Playing in pea soup fog, East Hampton High’s baseball team made it clear with its 4-1 season-opening win here Monday over the defending Long Island AA champion, Hauppauge, that the Bonackers will contend this spring for the League V title.
Finn O’Rourke, East Hampton’s starter, was masterful, striking out nine Eagles, walking two, and giving up two hits during the course of the six and one-third innings he pitched. The run Hauppauge scored was unearned.
With one out in the top of the seventh inning, Vinny Alversa, Bonac’s coach, brought in Tyler Hansen, a flame thrower, to close out the victory, which he did, notching strikeouts amid a dropped fly ball in left field.
The game was tied at 1-1 for quite a while. The Bonackers broke it open with three runs in the sixth. Hudson Beckmann drove in the game-winner. Others who came through at the plate for East Hampton that day were Livs Kuplins, who went two-for-two with two runs batted in, and Mason Miles, who went two-for-three with a run scored.
The senior-heavy team is to play at Hauppauge tomorrow and is to wind up the series here Thursday.
East Hampton was not mentioned in Newsday’s high school baseball preview on Sunday. But when mention was made of the next day’s big win, Alversa, who three weeks ago had predicted his charges would win the title, said he didn’t mind, that he preferred flying under the radar.
