When it comes to being a student-athlete in high school, there is an endless amount of responsibilities and tasks on a daily basis just to have the privilege to step on a field.
Looking back on it now, I’m not sure how I even did it.
Thinking about waking up at 6 am, catching the bus, sitting through 7 hours of school work for five days per week, multiple nights of off-season workouts, a week of tryouts and two weeks of scrimmages just to get to Opening Day is pretty outrageous. For seniors who may not have gotten the chance to experience success as an 11th grader – and who are probably not playing after this season – this short window of 18 regular season games represented their last opportunity to taste success in an organized sport.
And it breaks my heart that there’s a chance they may not even get that chance.
The COVID-19 pandemic has turned our lives upside down as we know it and there’s no end in sight at the moment. While the season hasn’t been officially cancelled yet, it does appear there’s very little chance any semblance of a regular season takes place.
The fall sport athletes had an unimpeded season and the winter sports made it right up until the Long Island Championship. Baseball didn’t even get to finish tryouts, so some kids don’t even know if they made the team.
I’m far removed from my high school career but this free time gave me some time to reflect on how much it meant to me and just how significant of an impact it had on my life and friendships that I maintain to this day.
To fully explain, I’d like to go back in time to the prior year.
2008
In February 2008, I was preparing for my junior season as captain at Centereach HS. It is hard to understate how excited I was for the season. I was coming off the best year of my life. Between school ball, summer and fall travel season, I went 25-0 with a 0.73 ERA. How do I know? My dad used to keep track of all the stats and I added it up. I’m glad he did, because I think those numbers would’ve easily been incorrect if I was going off memory.
I was flying high and I had received interest from many schools like Fordham, NYIT and Siena thanks to pitching in the Antonia Agostinelli Memorial Tournament at Baseball Heaven the previous October. In that game, I was matching up against Richmond County Baseball Club from Staten Island, which was coached by former Met great John Franco. As luck would have it, two future MLB players were in that tournament; Mike Trout and Sean Nolin. The scouts were there to watch Sean Nolin on another field but they were all hovering around the fields.
I got the start against Franco’s team and had one of the games of my life pitching for the Long Island Cobras. I went the distance, I think I struck out 12 in a two-hit shutout. Around the fourth or fifth inning, I distinctly remember sitting in the dugout and thinking to myself, ‘wow this is actually pretty easy.’
Well, life has a way of humbling you.
Fast forward again to February when the baseball season was right around the corner and everyone’s excitement was reaching a crescendo. My fastball was sitting 80-82 MPH with command of four pitches. During a bullpen session, I felt significant pain in my elbow. Even 12 years ago, it was pretty clear that was an ominous sign.
I remained cautiously optimistic but the pain persisted. The bullpens were shortened, the season got closer and doubt started to creep in that I would need Tommy John surgery or at least extensive rehab. In order to cope with the pain, I would do a lot of band work every time before I threw. I would rub any sort of pain relieving cream I could find on my arm until the pain was numb.
The exact timeline escapes me but I remember early in March my coach told me I probably had tendonitis and to take a week off of throwing. Once the week was up I would long toss, go to physical therapy and ease my way back so that I could start on opening day.
In a scrimmage on March 25, 2008 against Pat-Med I got the start and the plan was to go two innings. I did my band work and I crossed my fingers that there would be little-or-no pain once the adrenaline kicked in.
Well, it took only one inning for that plan to get thwarted.
On one particular pitch I felt extraordinary pain in my arm. Ironically, that was against Marcus Stroman on a pitch that he popped up to second (the second baseman dropped it – Marcus always had a way with great fortune on his side).
To his credit, Pat-Med Coach Anthony Frascogna came right over and walked me into the dugout. He gave my dad the phone number of a trusted orthopedic surgeon that he knew.
That was a Saturday, and I remember going to a party that night and feeling deflated knowing that surgery was inevitable and I would miss my junior year. I’m sure I was a joy to be around talking about my arm pain and missing my opening day start.
I wound up getting an MRI on the Monday and went to our first league game the next day which was at Smithtown East. I played first base and hit eighth in the order. It wasn’t pretty as I made an error and went 0-for-3 with a strikeout.
During the game, my dad received the results of the MRI and it confirmed a partial tear of the ulnar collateral ligament (UCL). We went to visit the orthopedic surgeon and he suggested that while surgery would obviously be the best option, rehab was an option.
That was all we needed to hear. I opted to rehab because had I got the surgery then my senior year would be impacted as well. This news didn’t make my arm magically heal but it was the glimmer of hope I wanted.
