Sports

For First Time, a Perfect Ending for Chaminade Baseball

Senior Robert Naughton hurls first perfect game in Flyers' history.

You figure in the history of baseball, with an average amount of about three to four starters per season, that at least one would have achieved the pitcher’s dream: a perfect game.

Through some conspiracy – call it collusion of the baseball gods if you want – across the 58-year span of NSCHSAA league record-keeping and the 86 year history of the school, the Flyers have had 15 titles, dozens of award-winning players and managed to put a few of them into the major leagues along the way.

Still the most elusive of individual honors continued to escape their grasp, the prospect always circling the runway yet failing to touchdown on their respective tarmac.

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Friday against St. Dominic’s it settled down on the shoulders of senior Robert Naughton at the St. Dominic’s field to the tune of a 6-0 score and 21 straight batters retired.

Before you get any ideas that this is discounted as a high school game with only 7 innings, consider first how many of those who have accomplished the feat have gone on to the majors – Google it, you’ll be surprised at the names that come up – but also let us inform you that Naughton had to first finish another game from April 18, one suspended in the ninth, giving the Bayhawks an extra frame of looks in his first win of the day before he starting his climb up the mountain to immortality.

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The Flyers coaching staff had decided to only allow the righty to pitch on an inning-by-inning basis, not so much working off of a count limit as it was simply letting him maintain the high-wire act through the 73 pitches that it took to go through the game.

There was little drama elsewhere in the game as Chaminade plated 5 runs in the third and batted around.

Every date with destiny has to have that one instance where you come close to losing it – Naughton had his near the start on a liner to classmate Terrence Connelly that the shortstop put away with a backhanded catch in the second. After that the senior cruised, fanning a total of 11 and popping up three for fly outs, unaware that no batter had reached base until the fourth due to the double-game start and –presumably – his other 12 teammates inching in the opposite direction down the bench lest they jinx the outing.

Rarely have the pitchers that have attained perfection been straight fireball hurlers; it is the ones who have a bit of finesse, the ones who make the ball dance and sing and who also have the stamina to last the full amount of frames before their arms give out.

But those who manage to pitch one and get two wins out of it? One for the record books.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 R H E Chaminade 0 0 5 1 0 0 0 6 7 0 St. Dominic’s 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0


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