Johnston’s trip to the Eastern Regional Tournament started with the ceremonial first pitch from Coach David Belisle who took his Cumberland team to Williamsport and delivered a famous inspirational speech upon his team’s elimination from the Little League World Series tournament.
Representing Rhode Island, the Johnston 9/10 Little League team started the tournament with an 11-1 loss to Fairfield National Little League, representing Connecticut.
After a scoreless first inning, Fairfield took a 3-0 lead in the bottom of the second after a fairly chaotic and strange inning consisting of several passed balls, a missed tag and an inning-ending run-down, all with two outs. Johnston struggled to get itself out of the jam, giving up runs to Fairfield’s Paddy Galvin, Griffin Polley and Brendan O’Hara.
Johnston gained some ground in the top of the third when Dante Iafrate scored after Joe Domenico was hit by a pitch with the bases loaded to cut Fairfield’s lead to 3-1. However, a home run by Fairfield’s John Heitzman to deep center kept Johnston at bay, bringing its lead to 4-1.
Fairfield pulled away in the fourth inning, scoring seven runs and defeating Johnston, 11-1, by mercy rule. After Fairfield’s Christian Rasmussen ripped a double off the wall, Charlie Swanson knocked him in with a triple. Swanson would be knocked in by a Jack Passeck single through the gap. Will Eustace would later knock in Passeck and Heitzman with a base-hit single. The game would end on a double off the bat of Brendan O’Hara that dropped into deep right, knocking in Galvin, Brendan Gagner and Reid Winter.
Despite losing in their tournament opener, these comeback kids should not be counted out. After all, this was the team that lost to a talented Cranston Western team, 6-2, in the first round of the Rhode Island District 1 Tournament, and then battled their way through the losers’ bracket, defeating North Providence East 16-3, and Cranston American 14-2. After that, they met Cranston Western once again, this time in a do-or-die scenario and won 5-3.
From there, the team went undefeated, beating North Providence West by a score of 12-2 and 8-0 to win the District 1 title, before moving on to win the state championship. This is a team that has seen the odds stacked higher against it before.
Johnston manager Bob Giudici said it himself. “There’s a lot of baseball left. When we played that first game of the districts, we lost to Cranston Western and came back to win nine in a row to win the districts and the state championship. They know that they need to fight, they need to come back, they need to play with confidence and minimize the mental mistakes. If they do that, we’ll be right back in this tournament.”
“I think that we played solidly and played them head to head for the first four innings, but then as the game progressed, we made a couple of mental mistakes, and every time you do that it comes back to haunt you. They capitalized on our mental mistakes and started scoring runs and hitting the ball on us,” said Giudici.
Fairfield has the talent to make teams pay for those mistakes. On its way to the East Regional Tournament, it went undefeated in the Connecticut Division 1 Tournament, winning 12-1 against PJ Foley in the Connecticut Section 1 championship, and sweeping West Hartford, 9-5, and 16-6 in their best-of-three series for the Connecticut state crown.
Despite the fact that Fairfield powered its way through the Connecticut state tournament, Johnston was very much in the game before losing 11-1 in the fourth inning. After all, Johnston was only down 4-1 after the third. Although they faced some adversity on Sunday, it will be interesting to see if this battle-tested Johnston team can bounce back as they have done so before.
Johnston took a step in the right direction on Monday night, rolling to a convincing, 15-0 win over Vermont.
It was set to be back in action on Wednesday night against Maine, but results were unavailable at press time.
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