Southhold wins! They take the Class C Long Island Championship final pic.twitter.com/Oy03M9EOAY
— aXcess Baseball (@axcessbaseball) June 2, 2017
by Matt Torpe
The Southold Settlers are Class C Long Island champions after a 13-5 victory over the East Rockaway Rocks.
“Pretty special team–our pitching’s been there, our bats have been there. We were lucky to get those runs early. Still got to clean up a few things, we didn’t play a perfect game we hit well enough and pitching was good enough to keep us there, but it feels good we worked hard. It was a great season,” said Head Coach Mike Carver on the team’s victory.
He went on to talk about what it meant for to get this victory, “Lets see that’s our first Long Island Championship since 2002. We went upstate in 2015, there was no Long Island C it was kind of nice getting another title hopefully we’ll get back upstate again. We didn’t like not getting up there last year.”
Led by junior outfielder Luke Hansen and senior shortstop Pat McFarland, the Settlers exploded out of the gate for ten runs in the first three innings.
“We got super pumped up. We knew we wanted to score in the first inning we knew we wanted to put some runs for Dylan to give him a lead,” said Hansen who went 3 for 3 with two RBI’s, two stolen bases and two walks, while starting pitcher Dylan Clausen held the Rocks to five runs going 6 1/3 innings with 9 strikeouts.
This is a revenge win for Southold as they had lost to East Rockaway 3-0 in the same Class C Championship game last year.
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“A lot of the seniors along with myself gained that experience with that big time game last year I think that was the biggest thing for us a little nervous lot of jitters last year but coming into this game we were level headed and focused, “ said senior McFarland who went 3-for-5 with five RBI. McFarland also came in to pitch the final two outs of the game.
Southold will go on to play North Salem in the Southeast Regional C at 4 p.m. at St. Joseph’s College.
