, a long while.

Abreu, moreover, drove in all of East Hampton’s runs with opposite-field line drives. More of his hitters should do likewise, said Alversa, when this writer noted he’d seen a lot of them waving at curves out of the strike zone.

Further concerning the buoyant dugout mood, Alversa said a lot of it was owing to his captains, the aforementioned Matthews, Brown, and Foster, who was to have returned to the lineup this week after rehabbing a broken hand the past four or so months.

“The good news,” said Alversa, “is that our first league game isn’t until April 9. . . . If we play with the intensity we had in the first four innings the other day, and if we throw strikes, we’ll be all right,” the coach said.

How the softball team will do this season remains to be seen, but so far, so good. “They hit well and ran the bases aggressively in the scrimmage with Pierson,” Cangiolosi Brown said during a telephone conversation Sunday.

First off, Sophia Swanson, the junior pitcher, and Katrina Osterberg, the sophomore catcher, couldn’t have better coaching than they’ll get from Brown, whose pitching records still stand at the State University at Cortland, and from Anderson, who was Bloomsburg University’s catcher in two college World Series.

Swanson is primarily a fastball pitcher at the moment, though Brown said she would work with her so the junior can add others to her repertoire.

Defensively, the team looked good, the coach added. To bolster the infield, Rebecca Kuperschmid has moved to shortstop from center field. An eighth grader, Emily Kennedy, is at third, Maddie Brown, a ninth grader, is at second, and Ella Gurney, a senior, is back at first.

Erin Decker, a senior, is in left field, Emma Silvera, a junior, is in center, and Raven Biondo, a senior, is in right. Osterberg, who has a good arm, is, as aforesaid, behind the plate. 

Biondo hit leadoff in the Pierson scrimmage, followed by Swanson, Osterberg, Kuperschmid, Silvera, Gurney, Kennedy, Brown, Decker, and, in the 10th spot, Claire Hopkins, a senior outfielder.

“We’re toying with the idea of a designated player,” said Coach Brown, “which can give you more options. Reale used to do that,” she said of Lou Reale, East Hampton’s former coach, for whom both Brown and Anderson played.