Flyers Baseball Finally Breaks Through Against Kellenberg

needed a win. With the start to the 2012 baseball season yielding a 1-4 record coming into Wednesday against Kellenberg at Hofstra University and fresh on the heels of another 8 inning loss, another 1-0 squeaker, the Flyers were looking for anything really to get their offense to click.

What they were looking for – believe it or not – was a few curveballs.

Kellenberg lefty reliever Robert Kelly had shut down the Flyer lineup in order Tuesday, but they had seen enough of his off-speed pitch to finally make the adjustment.

“Bobby’s a really good pitcher,” Chaminade secondbaseman Zachary Hieb said. “We know he’s big on the curveball, so we just sat back, waited on it.”

Waited and belted off six two-out singles off the Firebird reliever.

Waited and scored 5 runs to break open the game for an 8-2 win.

“We need every win we can get,” Pienkos said, noting that the blow out was “a long time coming” as his team batted around.

“It’s very unusual in the whole league to have an inning like that.”

Last year Chaminade used to , a rare sight when they would fail to send opposing teams’ pitchers packing and lighting their bullpens up like a pinball machine.

“It was a , not much experience so it’s good to see them do that for the first time this year,” Pienkos said.

No one can say if Kelly was rattled or by an exchange between his catcher and the Chaminade bench that escalated a bit to the coaching staffs, only that his curveball looked more like a meatball to leadoff hitter Christopher Wren in the sixth as he plated a pair of runs to break open the game.

“Sometimes in a game like that emotion, you saw the umpires and the coaches argue and all of a sudden emotion takes over and I think that kid on the mound tried to overthrow a little bit and our guys did a great job just putting the ball where it was pitched, hitting the ball where it was pitched,” Pienkos said.

Chaminade first-year starter Daniel Caniano is still a work in progress, pitching to contact as he held Kellenberg to 2 runs on 3 hits, 5 walks and lasted 6 innings – enough to earn the win – though struggling with his control.

“I didn’t have my best stuff today,” he said, noting that it “felt awesome” to put a 1 in the win column. “I just had to go out there and battle and I’ve got a pretty good field out there. As long as (Kellenberg) put it in play I knew they’d make the plays.”

Hieb was more apt to look at the larger picture.

“This was a big momentum shift for us,” He said. “We’ve just got to be more aggressive. Today we didn’t strike out as much as we usually did which was big, we came out hacking, came out very aggressive so from now on that’s what we’ve got to do and we’re trying to build on that.”

Really a win worth waiting for.