A pair of defeats in Section III Class A championship games stuck with every veteran player on the Christian Brothers Academy baseball team, who made quite sure it didn’t happen a third straight time.
Buoyed by a nine-run outburst in the top of the third inning, the Brothers completed its unlikely run from an 8-11 regular season and no. 12 seed to the sectional title by defeating Fulton 11-4 Monday night at Onondaga Community College.
Jack Sheridan, who came back from leukemia to emerge as CBA’s top pitcher, said that all his team needed to turn around its fortunes was to find some success at the plate.
“Going into sectionals, I knew we had good pitching and defense,” said Sheridan. “We just had to get the bats going.”
Someone was going to end a long stretch of frustration. CBA had lost each of the last two sectional finals – to Jamesville-DeWitt in 2014, to Vernon-Verona-Sherrill in 2015.
But at least the Brothers got that far. Fulton had not played in a sectional baseball title game since 1972, so it didn’t want to squander this long-awaited opportunity.
Fulton pitcher Will Caster was going on three days’ rest, and CBA went after him in the top of the first. Nate Burns walked, stole second and scored on Bryce Moore’s triple. Jack Sheridan walked and then stole second, but Dom Spinoso flew out, preventing a bigger rally.
Sheridan gained some early confidence on the mound when he got out of two-on, nobody-out jam in the bottom of the first, and did the same thing again in the second inning when, with two on and two out, Michael Bolster grounded out.
As it turned out, Fulton’s best chance to win was gone, for in the top of the third the Brothers delivered a deluge.
Another Burns walk in the top of the third led to another run when Eric Little tripled Burns home. Then Sheridan found the gap for a double that scored Little and Moore, and when two more singles led to another run that made it 5-0, Caster was out after 2 1/3 innings.
Nolan Bonnie relieved Caster, but the CBA parade of runs continued. Following Brian McCann’s sacrifice fly, Burns came back to the plate for the second time in the inning and this time produced an RBI single.
A throwing error made it 8-0, and Little, giving himself three RBIs for the third inning alone, hit a two-run single before a groundout ended it. In all, 13 men came came to the plate and nine of them scored.
Fulton didn’t withdraw from the battle, though, scoring twice in the bottom of the third and again in the fourth to force the Brothers to take out Sheridan after just 3 1/3 innings, relieved by David Gross, who surrendered another run on a wild pitch, but avoided further damage.
Dom Spinoso took over on the mound in the fifth inning and settled things down further. In his three innings of work, Spinoso allowed just two hits and one walk and, by doing so, made sure CBA claimed the sectional banner.
CBA will play in the Class A regional final Saturday against the Section II-Section X winner, just one victory away from an appearance in the state final four June 11 at Union-Endicott High School.
