By:KEITH GRANT
Sailors season ends in extra innings
For eight innings, Nick Conte did his best to fend off the end of the dream ride the Sailors have ridden for over a year.
The defending New York Class A baseball champions set sail Monday in search of a return trip to the state tournament. It took extra innings in Monday's Long Island final to finally being their ride to an end.
Suffolk champion Longwood plated two runs in the ninth to break up a scoreless game, then fended off an Oceanside rally to end the Sailors' season. For eight innings before that, Conte and Longwood's David Wood matched zeros on the scoreboard before an overflow crowd at Hofstra. Neither side even launched a serious threat until the ninth.
Leading off the top half of the ninth for Longwood, Bryan Hansen sliced a double just inside the leftfield line, only the second hit of the game off Conte. After a one-out intentional walk to Wood, Mike Brillante lined one just over the glove of shortstop CJ China to score the only run Longwood would need. A wild pitch with Wood on third added an insurance score.
That second run looked like it would be a big one when Oceanside finally mounted a threat of its own in the bottom of the ninth. With one out, thirdbasemen Dom DiDomenico, the hero of the county final last week, battled Wood to a full count. After a foul tip to stay alive, DiDomenico grounded a single through the right side to give Oceanside life. He was just their third baserunner since the second inning.
China followed with another two-strike hit, a blooper that fell into shallow rightfield. Suddenly, Oceanside had the tying run on base and the winning run at the plate.
With several hundred fans on each side standing and feeling the tension, Wood fell behind Oceanside's Billy Weitzman 2-0 and 3-1, but finally got the Sailors' DH to loft a harmless full-count fly ball to centerfield for the second out. Wood then wasted no time with catcher Brendan Harrigan, catching him looking at a curveball to end the game.
Oceanside's season ended with a record of 22-6. All was far from lost, though, as the ballclub did claim its second straight Nassau County Class A championship, edging out East Meadow last week in a three-game thriller. Having split the first two games of the best-of-three series, the Sailors snagged the title with an extra-inning game-winning hit by DiDomenico for a 6-5 victory on Friday.
With the game tied at five, second baseman John Alto picked up a one-out single. DiDomenico then laced an 0-2 fastball into the right-center field gap to score Alto and ignite a mob scene celebration at home plate.
A pair of unlikely heroes, Brendan Springstubb and John Jata--both put in positions that neither had been in all year--propelled Oceanside to its second straight county final the previous week, helping defeat South Side 2-1. Jata, making his first start of the year, pitched a brilliant game as he limited the Cyclones of South Side to only five hits. He didn't allow a single Cyclone runner past second base for the final six innings.
Springstubb's hit in the bottom of the sixth inning of that contest scored pinch runner Frank Valariano for the winning run. Conte, the leading hitter in the county in the regular season, crushed a one out double the opposite way to put the winning run on base. With Valariano pinch running, Jon Kourie hit a sacrifice fly to center, moving the runner 90 feet from home for Springstubb.
A pitcher, first basemen and occasional DH, Springstubb found himself in the unfamiliar territory of rightfield for the final frame. With two outs and the tying run on second, Springstubb put away a fly ball for the final out.
[ITALICS] David Muchnick contributed to this story.
