60.0°,
Mostly Cloudy Mepham tops East Meadow
Mepham freshman pitcher Toni Marie Valeriano started hot by retiring eight of the first nine batters she faced, and the offense did its damage over the final five innings, scoring all of its runs in a 10-2 win at East Meadow last Friday in a Nassau Conference AA-I softball game.
The victory snapped a three-game losing streak on the softball field for the Lady Pirates, who finished the conference season with an 8-6 mark.
“East Meadow’s a very good team,” Mepham coach Mike Muscara said. “We lost a tough one to them the first time around, 8-6, when we were up 6-1 and they came back. We needed a big win like this to get ready for the playoffs.”
The Lady Pirates scored two runs in the third, one in the fourth, three in the fifth and a pair in each of the final two innings. Junior catcher Claudia Law led the offense with three hits and three runs batted in, sophomore Alexis Ferraro drove in a pair and eight different players scored at least once. Senior Victoria Gunnels had three hits, including a run-scoring triple that took one bounce and went over the wall in deep center in the sixth and drove in Law.
“She came out throwing hard and throwing well,” Lady Jets coach Cindy McCarthy said of Valeriano, who pitched a complete game and allowed two runs on six hits with three walks and five strikeouts. “She was definitely jamming our hitters [early on].”
Defending county champion East Meadow, which fell to 8-5 in Conference AA-I with one game remaining, scored once in the fifth and once in the sixth. Senior Jamie Laird plated senior Samantha Miller with an RBI single in the fifth, and freshman Claire Travis drove home sophomore Taylor Conti in the next inning with a single off the glove of Mepham’s junior third baseman, Casey Thomas, that ended up in short left field.
Mepham erased a pair of East Meadow runners at third base and another at home with two of the outs ending an inning. In the fifth, sophomore Taylor Conti grounded softly to first base, and sophomore Danielle Cutuli was thrown out at home on a perfect throw from Gunnels to Law. Syers lined out to Valeriano to end an inning in which East Meadow had put two runners on base with no one out and came away empty. “We played a great game all the way around,” Muscara said.
After putting runners on base but failing to score in each of the first two innings, Mepham finally broke through with a pair runs in the third against junior pitcher Amanda Carlin. Gunnels followed a leadoff double to junior Nicole Pazienza and a one-out walk to Law with an infield single to shortstop. Taking an aggressive approach, Muscara waved Pazienza home on the infield hit, and she managed to slide under the tag of senior catcher Jesse Gallagher at the plate.
