Monday, May 31, 2010

By Cory K. Doviak
NJS.com Editorial Director

One day after picking up a semifinal win with 2 2/3 innings of scoreless relief, Pascack Valley senior John Reich struck out 13 in a complete game 5-hitter in an 8-1 win over Westwood that gave Pascack Valley first Bergen County championship since 1996.

DEMAREST -- It was a surreal 24 hours for the Pascack Valley baseball team and its head coach Will Lynch knows because he saw just about all of them. He had trouble sleeping in the one night between his team's upset of top-seeded Don Bosco Prep on Saturday and Sunday's Bergen County Baseball Tournament final. There were pitching decisions to make, contingency plans to work out and a second set to be drawn up just in case nothing went as planned.

“I was up at a 3:00 a.m. Was I thinking about the Bosco game or was it about the lineup today? It was kind of everything. My wife was up, I was up...,” said Lynch. “I fell back asleep, I woke up a 6 and about 7:30 I just went to school.”

About six-and-a-half hours later, he handed the ball to John Reich and things got considerably less stressful. Just one day after pitching 2 2/3 innings of scoreless relief to pick up the win against Don Bosco Prep, Reich did himself one better. He went the distance on a five-hitter and struck out 13 to lead Pascack Valley to an 8-1 win and it first Bergen County championship since 1996.

Geoff Perez knocked in Westwood's lone run with a sixth-inning sacrifice fly.

“I wanted to be out here to get tackled [in the postgame celebration]. Right when we got back to school yesterday Coach called me and Tommy [Corra] and was like you are getting the ball and you are in relief,” said Reich, who used his fastball almost exclusively to blow away hitters. “[Lynch] told me just to give him whatever I had whether it was four innings, five innings, six innings, seven innings, whatever. He just said ‘Give me everything you got.”

It was more than enough.

“If I could get him to [inning] 5, that was our deal. Anything less than that we had a contingency plan where we would have brought in [Tommy] Jansen,” said Lynch. “If we got to the fifth inning we would have gone to Corra. But Plan A was definitely to ride John.”

Reich set the tone when he struck out the first batter of the game on three pitches and then struck out the side in the second, stranding runners on first and second. The next time he threw a pitch, he had a lead to work with as Pascack Valley started to figure out Westwood starter Joe Bates, whose variety of off-speed pitches struck out five of the first seven hitters he faced, including the first two in the bottom of the second.

PV senior Matt Lurie hitting his second home run of the game, a three-run shot in the sixth inning.

But Matt Lurie waited on a bender and smoked it over the left field fence to give Pascack Valley the lead for good. An error on a pop fly kept the inning going and Bryan Perlmutter’s single to centerfield delivered Prince Canaan for a 2-0 PV lead.

Reich cruised through the first five innings and struck out five in a row, two to close out the fourth and then all three hitters he faced in the fifth.

“We just never got going. We were behind, we didn’t have men on base, we just didn’t hit,” said Westwood head coach Joe Yurko. “Hey, [Reich] pitched a good game against us. He moved the ball around and we just didn’t hit the ball.”

Despite the fact that Reich had allowed just three base runners, one of them erased on a caught stealing, through the first five innings, Westwood was still hanging around, trailing by just two runs. But any chance of getting Reich out of the game while it was still close went out the window when Pascack Valley broke the game open with three runs in the bottom of the fifth and two more in the sixth.

Chris Carroll about to get one of Westwood's five hits, a one-out single in the top of the seventh.

Four straight one-out walks in the fifth pushed Christian Lawlor all the way around the bases to make it 3-0, an error on a ground ball hit by Canaan allowed pinch runner Brian Swatek to cross the plate and Perlmutter drew another walk, the fifth of the inning, to force home Lou Pimpinella.

In the sixth, it was one swing of the bat, again by Lurie, that did the damage. He hit his second home run of the game, a three-run bomb that cleared the left field fence, to give Pascack Valley an 8-1 advantage after Geoff Perez’s sacrifice fly had gotten Westwood on the board in the top of the sixth.

“This was the last game I am ever going to play, probably, and it couldn’t have been any better,” said Lurie,” the senior catcher who finished 2-for-3 with the two home runs and five RBI. “The second one I got to enjoy a little bit more because we were ahead. When I hit it I kind of realized what was going on at that point. We were going to win a county championship and it was a nice feeling.”

Seven of Pascack Valley’s nine batters had at least one hit against three different Westwood pitchers. Lurie, Ryan Hourigan (2-for-3), Nick Gazzillo (2-for-4, R) and Caanan (2-for-4, R, SB) each finished with two hits and Perlmutter (1-for-4, 2 RBI), Lawlor (1-for-3, R, SB) and Pimpinella (1-for-3, R) each had one. Corra reached base twice with two walks and Mike Niego drew a walk, was hit by a pitch and scored two runs.

It was a total team effort for Pascack Valley, which had 15 seniors on its roster and sent them all out in style.

Pascack Valley second baseman Prince Caanan turning the double play that ended the game.

“Before the game we took a walk. I took the whole team out to 413 [the distance marker in deepest centerfield] and told them just to look around because it was not going to look like this in two or three hours. There are going to be a lot of people here, a lot of action here and [I told them] to take this all in because they only had one shot,” said Lynch. “This happens once in a career. They may have some other games in a college career, but I don’t think there is going to be anything bigger than this. What a great year.”

It was a great year for Westwood, too. The Cardinals were the No. 11 seed coming into the tournament, they beat Mahwah in a wild game last weekend to make the semifinals and then knocked out highly-regarded Hackensack in Saturday’s semifinal round before running into a Pascack Valley team that had destiny on its side.

“We have a young team and we’ll be back here. Hopefully same spot, same time next year,” said Yurko, who surpassed the 300 career win mark earlier this season. “These kids played great baseball to get here. Nobody expected us to get here and it took a lot of effort for them to get where they were. Maybe we ran out of gas, maybe we just didn’t have one more in us, but we will be back here.”

FOR MORE PHOTOS OF THIS EVENT OR TO BUY A COLLECTOR'S PRINT OF THIS GAME STORY, PLEASE VISIT 4FeetGrafix.com.