The rest of that season was largely a blur. Not helping matters was that for the first time in my life, I legitimately struggled in school. Chemistry and Math B (trigonometry) were awful and I barely kept my head above water – but I passed. I think of 2008 as being one of the worst years of my life, but a necessary one. It began with high hopes for the baseball season and my future – hopefully committing to a Division-I school, but it would feature none of that. I remember going to our game against Hills East and seething with jealousy as a St. John’s coach was there to watch Adam Brown pitch. It was my dad’s dream for me to go to St. John’s and here I was watching one of our rivals getting to potentially make it happen for himself. Brown ended up striking out 14 of our hitters that day and touching 85 MPH. He wound up going to Stony Brook and pitching 80 innings as a freshman in 2010.
What really bothered me wasn’t even what went on between the lines – which was bad, by the way. Centereach wound up winning 6 games. It was that parents in the stands were telling my dad they didn’t think I cared about the team since I wasn’t playing and that I appeared to be enjoying myself in the dugout.
That really motivated me because those were people I thought would support me knowing that it was killing me to watch my team lose in a year that we really should’ve been competing for a playoff spot.
One bright spot was in our last series of the year – we beat future MLB pitcher Nick Tropeano at West Islip, which was his first loss of the season.
After the season ended, I eventually was cleared to throw. I think my first outing was June 20 of that summer, so I had to miss out on trying out for the Empire State Games – which was a free event that featured the best players across New York facing off against each other in a tournament.
Things didn’t go well for me that year, I finished with a 3-9 record – although I pitched much better than the record would suggest. There was some 2-1 and 3-2 losses in there.
I remember being in the car with my dad going to physical therapy and it was strange that he had lost some of the confidence in me saying things like ‘maybe you should just go to a JuCo’, which was the opposite what he had been preaching all along. He even mentioned transferring to St. John the Baptist for my senior year to pitch for John Habyan. Maybe it was to test my mettle, too.
Two things that stuck with me that summer.
- I pitched against John Franco’s team again at Baseball Heaven. This time, they had my number. Actually, they had my signs too. My dad later found out from John Franco that our catcher was telegraphing the signs. I pitched four innings and gave up four runs and threw a few wild pitches.
- In mid-August we were in the playoffs for the Boys of Summer against a team called the Astros at PAL Stadium. Before the game, the debate was whether I should pitch that game or ‘be saved’ for the championship. The only reason I mention this is because it did not work out. I started that game and we led 2-1 going into the bottom of the sixth. I wound up giving up a two-out, two-run single to give them a 3-2 lead. That’s how the game ended.
To me those two events really summed up 2008 and it built up a lot of anger inside of me. After that playoff game, I went for a long run, lamenting in how badly this year turned for me.
I vowed that 2009 would be different.
Over the next several months I made it my point to harden myself mentally so that I could will our team to a better season. As I began to work harder and become more optimistic about my future, some good things started coming my way.
I committed to Farmingdale State College, who ended up going to the Division-III College World Series the next season. I remember calling up the pitching coach who was thrilled with my decision and he told me I was making a great choice.
One mantra that I adopted that off-season was ‘nobody can save you, except you.’ It dawned on me that it no longer mattered who my dad knew or what I did in a meaningless travel game in 2007 or who I did pitching lessons with. I had one season to establish myself.
2009
Once New Years hit, I felt invigorated physically and mentally and I said that 2009 was going to be the best year of my life. I knew that in order to reverse all the bad fortunes that I had and the 18-year playoff drought of Centereach that I would need to be at my absolute peak.
As far as I was concerned it was a foregone conclusion, because I believed in myself and I was throwing extremely well. One night stood out in particular, we were throwing bullpens in the back gym and I threw about a 40-pitch bullpen. We had someone charting all of our pitches, but it wasn’t even necessary because I know what I saw that night. Out of all the pitches, I might’ve missed the catchers glove two or three times. The entire softball team was standing behind me watching and I was feeding off of that energy. After that bullpen I said to myself, there’s no way I’m losing a game this year.
Once the schedule came out, I circled March 31 because that was Opening Day at Copiague.
On that day, two things stand out 11 years later. The first thing is that they had no bullpen. I remember thinking to myself ‘they’re not making this easy on me.’ Nobody likes to warm up in the outfield and then having to go right to the mound. And it was immediate, because we got to the game at about 3:35 for a 4 pm game, so it was stretch, bullpen, first pitch with no rest.
On the first batter, I went to a 3-2 count and I remember looking at the spectators down the right field line and thinking ‘this is a seminal moment in my life, I can’t start this any other way but with a strikeout.’
