Garden City, N.Y. - After starting the season at 4-7, the Adelphi University baseball team completed a run to the NE10 Southwest Division regular-season championship with a sweep of Pace University on Saturday at William J. Bonomo Memorial Field.
Entering play this weekend, the Panthers (16-12, 14-7 NE10) trailed Le Moyne by half a game.
in a perfect world, Adelphi needed a sweep of Pace and Le Moyne to lose two of its four games to Southern Connecticut this weekend, to take over the lead in the NE10's Southwest Division.
The last game of the season crowned a regular-season champion. The contests almost finished concurrently. Just seconds after Adelphi won 11-4, Le Moyne suffered a 7-0 defeat at the hands of SCSU.
Game 1: Adelphi 4, Pace 2
The Panthers led 3-2 in the top of the sixth, when Pace had the tying runner on third with one away.
Andrew Primm lifted a pitch to center and on the tag-up,
Cooper Johnson nailed pinch-runner Luke Rivara with a line-drive throw to the plate to end the inning.
It was an enormous turn of events, because
Anthony Cipri led off Adelphi's half of the sixth with a solo homer to right.
It was Cipri's first home run of his collegiate career and there was no bigger time for it.
Andrew Williams handled the rest of the work. He tossed a complete game and earned his first win as a Panther.
In the bottom of the second, the Panthers batted around and strung together three singles to plate three runs, which got the hosts out to a 3-0 advantage.
Game 2: Adelphi 11, Pace 4
Troy Simpson worked out of some first-inning trouble, including a fielding error to start the game, by striking out the side to keep Pace off the board.
The Setters did get out to a 1-0 lead on a third-inning RBI groundout, but a pair of two-out RBI knocks by
Kyle Olson and
Tim Feliz in the home half of the third put the Panthers in front.
Adelphi ran into some trouble in the fifth. After back-to-back leadoff walks, the Brown and Gold turned to
Nicholas Maricich out of the bullpen.
Maricich gave up the tying run on a sacrifice fly, before inducing a flyout from Mitchell McCabe with two runners in scoring position to keep the game at 2-2.
As the team was scoreboard watching, Adelphi broke out offensively in the fifth and sixth innings -- a combined nine-run outburst, in fact.
In the fifth,
Matt Alifano drove Cipri, who led things off with a single, around from first with a double down the left-field line. Later in the frame,
Tim O'Connor, who was making his return from injury, stepped to the plate with two outs and the bags full. A misplayed short-hop by the third baseman ultimately led to two errors that cleared the bases and broke it open at 8-2.
The Panthers weren't done yet. In the sixth,
Jose Matos added an RBI single and
Tyler Becker smacked a two-RBI double into the right-center field gap, which made it an 11-2 game.
Maricich, who was one of 14 seniors honored in a pre-game ceremony, picked up his first victory since 2019, with 4.1 brilliant innings of relief. Simpson started and struck out four over 4.0 innings of work.
As the NE10 Southwest Division's No. 1 seed, Adelphi will meet either No. 4 seed AIC or No. 5 seed Southern Connecticut in a divisional semifinal match-up on Thursday (May 13) at William J. Bonomo Memorial Field. More information will be released once the bracket is announced.
