Highlanders Beat Roselle Park 1-0 in American Legion Baseball

Before Saturday's game at Snyder Ave. field, the Highlanders have typically had an easier time with their opponents.

Coach Andrew Cunningham said the team's 8-1-1 record was testament to that. With just a few games left in regular season play there isn't much complacency. Highlander bats are still swinging, but the question is -- are they are driving in runs?

"Can we score some runs please?," an incredulous Cunningham pleaded to his team at the end of the third inning during Saturday's 14-year-old sophomore American Legion travel game against Roselle Park. The team had just two hits to that point in what was eventually to become a scrappy 1-0 win.

Cunningham said that when these two teams met early in the season the result was dramatically different: the Highlanders scored 10 runs on their county compatriots.

Nearly everyone appeared to expect more runs than what was achieved, however, in baseball, good pitching trumps everything, and on a sunny breezy afternoon, pitching was the biggest challenge to scoring runs.

"I think the biggest reason (for low runs) was that we had not seen the pitcher before and he threw hard," said Highlander pitcher Ethan Frohman.

He was referring to Roselle Park pitcher Nick Muccia, who allowed seven hits over seven innings, but who threw perhaps harder than many of the pitchers that the Highlander team has seen this season.

"He was throwing mostly fastballs," said shortstop Ian Lynch, who scored the game's only run on a Frohman single in the fourth. "His curve started to slip the first couple of innings so he didn't throw it that many times after that."

The Highlanders continued on to notch two more hits -- singles  by second baseman John Tedesco and John Wills in the fifth. That completed the Highlanders' bat production.

"He (Muccia) was throwing pretty hard," Lynch said. "We are used to much slower pitching and it was just a surprise to this team. There was more pace on the ball."

The other aspect of the game that helped the Highlanders win was some outstanding pitching from Frohman, who struck out eight and allowed just one hit across four innings.