The Bridgehampton-Ross School baseball team, in only its second season as a varsity squad since its return from a 43-year hiatus, is set to play Chapel Field High School in upstate Saugerties on Saturday in a regional playoff game.
But for some of Bridgehampton’s baseball Bees, basketball’s still on their minds. That’s because Chapel Field was the team that eliminated Bridgehampton from the state basketball playoffs two years in a row.
“Some of our basketball guys have a tiny chip on their shoulder,” said Scott Vinski, a senior pitcher and first baseman who also played hoops. “We want to win this one. . . . It’ll do justice for the basketball team.”
Vinski was on the mound on May 23 when Bridgehampton beat Port Jefferson 4-2 for the Suffolk County Class C/D championship. He threw a complete game with eight strikeouts, allowing just four hits. His two-run, bases-loaded hit to center field was the key to Bridgehampton’s win, coming just when the team needed it most: at the top of the seventh inning with two outs and the score tied at 2-2.
Port Jeff had swept Bridgehampton in a three-game series earlier in the season, so the Bees’ coach, Lou Liberatore, said it was a sign of real progress.
Four days later, though, Bridgehampton fell to another excellent team, Babylon, in the Suffolk Class B/C/D championship. The score was 7-3. “They’re the best team we’ve played in two years, and probably the best team on Long Island, so we knew that that is the type of team we wanted to play before going upstate,” Liberatore said. “We wanted that challenge and I think that we competed well.”
Kris Vinski, a senior pitcher, first baseman, and left fielder, pitched five innings for Bridgehampton on Saturday, scattering 11 hits and striking out five. Earlier in the season, Babylon shut out Bridgehampton, 7-0, so this, too, was progress.
“They had guys on base all day, but we were able to minimize the amount of runs they scored, which kept us in the game,” Kris Vinski said. “At one point it was a 5-2 ballgame, and we were right there.”
Shawn Genyp, a Ross sophomore who plays at right field, had the team’s biggest hit of the game against Babylon. He put the Bees on the board with a two-run single in the fourth inning that made the score 5-2.
“We worked our way in and out of trouble against them,” Liberatore said. “The positive, offensively, was that we had six guys in the lineup each with a hit, which was a good sign.”
Against Chapel Field, Bridgehampton is planning on playing “our brand of baseball,” Kris Vinski said. “We know we’ll get good outings from our pitchers, so we focus on playing defense behind our pitchers.”
“Our biggest challenge will be the stuff we can control,” Scott Vinski said. “We have to play the way we know we can play.”
Saturday’s state regional playoff game is exactly the kind of contest Bridgehampton, now with an 11-9 record, has been building up to for years. For its six seniors — including the Vinski boys, Dylan Fitzgerald, Jack Boeshore, and Hugo Kapon of Bridgehampton and Yudai Morikawa of Ross — it’ll be one of the biggest games of their high school careers. Scott Vinski will start on the mound.
“We look forward to another real good test,” Liberatore said. “We are a team that continues to get better every day in practice. We’re just going to continue to be us, and we think that’s definitely good enough.”