Coach absolutely 'sick' after baseball team wins 82-0
In sports movies, a ragtag band of misfit underdogs inevitably takes on the powerhouse team full of big league stars and, through grit, determination and Hollywood magic, manages to win.
In real life, they usually get stomped into dust, the game pretty much over on the first play, the game itself an embarrassing farce.
So it went for the Notre Dame Cristo Rey High School baseball team out of Lawrence, Massachusetts, a city whose large population of immigrants from the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico apparently has not sent any would-be Nelson Cruz- or Yadier Molina-level talents to that particular school.
They faced off Saturday against Old Rochester, a Division 3 baseball school; Massachusetts, like most states, uses a tiered format so that, for example, some small school out on the New York border doesn’t have to beat a school in downtown Boston for a state championship at its level.
Cristo Rey is a Division 4 school with only 103 boys and no real athletic reputation to speak of.
And after the ballgame was over, the final score was 82-0 in favor of the bigger school.
Old Rochester scored 12 runs in the first inning and 20 in the second inning, taking a 32-0 lead and leaving anyone in attendance wondering, “Don’t they have a mercy rule?”
Bulldogs baseball coach Steve Carvalho isn’t gloating over his win.
“I’m sick to my stomach over this,” Carvalho told the Boston Herald. “We really tried everything possible. We told the kids don’t take extra bases, no sprinting — we even had kids bunting and they couldn’t make the routine plays. We had kids hitting balls 300 feet and jogging to first.
“We even asked that they stop the game after four innings and they said no. Believe me, we exhausted all options in our power.”
Which in itself may have been even more demoralizing; imagine playing a ballgame where you know full well the other team isn’t even trying after the second inning and you still get beat 50-0 when you’re being given every opportunity to get guys out.
The game itself was the result of a scheduling error, as Carvalho explained.
“We had 18 games and we were searching for a 19th game,” he said. “We looked at the MIAA website and saw Cristo Rey was looking for a game. I noticed they were 11-8 and made the tournament. I didn’t realize at the time that there were two Cristo Reys.”
The Cristo Rey Carvalho thought he was up against is in Dorchester, a neighborhood within Boston.
When Carvalho realized his error, rather than backing out on his word, he made the 88-mile trip to Lawrence. The coach thought it would be “a good cultural experience for our kids,” citing Lawrence’s civic character as a little slice of the Caribbean in an old New England mill town.
Georgie Rosario, Cristo Rey’s athletic director, saw no problem with accepting the game for his school despite the size disparity between the talent pools.
“I don’t have a problem with Old Rochester at all; they are a program we’re trying to be like,” Rosario said. “We’re a very young team that graduated seven seniors year from last year. We have no seniors, two juniors and the rest of the team is freshmen and sophomores.”
The teams are scheduled to meet again on May 19 at Old Rochester, which will be a cultural experience of a different stripe for the kids from Lawrence; unlike the mill town’s Hispanic atmosphere, the Old Rochester school district (which includes the neighboring towns of Marion and Mattapoisett; the high school is located in the latter town) is a mostly white South Shore bedroom community suburb.
Carvalho is taking steps to ensure that his players will be better hosts than guests.
“No way am I using my varsity,” the coach said. “We will play the game with our junior varsity.”
This was not the worst beatdown in high school baseball history. That “honor” goes to Atlantic of Iowa, which beat Griswold 109-0 in 1928. If Old Rochester had wanted that record, it could have gone for it, but sportsmanship, such as it was, prevailed.
Hopefully the JV kids prove a fairer match.
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