Manchester ousted
Manchester eliminated from LL World Series by Toms River, N.J.
In the beginning, there was hope. The Manchester Little League team, facing elimination from the Little League World Series with a loss, scored first. In the third inning, Jacob Budarz crushed a two-run homer over the center field fence.
But then it all unraveled and the Toms River (N.J.) team rallied from a three-run deficit and went on to beat Manchester 11-4 Saturday at Lamade Field in Williamsport, Pa.
Toms River advances to play the loser of Sunday’s Michigan-Texas game, and Manchester, at some point, will return home, although travel plans were uncertain, manager Rob Rastelli said, due to the forecasted hurricane.
“Obviously, nobody wants to go home when you get here,” Rastelli said. “We told them it’s OK to be upset. When that goes away, we’re going to look back and remember that we were one of the top 16 teams in the country playing here.
“We came in, we played our game. We hit home runs. We had some base hits. We had pretty good offense. We had some pretty good pitching right up till the end there.”
Manchester, which lost 9-1 to Hawaii in its opening game Thursday, looked solid early on. Arlen Peyman, who hit a home run in his first at-bat Thursday, opened the game with a double and scored on a Budarz single. In the third inning, it was Budarz who smacked a home run, scoring Alex Rastelli. Eli Bucko followed that with a double, and Ryan Gorman singled Bucko home and Manchester led, 4-1.
But after that, it was all New Jersey. Dominic Roma came in to relieve Carson Frazier (former major leaguer Todd Frazier’s nephew) and shut Manchester down. Toms River got two runs in the third and batted around in the fifth, scoring eight runs, including a grand slam by Joey DiMeo, which broke a 4-4 tie.
“I was going 0 for 3, and I wanted to get a hit,” DiMeo said.
“We just left a curveball up, and that was the turning point for us,” Rob Rastelli said. “We just were a little flat after that.”
Toms River had trailed 4-3 going into the fifth.
“We knew, going into the fifth inning, that we were going to do something special,” Toms River manager Paul Mika said. “We said, ‘We need your best at-bats,’ and guess what, they gave them to us. I’m super proud of these boys.”
When Gorman was struggling to get out of the fifth inning on the mound, the team came out to talk to him. Peyman stayed longer,
trying to boost Gorman’s confidence.
“Arlen is a good kid. He’s always there to pick someone up,” Rob Rastelli said. “He’s one of the first kids, when someone makes an error, he’ll say, ‘You’ve got it next time.’ He’s a real great team player.
“It says a lot about these kids. They worked hard all summer, and they played hard. It was just unfortunate we weren’t able to pull off a win here.”