SPRINGFIELD, Mass. – There’s dominant, and then there’s the Mount Greylock baseball team’s pitching staff in the Western Massachusetts tournament.
Jack Cangelosi Wednesday struck out 10 and allowed no hits in leading the Mounties to a 10-0 win over Frontier in the Class C Championship game at Springfield College.
The Mounties concluded a playoff run in which they outscored opponents 22-0 in three games: a perfect game from Derek Paris in the quarter-finals, a five-hitter from Cangelosi in Friday’s semis and Wednesday, when Cangelosi kept the Red Hawks off the bases for 5-? innings and "settled" for a no-hitter.
The only hiccup, minor though it was, came on an error in the sixth, but that runner went nowhere, and Cangelosi retired the next four batters in order.
“These guys got eight hits off me last time,” Cangelosi said of Frontier in a 3-0 regular-season loss to the Mounties. “But Derek caught an amazing game at the plate today. I give a lot of the credit to him. He did amazing, the defense did amazing. They always do great for me.
“I was able to execute today. I’m happy with how I pitched.”
And Mount Greylock coach Rick Paris is happy to have his Division I-bound son catching for the dangerous southpaw Cangelosi and occasionally stepping out to the mound himself.
“Almost two perfect games – one call away, a really, really close call, too,” Rick Paris said. “What can you say? Jack is just a professional out there. He’s so darned good. And he hits his spots.
“[Frontier’s batters] were toeing the line at the plate, and he would just hit that corner – constantly hit that inside corner. He wasn’t afraid to come inside. A lot of pitchers, when someone is toeing the line, they stay away, stay away. Jack’s not that guy. He’ll come in on you.”
Cangelosi set the tone early each inning, striking out the first hitter in each of the first six innings, and he closed the game with punchout No. 10 to touch off the Mounties’ celebration.
In between, Frontier managed to get just two balls out of the infield. But that does not mean the Mounties’ defense could totally relax.
“We had a big play by Derek on that one little hopper in front of the plate where he got up and just got the guy at first,” Rick Paris said. “That was a huge play. And [third baseman] Thomas Martin in the first had those two plays coming up and getting those slow ground balls to get the guy at first base.
“Those are a couple of big plays during the game, and you’ve always got to have those.”
Midway through the game, Cangelosi was thinking that a perfect game might be in play, though he did not hear a peep from his teammates about it.
“Usually, it’s around the fourth inning,” he said of the thought process. “Maybe it was a little earlier this time because Derek got a perfect game last week, so I was like, ‘Oh, maybe I’ll do it, too.’ “
It helped that his offense gave him an early cushion and just kept tacking on runs.
Paris reached on an infield single in the bottom of the first. He then stole second, moved to third on Chase Doyle’s single and scored on an RBI groundout by Landen Jamula.
Jamula would go on to a 2-for-3 day with a walk and five RBIs.
In the second, Jackson Shelsy led off with a triple to ignite a three-run rally. Although the crooked number opened a four-run lead, the Mounties did leave the bases loaded, but that did not concern Rick Paris.
“I don’t think I was worried, because once we get three or more with Jack, I think we’re pretty comfortable,” he said. “But at the same time, I don’t want these guys to know we’re comfortable.”
Instead of resting on their laurels, the Mounties added two runs in the fourth and four in the fifth.
In the fourth, Cangelosi helped his cause with a leadoff double. In the fifth, Martin got things started with a leadoff triple.
“That’s what I like to see,” Paris said. “They kept putting guys on base, kept trying to score runs. They stayed up. The last time we played these guys, we scored early, but then we faded away after the second inning, and I think we scored three runs but didn’t do anything the rest of the game.
“Here, we just stayed at it.”
