If all good things must come to an end, Rye High’s 2015 baseball season came to its end a little too soon last Saturday, at Rockland County’s Provident Bank Park against Byram Hills.
By Mitch Silver
If all good things must come to an end, Rye High’s 2015 baseball season came to its end a little too soon last Saturday, at Rockland County’s Provident Bank Park against Byram Hills. The second-seeded Bobcats defeated the defending champs and top-seeded Garnets, 4-3.
Rye High sent senior Tim DeGraw to the hill to duel Byram’s ace Frankie Vesuvio and, though the score was close, Vesuvio eventually did to Rye what his namesake did to the people of Pompeii. Buried them.
The beginning, though, was all Garnet and Black. After setting down the Bobcats in order, DeGraw led off with a ringing double. Junior Tim Hale bunted him over to third and senior Sam Lubeck singled him home.
DeGraw threw another clean inning in the 2nd without allowing a ball out of the infield. Senior Keith Secon walked and junior George Kirby was hit by a pitch with one out in the bottom of the inning. Secon would score on a Vesuvio throwing error before the Bobcats could get out of the inning.
Byram’s pitcher made amends in the top of the third by doubling home a run, cutting the deficit in half. It stayed that way into the visitors’ 4th, when DeGraw yielded a run-scoring two-out double to Jake Stuckelman to knot things up at 2-2. An error, a wild pitch, and a base hit would plate the go-ahead and winning runs before junior Ryan Anderson came on to get the third out.
Anderson was brilliant the rest of the way, giving up a lone single in the 6th after an error. Stuckelman, running on the play, was out at the plate when Lubeck applied the tag.
Meanwhile, Rye would threaten in the 5th. With one out, DeGraw, Rye’s leading hitter and base-stealer on the season, now playing center for the Garnets, stroked his second hit of the day. After Hale flied to left, Lubeck came through once again, singling the run home to pull within 4-3. But when Nick Sapone bobbled the ball in right, Lubeck tried to leg it to third and was gunned down.
That was all Vesuvio needed to close out the game. Aided by a double play in the 6th, he finished off his complete-game, eight-strikeout afternoon by getting Secon, Kirby, and Campbell Schultz for the win and the championship.
— Photos by John Wood
