Easton Legion Beats Barnstable

Barnstable Legion baseball team did not have enough to stay alive against the Easton Legion baseball Tuesday night at Braintree High School.

Easton's pitcher Dave Peretti was just too good.

"They were just swinging at the first pitch," Peretti said. "I knew I didn’t have a really big pitch count, so I was just pitching for contact and they were going for the first pitch."

Peretti pitched the entire nine inning elimination game, throwing 94 pitches on Easton's way to a 4-1 victory. He gave up eight hits and one earned run while walking two.

Despite going the distance, Peretti only struck out two batters - a testament to Easton's play in the field.

"We hit the ball hard and we put a lot of balls up in the air, but baseball’s a funny game," Barnstable head coach Jack Toffey said. "You just gotta battle through it. It would have been nice to come out on top today. I felt pretty good about it coming here, but we gave away a couple of runs early and just couldn’t get across the plate."

Easton took away hits from Barnstable through the duration of the game, including six put-outs by center-fielder Jared Bloom, capped with a diving play in the eighth inning.

Bloom also drove in two runs for Easton on a single in the fourth inning off of Barnstable pitcher Pete Liimatainen, who threw 130 pitches in eight innings, giving up nine hits, walking two and striking out five. He was relieved by Dan Holzman, who pitched a 1-2-3 ninth inning. Easton's other two runs came off the bats of Matt Harding and Andrew Mancini who drove in Bloom and leadoff hitter Jim Sullivan in the first inning.

Easton head coach Frank Auditore was impressed with the one-two punch of Sullivan and Bloom at the top of the lineup.

"The way our first two batters go is going to dictate how we play," he said. "And, Jim didn’t play the other day so he might have been a little rusty, but Jared had some big hits for us."

Barnstable's lone run was scored in the ninth inning after Ryan Litchman hit a two-out triple and was driven in by Denny Beynor.

"We had some counts in our favor and started chasing some pitches," Toffey said. "[Peretti] was around the zone but our hitters as a whole need to do a better job than that. We’re a young team, we’re mostly 16-year-old players on the team, so we have a tendency to make some mistakes."

Barnstable Post 206 second-year shortstop Will Toffey - who batted .411 with 16 RBI and 13 stolen bases - and third-year outfielder and left-handed pitcher Everett Walsh were both named to the 2011 District 10 All-District Team. Walsh led the team with a 5-1 record on the mound and 2.43 earned run average. He also batted .353 with two home runs and was tied for the team lead in RBI with 17.