by Vinny Messana
His fastball can be heard from a great distance.
Not just from the entirety of Mount Sinai‘s HS campus but also from the entirety of League VII, as his dominance on the mound has allowed his team to climb to the top of the standings.
Fastball velocity has always been a point of pride for Sam Kessler and last summer he hit his goal of touching 90 at the Connie Mack World Series. Since that time, he has been sitting at that velocity and he is now one of the prized prospects on Long Island.
One person that doesn’t always enjoy that is his catcher, George Rainer.
“He throws hard enough where I have to wear a batting glove under my catcher’s glove,” said Rainer. “And also, he throws from a 3/4 angle so his two-seam runs in on right handers a lot,” he added.
This type of action has allowed him to win four of his first five starts while allowing a total of one earned run. The winning aspect is what makes it fun for Rainer.
“He makes my life as a catcher easy because he’s extremely efficient on the mound, has great stuff and he’s especially accurate. Also, he’s one of the biggest competitors on the mound I’ve played with in my baseball career,” he added.
Mount Sinai is off to a 10-3 start to the season, but Kessler is not satisfied with simply winning regular season games. The combination of he, Stony Brook-bound Brandon Bonanno and James Sarno creates quite a formidable rotation–one that could make a deep playoff run.
“My goal is to win a New York State title,” he said–certainly not holding back any confidence in his team. “We’ll take it one series at a time, but everyone here has the same mindset,” he said.
He noted that the team’s performance has begun to garner interest from the students at Mount Sinai despite the school’s reputation for being a lacrosse powerhouse.
That’s generally what happens when you are part of turning around a program, as they have done the past couple years.
Regardless of what they are able to accomplish, he can say he left the school having made an impact on the program, and his next stop comes 470 miles south at West Virginia University.
“It was love at first sight with the campus,” he said in regards to West Virginia. Despite making his official visit a week prior to the rest of the recruits, he was able to get in touch with some of the guys and he noted he has been “hitting it off with them”.
Kessler stated that he feels he still has room for improvement and he looks forward to that aspect of college.
For the time being, however, he still has some work to do in high school. With just about a month remaining in the season he will be looking to finish the regular season up strong before making a playoff run.
“You can never count out Bayport-Blue Point,” he said. “They know what it takes to win.” He also noted you can’t take anyone lightly in a conference that includes Shoreham-Wading River, as well. They have arguably the best player in the 2017 graduating class in Brian Morrell.
“We’ve been playing together since we were nine years old,” he said. “Competing with him is fun.”
It very well could come down to a match up between the two friends later on in the season. Wouldn’t that be something for the childhood friends if they were the final two teams standing in Class A…
