HADLEY — With the way Andrew Ciaglo was dealing on the mound, a couple early runs was all the Hopkins Academy baseball team needed on Thursday to lock up a spot in the Western Mass. Div. 4 championship game.
The Golden Hawks put two runs on the board in the first before tacking on four more in the second. Visiting Lenox pushed one run across in the second but it was all the club would get off Ciaglo, who went the distance allowing a mere four hits while striking out seven batters to lead No. 2 Hopkins to a 7-1 victory in the semifinal round.
The Golden Hawks advanced and will host No. 5 Ware in the title game on Monday at 4 p.m.
“We’re feeling great,” Ciaglo said. “This is where we wanted to be since the start of the season. Now it’s on our home field. We’re excited and ready to go. We’re going to get some rest, practice these next couple days and come out Monday fired up.”
A pair of early mistakes by No. 11 Lenox (8-8) in the second inning proved costly.
Leading 2-1, the Golden Hawks (13-1) loaded the bases with two outs in the bottom of the second. Patrick Fitzgibbons came to the plate and hit a shot right to Millionaire shortstop Dan Munch, who threw the ball to second. It sailed over the head of second baseman Mike Butler however, allowing Braeden Tudryn and Kouji Ishida to score.
With Fitzgibbons on second and Jack Feltovic on third following the error, Jake Smith came to the plate and smacked a ball to right field which went over the outstretched glove of Lenox’s Nate Armstrong. That allowed Fitzgibbons and Feltovic to score and put Hopkins up, 6-1.
“I preach to my kids every practice that defensively we have to be perfect,” Golden Hawks coach Dan Vreeland said. “There’s a lot of good teams in this tournament and if we aren’t perfect we won’t beat those teams. I preach that, and taking advantage when the other team isn’t perfect – four of our runs came from that where they made one slip up and we kept punishing them.”
The Hopkins bats weren’t able to do much from that point forward, but the early lead turned out to be more than enough with Ciaglo allowing just one hit from the fourth inning on.
“It takes the weight off the shoulders a little bit,” Vreeland said. “Sometimes it’s a little nerveracking to get those runs early and feel like your bats died. We still hit some really good balls but I want to see us continuously hitting and we slowed down a little today. It was definitely nerveracking because (Lenox) can hit the ball but with the way Andrew was pitching today, there was no way seven runs wasn’t going to hold up. He pitched an absolutely phenomenal game.”
Hopkins took the early lead in the first inning after Ishida singled, stole second and was brought home off a single from Feltovic. Later in the inning, a Ciaglo base hit scored Feltovic to give the Golden Hawks a two-run cushion.
“We do that all the time,” explained Ciaglo. “We jump on the pitchers early and stay on top of them the rest of the way. It helps me, Feltovic and all the pitchers on the staff to go out there and do our thing. I just wanted to throw strikes and start batters on first-pitch strikes. I wanted to get ahead and go to my curveball and go from there.”
The Millionaires scored their lone run in the top of the second. Brendan Armstrong opened the inning with a double, took third following a single from Josh Hunter and scored after a ground out from Lenox pitcher Max Shepardson.
It wasn’t until the sixth inning when Hopkins got its seventh run, with Ishida walking, stealing second and reaching third on a balk. Feltovic knocked a dribbler to the right side of the infield to score Ishida and give the Golden Hawks a six-run lead going into the seventh.
The win puts Hopkins one step closer to accomplishing the second goal on its list this spring.
“We try to go through three stages of goals every year,” Vreeland said. “We start by wanting to win our league and we accomplished that a couple weeks ago against Frontier. Then we turned our goal into winning Western Mass., then the states is the ultimate goal. We just try to only focus on what is in front of us. We’re one step away from our second goal and the third is in the periphery but we can’t get distracted by that.”
Vreeland said he is expecting to see a prepared Ware squad visit Hadley on Monday.
“I’ve seen a little bit of them,” Vreeland said. “My assistant coach saw them play Palmer but coach Scott Slattery always has them well-coached. With someone like Ware, they won’t make a ton of mistakes so we have to make sure we’re on our ‘A’ game.”