Defensive Lapses Cost West Deptford In Regional Opener

A single error can cost you a game at the regional level.

A handful of them spells almost certain doom.

Though both teams ended the night with three errors each, for West Deptford’s Senior League squad, a few key miscues in the fourth and seventh innings amounted to three unearned runs and turned an otherwise evenly-matched game into a 7-3 loss to Pennsylvania in the opening round of the Eastern Regional at Union Field Friday night.

“When you’re playing a good team like this, those defensive letdowns are going to cost you,” West Deptford manager Marty Roselli said. “We’ve got to play our best games here.”

West Deptford cruised through the first three innings behind an untouchable performance on the mound by Keith Wallace, who struck out six in the early going, but things frayed at the edges in the fourth.

After Wallace induced a pair of easy outs, Pennsylvania’s Trent Grove smacked a grounder up the middle for a single. The next batter, Bart Chupka, hit another hard grounder to almost the same spot, but West Deptford’s Jason Roselli was able to snag it on the run in shallow center.

Roselli made an off-balance throw to shortstop Ty Castellano, who missed getting the out at second by mere inches.

The inning looked over when Pennsylvania’s Jake Granteed hit a mile-high popup to shallow right, but Roselli misplayed the ball, allowing Grove to score and Chupka to get to third.

A passed ball a few pitches later allowed Chupka to score, but Wallace reached back down and struck out Walkowiak to end the inning and minimize the damage.

“You’ve just got to keep pitching,” Wallace said. “Once the ball leaves your hand, it’s out of your control.”

Meanwhile, West Deptford couldn’t scratch out hits when it needed to. The team squandered a few early scoring chances, leaving the bases loaded in the first inning and leaving runners at second base in the second and fourth innings.

Some of the credit for the lack of hitting went to Pennsylvania starter Adam Romanowski. He weathered a tough first inning, where he gave up a pair of walks and struggled with his control, and used a late-breaking slider to baffle West Deptford’s batters into the fifth inning.

The hosts weren’t about to slouch off the field, though.

After Dominic Bisirri lined a two-out single to center field, Ed Essig stepped to the plate and took the first pitch to the deepest part of the park for a two-run shot that cut Pennsylvania’s lead to 3-2 and appeared to charge up the West Deptford dugout and the vuvuleza-toting crowd.

“It was just a matter of knowing what was going to come and timing it right,” Essig said. “He was throwing that first pitch almost all game; it was pretty predictable.”

Pennsylvania’s bats added a run in the sixth off a tomahawked home run by Chupka, and then were aided by a pair of West Deptford errors in the seventh.

West Deptford got a few chances of their own in the bottom half of the final frame, thanks to some defensive mistakes by Pennsylvania, but the comeback was snuffed out after a single run.

The hosts now fall to the loser’s bracket, and play Sunday morning against the winner of Maine and Massachusetts for the chance to stay alive in the tournament.

“I told them not to get down–we still have another bullet,” Marty Roselli said. “They realize now they have some tough competition here.”