Millburn Baseball Wins Sectional Title

As the Miller baseball team caught its final out to win the North II Group 3 state sectional championship, there was no wild celebration and no jumping up and down on the mound. Just some scattered and subdued high fives, a few of hushed claps and a couple hugs as brief as an eye blink.

As Friday afternoon’s hero, Felipe Bomfim put it after the home win, they still have work to do.

“Two more games. Two more games and we’ll win the states. That will be a dream for me,” Bomfim said.

Powered by a five RBI afternoon by Bomfim, and seven shutout innings from freshman pitcher Dave Talpalar, the Millers defeated West Morris Mendham, 7-0, in the state sectional final and now have their eyes set on a Group 3 Championship.

“This is a nice feeling, absolutely,” Talpalar said of winning the section. “We’re going to soak this one in tonight, but come tomorrow we have to focus again, because as coach [Brian Chapman] just said, we didn’t come this far to fall two games short from the state championship.”

“We played a very good ball game today, David pitched very well, our defense was outstanding and our offense did what they had to do,” Chapman said. “We scratched some runs, got some big hits from Felipe, we played a good ball game.”

Through the first three innings of play, it was a scoreless game, with Talpalar and Mendham hurler, Casey Meyers, trading zeroes. But in the bottom of the third, Will Fitzgerald, Anthony Del Greco and Talpalar reached base consecutively to load the bags for Ian Riddell, with no one out.

Riddell took a 3-2 pitch to leftfield, driving in Fitzgerald to put Millburn up 1-0. In the next at bat, Clayton Elder reached first on a fielder’s choice, with Mendham opting to go home for the force out and then back to first for the double play try. While they were trying to double up Elder, Millburn’s Ryan Rounick, who was the courtesy runner for Talpalar, never stopped running and was able to score from second base on the play, with an errant throw coming back to the plate.

With Millburn up 2-0, Bomfim bombed a 3-2 pitch well into left field and over the heads of a Mendham outfield that was playing extremely shallow. The two run triple broke the game open and Bomfim delivered the knockout punch with a three-run homerun in the sixth inning, scoring Riddell and Elder.

“Sometimes you just get a hold of one and this happened to be my day,” Bomfim, who entered the game with a .158 batting average and one extra base hit, said. “I luckily got hold of two. …RBIs are RBIs, I just try to do my job for the team. I don’t care about homeruns.”

“He hasn’t been hitting throughout the year in the lineup, but he really enjoys those opportunities and he has done an incredible job,” Talpalar said of Bomfim. “It was a nice performance, it was incredible.”

With the way Talpalar was pitching, a seven run cushion was more than enough for Millburn’s freshman ace. Talpalar gave up three hits and struck out three in a seven inning shutout performance. After giving up a first inning single, Talaplar retired the next 11 batters he faced and 17 of the next 18.

“What more can I say. The guy works wonders,” Bomfim said of his battery mate. “When he is on, he is on. He had two big games, he beat Seton Hall and West Essex. I feel like when he’s up there, he can do whatever he wants when he’s on against any team.”

‘Today, Talpalar was fantastic,” Chapman said. “He just pounded the strike zone with his fastball and he threw three pitches for strikes, which is just dynamite and he really kept them off balance. That’s a pretty good offensive team which they’ve shown in the state tournament.”

While he wasn’t striking out a ton of batters, Talpalar induced groundballs and weak fly balls, allowing his defense to make plays behind him.

“I thought my stuff was pretty good, but I was just peppering the zone, letting the guys behind me make awesome plays time after time and again,” Talpalar said. “That’s really been the story of the year I think for us as a program. Pitchers have just done a great job of throwing strikes and we just have the confidence in the guys behind us to make every play.”

Mendham, which came in with a 13-14 record, was having a magical run through the sectional playoffs, as the 10 seed knocked off second seeded Cranford and third seeded South Plainfield on the way to top seeded Millburn.

The Millers travel to William Paterson University on Tuesday for the Group 3 semifinals against Paramus at 4 p.m. The Millers improved to 25-6 this season.