BSP bats pound Princeton
LAWRENCE » Kyle Harrington wishes he had found this kind of success much earlier in his senior season at Hamilton High.
After his high school baseball team battled through a .500 season, and shortly after Harrington graduated from Hamilton West, this senior headed to Mercer County Community College is on a Broad Street Park Post 313 baseball team that has taken the Mercer County American Legion League by storm.
Two years after tying for the MCALL regular-season title, Post 313 is back on top of the league and has already swept defending champ Hamilton Post 31.
With its five-inning, 15-1 win over Princeton Post 218 at Barbara Smoyer Park Sunday, manager Mike Petrowski’s team improved to 11-1 with 10 games to go in the 2017 regular season. Broad Street Park has a 2 ½-game lead on Post 31 and Bordentown Post 26.
“I don’t know what the difference is. I wish I did,” Harrington said about his team’s start this summer compared to his 12-13 spring season with the Hornets. “Both Coach Petrowski and Coach (Mark) Pienciak (at Hamilton High) are great. I don’t know if we just got tired of losing, or if now that it’s summer, we feel more free. I really expected us to be competitors since the spring season began.”
Harrington came out pounding the ball Sunday. His one-out triple to center field in the first inning chased around Jose Rodriguez (walk) with Post 313’s first run.
In the second inning, he came up with the bases loaded and two outs and promptly doubled to center, clearing the bases.
From there, it became that kind of day for Post 218, which had drawn as close as 2-1 in the bottom of the first inning.
“All I know is I’m hitting more now,” Harrington said. “I think I was tired of feeling pressured. But mostly, I think I realized that I shouldn’t have been giving myself pressure.”
More relaxed now, Harrington went 2-for-3 with four runs scored and five runs batted in out of the No. 3 hole for BSP against Princeton. He also made things easier on cleanup hitter Cameron Bruschini, who went 3-for-4 with two runs and two RBIs.
In doing so, they made life hard on Post 218, which dropped its third straight after upsetting Lawrence Post 414 Friday.
“It seems like something always goes wrong, but we keep on fighting,” said Zach Dudeck, a Princeton Day School grad who will head to RPI (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institure) in Troy, N.Y. this fall to major in architecture and continue his athletic career.
Usually the center fielder for manager Tom Parker’s team, Dudeck was called upon to pitch in relief of starter Owen Seals, something he had not done since Little League. By that point in the fourth inning, a 10-run decision was already a possibility, but that was not the way the game appeared to be going early on.
Princeton (2-10) loaded the bases twice in the first three innings against BSP starter Tim Sharpley, but only managed one run. After walking and scoring Post 218’s first run, Dudeck doubled in the third inning and appeared to come around on a single by Teddy Durbin (2-for-3), but was called out on an appeal that he had missed third base.
Harrington and Broad Street Park had no such troubles. He reached base all four times he came to the plate, and Post 313 scored a run in every inning.
Connor Hayes’ two-run single capped a six-run fourth before T.J. McKenzie’s RBI ground out with the bases loaded plated Harrington (walk) in the fifth ahead of Connor Luckie’s second RBI of the day on a sacrifice fly which scored Bruschini (single) to keep BSP at the head of the class.