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NORTH ADAMS, Mass. – The fourth-seeded Danbury Westerners (7-1) swept the No. 5 seed North Shore Navigators (5-3), in common comeback fashion for the team, in Game 2 of the 2021 New England Collegiate Baseball League (NECBL) Championship Series to win their first-ever Fay Vincent Sr. Cup in the organization’s 26-year history at Fraser Field on Thursday night.
The new NECBL champions’ relief pitcher, Jacob Marshall (Le Moyne College), earned the win in relief of starter Sean Hogan (Williams College) after taking over in the fifth inning (2 innings pitched, 0 hits, 0 earned runs, 2 walks, 3 strikeouts), and Navigators starter Luke Marshall (Stonehill College) suffered the loss at home (3 IP, 6 H, 4 ER, 4 BB, 4 K). Coleman Picard (University of Hartford) secured his third save of the postseason for the Westerners.
North Shore jumped out to an early lead in the bottom of the first inning with the help of a two-run single hit by third baseman Matthias Haas (Cal Poly San Luis Obispo) and an RBI base hit from catcher Cal Christofori (Yale University) before, in signature gritty Danbury Westerners style, the road team tallied five runs in the top of the third by a pair of RBI singles by first baseman Andrew Jenkins (Georgia Tech) and third baseman Nicholas Lorusso (University of Maryland) plus a three-run home run off of the bat of second baseman Matt Zaffino (Fairfield University).
Haas drove home another run for the Navigators in the home half of the same inning to bring the score to 6-4 in favor of the visiting squad, tallying his team’s final run of the summer.
Danbury scored twice more in the visitor’s half of the fourth inning thanks to an RBI single by Jenkins and a sacrifice fly from Lorusso to cap off the eventual winning squad’s scoring in their championship title-clinching victory before relievers Marshall, Michael Farinelli (Northwestern University), Noah Jensen (Elon University) and Picard shut down North Shore’s lineup the rest of the way to seal the Westerners’ final win of a memorable 2021 season.
After finishing the regular season with a 23-19 win-loss record and just one-and-a-half games behind the first place Martha’s Vineyard Sharks, Danbury, the self-proclaimed grittiest team in the NECBL, began the postseason by knocking the fifth-seeded Newport Gulls out of contention in the Wild Card round, followed by a series sweep of the No. 2 seed, the Valley Blue Sox, in the Southern Division Semifinals before edging the top-seeded Martha’s Vineyard Sharks in the Southern Division Finals, and, most recently, sweeping the No. 5 seed Navigators.
The Westerners routed North Shore by a score of 13-5 in Game 1 of the Finals, asserting their dominance over the underdog at home in southwestern Connecticut to kick off the series. The first contest between these two teams saw a win earned by relief pitcher Jimmy Fahey (Trinity College), a pair of two-run homers by catcher Jack Payton (University of Louisville) and right fielder Henry Strmecki (University of Dayton), a three-run shot by left fielder Cameron Masterman (University of Louisville) and a grand slam hit by Jenkins to all but seal their squad’s Game 1 win and set up their sweep over the Navs in Massachusetts.
The 2021 regular season saw plenty of ups and downs for Danbury but, when it mattered most, the Westerners played nearly flawless baseball from the start of the Wild Card round up until the last out in Thursday’s Game 2.
In the words of Danbury infielder John Anderson (Georgia Tech) on June 24th of this season after coming back from a 6-2 deficit with a six-run inning: “We’re the grittiest team in NECBL history”. Anderson and the rest of his team knew this year’s team was different, and, in the end, they were right.
