The Old Westbury Panthers felt good about their chances heading into their home opener today against NJ City with their ace Jeremy Charles on the hill.
Unfortunately, the Gothic Knights scratched across a run in the sixth and seventh inning against him and that was all their freshman Ray Ligouri needed to record the 6-1 victory– his first collegiate win.
Photo Credit: Vinny Messana
The NJ native fired a complete game, taking a shutout into the ninth inning before Dean Sheridan drove in Tommy Zeigen with an RBI single to put the Panthers on the board.
“We have a lot of respect for Old Westbury, said NJ City’s Head Coach Jerry Smith. “We knew they’d have a good pitcher coming in with the week off, so we knew what our approach would be–try to stay in the game as long as possible, then hopefully get into their ‘pen, and even the guys in the ‘pen are very good.”
Regarding the work of his starting pitcher, he said “We have a lot of confidence in Ray, he’s one of our conference starters. It’s just improvement every day for him. When you can control three pitches for strikes, like he had today, it just keeps hitters off balance,” he said.
The first five innings of the game absolutely flew by with both pitchers firing zeros and Ligouri allowing only one hit.
In the top of the sixth, after striking out the first two batters, Charles allowed a two-out single to Andrew Niech. After he stole second, he scored on an RBI single by Joe Coutinho to get on the board.
In the top of the seventh, a suicide squeeze by Taylor Born increased the lead to 2-0.
They tacked on one in the eighth inning off Nick Dorcean and one in the ninth against Ryan Mordecai.
For the Panthers, Joey Walsh was the lone player with a multiple hit game. The bats had issues staying off Ligouri’s slow breaking ball that he controlled out of the strike zone very well with two strikes.
They fall to 9-5 with the loss and will host Oneonta in a DH on Sunday (weather pending).
