HAMILTON – With former Nottingham baseball coach Pete Capone throwing out the first ball in honor of his upcoming retirement from teaching, starting pitcher Matt Juliano took notice.
“I saw him from the outfield,” Juliano said. “It was a nice strike right down the middle.”
The senior right-hander followed suit with an outstanding effort in his first start of the year, pitching the Northstars to a 9-0 victory over Ewing Monday.
After allowing a single and a walk to start the game, Juliano retired the final 15 batters he faced, striking out five. Freshman Alex Alonso threw two scoreless frames to wrap up the fourth straight win for Nottingham (4-5).
“I was just trusting the defense,” Juliano said. “You saw all the great plays Jordan (Raba) made at short, Cav (Aidan Cavanaugh) made at first base. That’s all you have to do with your pitching is trust the defense. That’s all I was doing.”
Asked what his game plan was, Juliano said. “I let coach (Charlie Iacono) call what he thinks is good. Try to get a nice pitcher’s count so I could drop in the slider. That’s what I felt I was doing.”
As has been their mantra in recent years, the Northstars are picking up steam after a slow start.
“Our pitching has been on fire,” said sophomore rightfielder Luke Formica, who had the game’s key hit. “Our hitting has been really good, our defense has been contributing incredibly.”
Formica’s contribution came in the bottom of the fourth of a scoreless game. Nottingham left three runners on over the first three innings and adding to the frustration is that Raba, one of the CVC’s top base stealers, got nabbed twice trying to pilfer.
Gutsy Ewing junior Joey Andreas, making his first varsity start, battled out of situations in the first three innings but couldn’t survive control issues in the fourth. The right-hander walked every other batter he faced in the inning to load the bases with two outs.
Formica then lined a 2-1 pitch into left to plate the only two runs Nottingham would need.
“I was coming up with two outs, runners in scoring position, just trying to do damage,” Formica said. “I just tried to get it up the middle past the infielders to score them.
“I got a fastball. I was gonna swing at the first pitch, that’s what I like to do. He threw a ball with the first two pitches, I fouled off the next pitch and then got one to hit.”
The floodgates opened at that point. Raba singled home Aidan Lipman, Juliano followed with an RBI single, Mike Septak walked to load the bases and Chris Babkowski drove one over the leftfield fence into Eet Gud Bakery’s parking lot for a grand slam to cap an 8-run inning.
“(Iacono), word for word said ‘Hanging slider right over the tree,” Juliano said. “That’s exactly what happened.”
Asked what he thought when Babkowski’s ball soared over the fence, Juliano said, “Even though I was pumped out about that, the first thing I did when I came back to the dugout was give Luke a nice high-five because he started that whole inning.”
In the fifth, Lipman doubled and came around when Formica reached on an error to cap a nine-run inning.
Juliano wrapped up his day with a perfect fifth, and gave a huge boost to a Nottingham staff that lost sophomore hurler Nick Gaglione to injury earlier in the year. Iacono said Gaglione would have thrown 30 to 40 innings this year.
And Juliano, despite playing for the Stars basketball team, was a question mark coming into the season.
“Back in July I had an elbow injury,” he said. “I’m not sure what it was. I want to say nerve damage, but honestly I didn’t think I would pitch this year. But all throughout basketball since December I’ve been rehabbing three, four times a week and doing what I can to be healthy. I got a few innings in relief this year, I came in with a pitch count and felt good the whole time.”
He made Ewing feel bad, as the Blue Devils (3-6) dropped their fourth straight.
“You gotta just keep going to work every day,” coach Dave Angebranndt said. “There’s a chance of getting better, whether you lose 10-0 or lose 4-3 in 10 innings, you have a chance to get better the next day. Hopefully we come out ready to work tomorrow.
“You can’t take away from the fact that Nottingham came out and played well, because they did. But we have a chance to come out tomorrow and get better, and try to bounce back Wednesday against PDS.”
Ewing (3-6) 000 000 0 – 0 3 1
Nottingham (4-5) 000 810 X – 9 9 0
WP: Juliano. LP: Andreas. 2B: N–Lipman. HR: N–Babkowski. RBI: Juliano, Raba, Babkowski 4, Formica 2.
