CHSAA baseball playoffs: Sea’s ‘stay together, win together’ mentality gets Vikings to Sunday’s Archdiocesan - SILive.com

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St. Joseph by-the-Sea rookie coach Nelson Ortiz was still trying to soak in the proceedings Wednesday night after his No. 7 seeded Vikings dismantled No. 3 St. Raymond’s in the Bronx when his thoughts turned to Sunday’s CHSAA Archdiocesan championship game.

“I am totally happy for this team, especially after not having a season last year,” he said. “I want this so bad for these seniors. They are a special group.”

Ortiz recalled a meeting he had with his freshman baseball players four years ago when he was the then-Viking JV skipper. He told most of those players who are now seniors that this was a special team with a couple of possible championships in their future.

“They won the JV championship two years ago. And now we are one game away from winning it all,” says Ortiz.

Standing in their way is No. 5 seed Kennedy Catholic, who like the Vikings didn’t lose a game in the eight-team, double-elimination Archdiocesan playoffs. Sunday’s winner-take-all title game will be played at Maimonides Park in Coney Island, Brooklyn, at 6:15 p.m.

The Vikings have advanced this far by winning on the road for all their games and have rallied around Ortiz’s “road warriors” mentality.

It helps, too, that the Vikings are loaded with talent starting with their deep pitching staff that consists of Nicky DiMartino, Joe Ciancimino, Zack Clausen and Devin Malvasio.

Ortiz insists he doesn’t have an ace, but DiMartino, a junior righty, got the win vs. St. Ray’s in a 90-pitch effort and has been penciled in to start Sunday’s game on what will be three days’ rest.

Sprinkle in some key position players like Anthony Palermo, Nick Girellini, Jackson Tucker, AJ Vigliotti, Mike Alongi, Nick Fazio and Vincent Caterina and Sea is a good and deep as anyone in the league.

It sure didn’t look that way earlier in the season when Ortiz’s troops got off to a 1-3 start in the Island division. It was a bad look for a rookie coach, who was handed the reins of the team a few days prior to the start of the season when previous coach Ken Rigatti stepped aside.

But after a team meeting, the Vikings (20-5-2 overall) won their last five league games to go 6-3 and force a three-way tie in the league with St. Peter’s and Monsignor Farrell. Sea lost the tiebreaker and wound up finishing as the No. 3 seed on the Island behind Island champ St. Peter’s and runner-up Farrell.

Sea (11-4 in the league), however, hasn’t lost a game since, winning two play-in affairs and then all three Archdiocesan playoff games to get to Sunday.

Ortiz knows Kennedy Catholic is on a mission of its own and that his Vikings have their work cut out for them.

“Kennedy has some big arms, too. They always have a strong team,” said Ortiz. “They have great coaches. We played them in a scrimmage game. We won the game in seven innings. Then we went an extra two innings and they came back and beat us.”

In the end, though, Ortiz likes his team’s chances of winning the Manhattan-Bronx-Staten Island championship, which differs from the Intersectional titles of the past when teams from the Brooklyn-Queens diocese competed in a true city championship.

“When we started this winning streak, ‘we said stay together, win together,’ " says Ortiz. “Now, we need to do that one more time.”

The Link Lonk


June 12, 2021 at 07:40PM
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CHSAA baseball playoffs: Sea’s ‘stay together, win together’ mentality gets Vikings to Sunday’s Archdiocesan - SILive.com

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