Baseball mismatch raises lots of questions, with not many good answers
day of the Connecticut high school baseball season brought a bright sun, a chilly breeze and Fairfield Ludlowe’s 36-0 spike-stomping of Wright Tech.
The CIAC 10-run mercy rule was invoked after 41⁄2 innings. If the game had gone the full seven, we leave it up to your imagination to what the final score might have been.
Two questions need to be asked after such an embarrassing score:
What did Fairfield Ludlowe do to avoid piling on the runs?
Why was this game scheduled in the first place?
In Wright Tech’s case, there is another question. What is the fledgling Stamford program doing also playing Wilton and Westhill, the state’s No. 1-ranked team, within the next week?
A final score is as simple as a number, a hyphen, and another number. Yet there can be several explanations for a particular result.
At Hearst Connecticut and GameTimeCT, we are not in the game of cover-up. We are in the game of informing, explaining and, on a good day, entertaining.
Mature questions deserve maOpening ture answers from coaches and athletic directors, both in the spirit of mutual understanding and because the schools involved are public and taxpayer-funded.
Repeated attempts to reach Ludlowe coach Ken Geriak and athletic director Todd Parness were unsuccessful. Geriak did contact another member of Hearst Connecticut Media to say he had no public comment. So what he did or didn’t do to take his foot off the gas during the game will go unreported here. I’m not printing hearsay. Why did Ludlowe schedule such a game? Also unknown.
I first saw the 36-0 score in a tweet from the Ludlowe baseball account. That tweet later disappeared, replaced by another one marking the program’s 200th victory and first head coaching win by Geriak. There was no mention of the score.
The results of the game Saturday were not sent in to GameTimeCT or any of the Hearst publi
cations. On Ludlowe’s CIAC site, the game is listed, but not on its MaxPreps site. I can’t find a linescore anywhere. In fact, the best I got is Wright Tech coach Brian Colantonio saying it was 15-0 after one inning
“You don’t make any plays,” Colantonio said. “That’s it. That simple. Errors. Pops it up for you. You drop the pop-up. Fly ball to center field. Nothing. Ground ball to short. Nothing. Literally. That’s the story.”
We grow accustomed to 18-3 and 19-5 games in the spring. In a game with no clock, time management is out the window. But 36-0 is awful. It isn’t the worst. Four years ago in Massachusetts, Old Rochester beat Notre Dame Cristo Rey 82-0. Turns out Old Rochester scheduled the wrong school. There’s a 109-0 game in Iowa in 1928. Those two games were played without mercy rules.
Last year, winless Bridgeport Central lost 10 games by more than 20 runs. The worst was 27-0. Programs struggle. All those losses also were to fellow FCIAC schools.
Although they were mismatches, they were league games.
Wright Tech is in the CTC. It is only in its second year returning as a varsity team. Colantonio, a history teacher at Wright Tech, is entering his fifth season with the program, the first two before the COVIDcanceled spring when he developed a junior varsity. Enrollment figures at Wright Tech show about 70 boys per class. He counted six freshman starters against Ludlowe and 23 total players in the program.
“We are given our base schedule by the CTC,” Wright Tech athletic director Robert Kucharski responded in an email. “I then have to reach out to other schools to fill our schedule. In some cases I am able to get a second game with other CTC teams, but it is not always a given that I can get those. I have to look for other teams and I usually tend to try and schedule teams that are a close distance. Our students come from Greenwich and as far as Westport and Bridgeport. We schedule games that are close to avoid our students having to get home late at night.”
Besides Wilton on Friday, Westhill next Tuesday and Sheehan on May 3, Wright Tech had a nonconference 12-2 loss to Hillhouse/Career on Monday.
“Scheduling takes place as early as the year prior and there is no way to predict how our team or opposing teams will be,” Kucharski said. “We are a young team this year and we are still in our infancy. I have no problem with the teams that are on our schedule and am confident that our team will learn from whomever they play.
“In the case of Sheehan, our coach is an alumni and asked to have that game scheduled. Unfortunately (with other nonconference games), we are surrounded by very large schools as we are the only S school in our region.”
As Kucharski points out, there are more boys in one Westhill class than Wright Tech’s entire school.
“Hillhouse is a team that is sort of in our caliber,” Colantonio said. “We have a game against Wilton, which is better than Fairfield Ludlowe. Westhill should win the state championship. We play Sheehan, where I played ball, which has a ton of state championships in their past.
“As long as the kids aren’t too demoralized, the experience I think it is beneficial.”
How did the kids take 36-0?
“In stride,” Colantonio said. “They know that we are a developing program. They know there are going to be losses. They know there are going to be bad losses. Fairfield Ludlowe is a good, established program, certainly better than us, but shouldn’t be blowing us away with more than 30 runs. For some of my guys that was their first varsity action and it showed.
“You have to contextualize it. As a coach, before I took on this team, I coached in Wallingford, coached the Legion team. Those are good teams. You don’t expect to lose by 30 runs, but for this team they are aware of who we are playing, our age level and their own limitations. I do think it benefits them to see baseball played well.”
After the loss, Colantonio said, the team got off the bus and caught Westhill playing Hall at Cubeta Stadium.
“Incredible game,” he said. “Two good teams. My kids stayed and watched. They wanted to see really good baseball. I think at the end of the day the pros outweigh the cons. Again, contextualize it; if there’s a story about it in the Stamford Advocate about how they got clobbered 36-0, that might be a little more demoralizing.”
That’s interesting. So if I write a piece it would be worse because they might deem their 36-0 loss more negatively than if there wasn’t a story.
“Yeah,” Colantonio said. “I know that. We’re talking about kids who have very limited experience at this level. I had two of my best players out with injuries. I pitched a kid who wasn’t totally clear how to pitch from a set. They’re freshmen playing varsity ball who frankly aren’t ready to play varsity ball.
“(By playing), they are able to analyze the game and we can show them what they want to work on. They want to be better. They want to improve. Obviously, if they see on the news or in the Stamford Advocate the score, that’s going to be significantly more demoralizing when other people tell them how bad they are. You can imagine being a 14-, 15-year-old and seeing it. Look, I’m not knocking sports reporting or your work whatsoever. I’m just saying that’s reality of the situation.”
Asked if he had to do it over, if he’d play Ludlowe again, Colantonio answered, “Yeah, oh yeah, yeah. We weren’t our best: 36-0 against Westhill, OK, OK, I can buy that even at our best. Frankly, I don’t do the scheduling. I would not schedule a game against Westhill or Wilton, either Norwalk school. Fairfield Ludlowe is on that cusp. Stamford High right on that cusp. I think our kids can get a lot more from Fairfield Ludlowe or a Stamford than Westhill. I’m a little nervous about that one.”
I empathize with Colantonio. But these games against talented FCIAC teams shouldn’t be happening right now. Scrimmages? Great. Learn. Improve. Not regular-season varsity high school games. No, it’s not the major leagues, but it isn’t T-ball either. Westhill will have to play its JV to keep the score under 35. And what is it doing playing the game in the first place?
It’s up to the adults to protect the integrity of the competition by this level, not up to the media to hide the linescore.