Cougars pitching leads way to semis

Kennedy captured its first baseball regular-season conference championship in five seasons, earned a first-round bye in the Nassau County Class AA playoffs and then knocked off No. 7 Carey, the defending Long Island champions in the quarterfinal round.

Up next is the Cougars’ biggest test yet: second-seeded MacArthur in a best-of-three semifinal pairing this week. “It’s all about the pitching,” Kennedy coach Eric Passman said. “Scoring opportunities are going to be tough to come by, so our pitchers have to hold up and keep [the Generals] off the bases.”

If the Cougars (17-4 overall, 13-2 in Conference AA-III) needed any sort of a confidence boost, they would have to look back no further than last week, when they knocked off the Seahawks in consecutive games to sweep the best-of-three quarterfinal series. “[Beating] Carey was a tremendous confidence boost,” Passman said. “They’re a very good baseball team and very well-coached.”

In the series-clinching game, a 10-0 victory, senior Noah Shulman provided all the run support senior pitcher Adam Swersky would need. Senior second baseman David Leiderman helped tack on some more runs by driving in three, as the Cougars closed in a big way, scoring eight combined runs in the fifth and sixth innings. Swersky went the distance, allowing just three hits and striking out 11.

“He was virtually unhittable,” Passman said of Swersky. “We were struggling [offensively] until the fifth. [Carey] was throwing a lot of off-speed pitches. Once we started staying back, we were getting hits.”

Staked to a three-run lead in the first inning of the opening game on May 16, senior Jordan Boyer pitched a complete game, in a 4-2 Kennedy victory. Unlike Swersky who was supported by some late-game offensive fireworks, Boyer was forced to make his early lead stand up, even as the Seahawks climbed back into the game with single runs in the fourth and fifth innings. “We had enough timely hits,” Passman said. “We didn’t kill the ball, but we got two-out hits with runners in scoring position. [Sometimes] timely hits are better than a lot of hits.”

And sometimes, bloops can be better than blasts, as Kennedy proved in the first inning. A two-run single by junior Jake Schwartz plated junior Michael McCormick and Leiderman, each of whom singled. Senior Brandon Serota capped the strong start with an RBI walk. Shulman, who finished the two-game series 6-for-8 at the plate, drove in the final run with a sacrifice fly in the fourth. “We had the right people up at the right time,” Passman said.

The wins gave the Cougars four in a row over the Seahawks in a span of just seven days. The two teams also met in the final regular-season series with Kennedy winning the last two. The final victory clinched the regular-season Conference AA-III title and extended the program’s run of playoff appearances to five. The semifinal matchup marks the second time in three seasons Kennedy will square off with the Generals in the Final Four.

“The guys know the pressure and understand the pressure,” Passman said of his team, which is led by 14 seniors.