By DAVE O’SULLIVAN
Staff Writer
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PISCATAWAY — Coaches love to give you the ol’ cliché: It’s not how you start, it’s how you finish.
Well, at the Group 4 state baseball championship at Rutgers University on Sunday afternoon, it was definitely how Ridgewood started that made all the difference in the Maroons’ 7-6 victory over Kingsway Regional. Ridgewood scored five times in the top of the first inning — on just three hits — and tacked on two more in the second to jump out to a 7-0 lead. They then held on as Kingsway mounted a furious comeback attempt that saw the Dragons load the bases with two outs in the bottom of the seventh before Ridgewood senior right-hander Brady Ross induced a pop-up on the infield to end it.
Kingsway had its chances, but, as longtime South Jersey coach Bill Alvaro said, his team put the ball in the air too often against Ross, who allowed no runs on just three hits in four gritty innings of relief.
“We believed until the last out that we were going to win the game. We had bases loaded in the last inning. We started out with two outs and nobody on, then loaded the bases. We had the winning run at second base, we just put a few too many balls in the air in our last few at-bats instead of getting line drives. We just ran out of outs. (Ross) worked ahead in the count and put the ball in play. We tried to do a little too much — instead of line drives we hit some fly balls,” said Alvaro, who reached 500 career wins earlier this season during his stops at Williamstown, Washington Township and now Kingsway. “We talked about how everything that could go wrong went wrong for us in the first two innings. (After the second inning) it was time to just settle down and play the way we know how to play baseball. And that’s what we did. These kids have fight, and that’s what makes this group special. There was no way they were ever going to give up.”
Ridgewood (25-7, 7-1 Big North Freedom) got off to a great start in the first, sending nine batters to the plate and scoring five times. The inning featured three walks and a hit batsman, and the big blow came when Hudson Feeney ripped a bases-loaded double just past the third-base bag. That staked the Maroons to a 3-0 lead, and they tacked on two more on an RBI double by Justin Loffredo and a run-scoring single by Brody Perrapato. The Maroons added two more runs in the second on a passed ball with the bases loaded and an RBI single by Kotaro Kim.
Ridgewood looked to be on its way to a 10-run mercy rule win, but the Dragons (24-6, 6-3 Tri-County Royal) stormed back with a pair of runs in the bottom of the second and four more in the third.
An infield single by A.J. Ward and a pair of walks loaded the bases, and after a pair of strikeouts, courtesy runner Chase Daciw and Austin Schmidt, who had walked, both scored on passed balls. In the third, Kingsway got a two-run double by Ward to cut the deficit to 7-4, and later in the inning a sacrifice fly by Ashton Ford sliced Ridgewood’s lead down to 7-5. Kingsway made it 7-6 when Schmidt scored on a wild pitch, but when Ross came into the game in the fourth it was a different story. He only struck out two, but allowed just four base runners over four innings to secure the win.
“There were multiple games in the playoffs when we were down, so we’re used to it,” Ward said of the early deficit. “We knew we had the heart — everyone on this team has the heart, the players in the dugout, the players on the field. We knew we could do it, we just had to execute. And we did, we just couldn’t get over the hump.”
Ward said knowing the state championship would be the final game for Kingsway’s 11 seniors made the result that much more difficult to take. This group helped Kingsway win 76 games in four years, but this was the only season in which the Dragons made it past the sectional semifinals.
“This is just a complete brotherhood. On and off the field we’re hanging out with each other. We’re best friends. We’ve played baseball together our whole lives. I would do anything for these guys, they’re like my brothers,” said Ward, who went 3-for-4 with two RBIs in his final high school game. “These have been the best times of my life, with these guys. Before the game I said to one of our coaches, ‘man, I’m nervous.’ And I feel like I said that before every single playoff game, thinking every game could be my last. There was always that chance, and the fact that this one truly was, it was a little different feeling going into it.”
“I’ll never forget (this season). They set out on Day One to be here, on this field, on this day — and not many teams you have actually believe they can do that, and accomplish it,” Alvaro added. “Group 4 is really hard, and for them to (get to the state championship game), they’ll always be one of my favorite teams. South Jersey Group 4 champs, make it to the state final, bases loaded in the last inning and you lose by one. Obviously we wanted a different outcome, but I wouldn’t change anything these guys have done all season.”
Ward said the long bus ride down the New Jersey Turnpike to Swedesboro was likely to bring a wave of emotions for everyone wearing a black-and-red jersey.
“I think it will start off with us being sad, but by the end we’ll be grateful for everything that happened,” he said. “I think by the end we’ll be happy just because of how far we’ve come.”
