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McDonald advances in Div. IV baseball
By john bassetti
McDonald
Before boarding the bus, Lowellville coach Sam Pitzulo urged his players not to leave the dugout a pigsty as they gathered their equipment and any other items that may have collected during the game.
Not that the area was a mess, but, nonetheless, they complied and then left.
In a sense, it was McDonald that cleaned up the place as the Blue Devils (18-3) beat Lowellville, 12-5, in a Division IV baseball sectional final Friday.
Despite giving up two home runs to Bryan Rossodivita and another one to Mike Petronek, Anthony Raschilla’s five-hitter and seven strikeouts kept the clamps on the visitors.
“He gave up three home runs to a good team,” Alan Stanley, McDonald’s first-year coach, said. “We faced them early in the season [a season-opening 7-4 McDonald win] and they put the ball in play. Down at Cene [Park] you’re not going to have three home runs, but they’re a good fastball-hitting team and they approach the plate well. They laid off his offspeed for the most part and they hit fastballs. They made him [Raschilla] work and they made him hit spots. Bottom line, we were good enough in the end to outscore them.”
To help Raschilla, McDonald had 13 hits, including a double and single by Anthony Raschilla himself. Mike Raschilla had three singles, Devin Bansberg had a home run and single, Will Robison had a double and single and David John and Matt Gatta added two singles for the Blue Devils, who will face Columbiana in a district semifinal next Thursday at Cene Park.
McDonald didn’t play Columbiana this year; it was eliminated by the Clippers last season in the district semifinals.
“They beat us up pretty good,” Stanley said of 2009. “We kind of know what to expect out of them. They’re well-coached. We’re not going to throw the white flag. We’re going to dig in.”
On Friday, however, McDonald stranded 12 runners.
“When you’re in a game and battling back and forth and you realize, at the time, we’d left 11 on base, you’re kind of scratching your head,” Stanley said. “But we felt that if we kept the same approach, sooner or later, we’d get that key hit and we did.”
Bansberg’s home run in the bottom of the fifth tied the game, 4-4. Gatta’s hit to score pinch-runner David Ritz put McDonald ahead for good.
The “approach” Stanley mentioned was to take Alfano deep in the pitch count with hopes of wearing him down.
“We faced him early in the season and he beat us. We tried to be patient and tried to lay off his offspeed. It looked like early he was having some trouble locating it, and I give credit to my guys because, sometimes, you can say ‘lay off the offspeed,’ but that’s hard to do.
“Yet we were able to [refrain from swinging] and we got him deep into [the pitch count] a couple innings. We felt that if we kept that same approach, eventually, whether we got to him or whether we didn’t get to him, his pitch count would get to the point where they had to take him out.”
Anthony Raschilla’s explanation for McDonald’s success now is simple: “It’s the way we battle back,” the senior said. “We were down in the early innings [4-3 in the fourth], but came back and won.”