Baseball Team Defeats Summit 5-3

With another conference championship in the books, the Cranford varsity baseball team tuned-up for Saturday's Union County championship game with a 5-3 victory over Summit at Memorial Field in Cranford Thursday.

The victory improved the Cougars record to 18-5, and once again, it was timely hitting, outstanding defense and strong pitching which helped the home team score the win.

"I thought we did very well," said catcher Marc Linger. "We hit well, we pitched well. We had a pretty good performance out there."

"The key today was that we did a good job getting runners in, we hit in the clutch" said Sean Feeney. "It was something we struggled with in the beginning of the year. Mark Osofsky had a nice single through the hole at short with bases loaded to drive in a run, and that's something we've been working on a lot. Hitters counts, stuff like that at morning practice, and when you get up there, you really have to do a good job driving in runs."

Meanwhile, Summit proved a much better team the second time around, after Cranford handed them a 14-0 loss earlier in the season.

"Summit played a great game," said Cranford head coach Dennis McCaffery. "We had Kurt (Rutmayer) throw a couple of innings, and we had Vinny Colaneri come in and he did an outstanding job. And then Nick Cook came in and got the save. I thought we threw the ball well today, and we had some good situational hitting. We were fortunate to come out with a win."

"We did a nice job throughout," said Summit head coach Kevin Zaleski. "We hung in there, we battled. We got some runners on in the last inning, which was nice to see. In reality, this is what we needed, we needed a good tune-up before the states on Monday and our hopes are still up. Losing 5-3 is very respectable for this team."

Colaneri improved to 3-0 after tossing four innings, giving up one run on two hits and striking out three. Nick Pace had a big day with three hits, while Greg Matlosz,Rob Ghiretti and Osofsky had RBI's in the three-run fifth inning.

"We've been hitting pretty well and squeezed a win out of today," said Ghiretti, a senior second baseman. "We hit the ball hard the entire game. They started to fall through later in the game."

Cranford locked up the Conference championship earlier in the week, which is always the first thing on a list of goals set by McCaffery each season.

"It's one of the five goals that we have," said McCaffery, who is in his 12^th year at the helm. "It's the conference, county, section, North Jersey section and the state championship. So, one of the five goals is accomplished and hopefully we'll have a lot more baseball to play."

The Cougars will practice Friday before facing the Westfield Blue Devils in the Union County final Saturday afternoon at 2:00 p.m. at Williams Field in Elizabeth.

"Westfield's been in the county finals 20 years," McCaffery noted. "They have an outstanding program, their kids are very talented. We know we're going to have our hands full. They swing the bats well. They have a good pitcher that we're going to be facing, so it's going to be a very difficult challenge for us this Saturday."