I stepped back on the mound, grabbed the ball with a two-seam grip and delivered. It came out feeling absolutely perfect and it was directly on the inside corner (to a lefty) for strike three. I took a deep breath and said, ‘this is exactly the way it was meant to go.’
After that, everything fell into place. The offense scored runs, I continued to put up zeros and we did what we were supposed to do. We were 1-0, I went six innings with nine strikeouts, gave up 1 run and we were on our way.
I remember going home and feeling so relieved because just one year ago I was feeling like such shit, so demoralized and so far away from my dreams. It was one win, but for me it was so significant.
One thing switched, and that was my mental state. I convinced myself there was no speed to go except full speed and it made all the difference.
The details after that are inconsequential, but each week I went out and performed basically the same way as I did on Opening Day and Centereach continued to win. We did get some good luck that year, namely that East Islip, Newfield and West Islip were not nearly as strong as they were the years prior. That, combined with our incredible offense made us the best team in the league.
We had eight players go All-League and three All-State players. Andrew Abreu, Nick Luciani and myself went All-State while the entire lineup basically went All-League.
We did hit one obstacle during the regular season and that was a crushing 7th inning collapse at West Islip in which a two-out error opened the door for Kyle Gelling to hit a walk-off two run triple to left-center for an awful loss.With that loss, West Islip actually went ahead of us in the standings.
After that game, our assistant coach who is now the Head Coach of Centereach, took me aside after a team meeting and said – ‘we need you to be Andy Pettitte, go out there on Tuesday and dominate.’
Back in those days, I loved those challenges.
We had a huge task ahead of us if we wanted to win League 3. We had to win all 6 games and needed Smithtown East and West Islip to each lose two games. We had East Islip and Smithtown East in the final two series so it wouldn’t be easy.
In that next outing, I took the challenge and answered the bell. It was a close game, but we beat East Islip, 2-1 in first game to get a little bit closer to our goal. The next two games were higher-scoring games and it tested our bullpen depth but ultimately our offense was too good and we finished off the sweep.
Our final series was against Smithtown East and that was going to be a challenge because they were a playoff team. Fortunately, I had my best stuff of the year. I threw a complete game, two-hit shutout with 12 strikeouts to get us within two wins of clinching thanks to East Islip beating West Islip in the first two games of their series.
We got the job done and clinched the League III title with a record of 14-4. After that final game, Coach came over to me and congratulated me on being voted League III MVP and for completing the ‘League Circuit undefeated’, which had only been done once in program history. I pitched 42 innings, allowing 4 runs and went 6-0.
What a difference a year makes. In 2008, I was reading about players that I knew and now it was my name in the box scores and that felt great.
On the flip side, all good things must come to an end. We did win one playoff game (against Smithtown East) but lost to Hills West and Lindenhurst to end our season. It wound up being North Babylon who made the improbable run to win the Class AA County Title but they lost to Massapequa in the Long Island Championship (their fourth in a row!).
The good memories did not end just there, though. I had the chance to play in the ‘Grand Slam Challenge’ at Farmingdale State College, on the mound I would pitch at less than a year later. The stands were packed, as many people wanted to watch Marcus Stroman, Steven Matz and Kyle Hansen pitch. Matz ended up not pitching, as he was in the midst of negotiating his contract with the New York Mets at the time. I pitched one inning, gave up one single to Oceanside’s Andrew Grann but threw a scoreless inning.
Later that week, I went to the All-County dinner at Villa Lombardi’s and got to stand up next to the League MVPs in front of 600 people which was nerve-wracking and exciting at the same time. I was a finalist for the Yaz Award, but that wound up going to Matz, of course.
They also had an ‘Exceptional Senior Game’ which featured the top high school seniors from Suffolk County in an All-Star Game at the PAL Stadium.
Just when I thought all the fun was over, I woke up on a Sunday morning to a text congratulating me on being named All-Long Island, which was the last icing on the cake of an unbelievable school season. Each win I got to experience with my friends and family.
I parlayed that into an amazing summer with friends, which featured a couple great vacations and a bunch of graduation parties. It all came in stark contrast to the previous summer which I was miserable through out.
I continued to pitch well through that summer, which featured six more wins in my summer league – with the last coming in a playoff game at Stony Brook University to cap off a 12-0 season.
The point is that without a senior year, players are robbed of the chance to go out and experience these types of thrills. The wins, the camaraderie, the accolades, the conversations in the hallway – it’s all part of it.
Or at least it was all apart of it. The thought of going from March tryouts into a virtual graduation is something that really pains me and it’s something that looks increasingly likely with each passing day of carnage in New York.
My heart goes out to people that have lost loved ones during this horrific time and my heart goes out to kids who won’t get to experience the thrill of their senior season in high school.
