By Vince Paravecchia
CorrespondentJosh Magyar did a fist pump and waited for the pile-on.
And it came--quickly.
Nearly all the Bristol Post 382 players took part in a celebration that few would have thought possible a year ago, and not to mention, even a few days ago. This program, which last season won just three of 27 Lower Bucks American Legion League (LBALL) games, was celebrating a league title on perennial power Yardley-Western Post 317's field after winning the last two games of the 3-game championship series.
“I wasn’t looking for a league victory, but I knew we had a good team,” said third baseman Joe Tepper, about whether he thought a league title would have been possible after last year. “We just pulled it together, we got on a roll.”
“It’s awesome. I love this group of guys. We have a lot of fun; [we] just go out and play our hardest, and luckily, we came out of here with a championship today,” added second-year player Joey Brown, a Conwell-Egan Catholic graduate on his way to Bucks County Community College. “I just think we believed that we could win. We got a couple of wins early. We just kept rolling with it, just played our hardest [and] finally got here.”
When Bristol coach Tim Monaghan played for Post 382 in the mid-1990s, Post 317 was always the team to beat. Western won an American Legion national championship in 1996 and was always, at the very least, winning the league title, he recalled.
Monaghan also couldn’t remember the last time Bristol won the league championship, but one thing was sure: he hadn’t even had a playoff team in the two seasons leading up to this one.
“It’s a great turnaround,” he said of his 17-win team in league play. “I knew that last year, we were going to take our lumps and we were going to improve.”
Though they reached the postseason with a third place league finish, Post 382 staggered to the finish line after losing four of their last six games.
That’s another reason this championship was so special. Not only were most of the players back from last year’s squad, but they were considered underdogs on many fronts.
First up was Falls Post 834, which beat Bristol three times in the regular season. But Post 382 was not to be denied in the semifinal series, as it swept second-seeded Falls, which was also the defending league champion, by 6-3 and 5-2 scores.
That meant a date with top-seeded Yardley-Western, which put Neshaminy graduate Andrew Rushwick on the mound in game one and got a 6-5 victory, thanks to his efforts.
From there, the series went to Truman (Bristol’s home field) with Post 382's remarkable season on the line.
“In a sense, your back’s against the wall as far as your opposition goes there and it takes a lot to battle, and hats off to them because they came out, they did what they had to do,” said Post 317 coach Dave Vaccaro after losing game three. “They forced us to make mistakes. Either they forced us to or we found a way to make them the last two nights, and it came back and haunted us.”
Behind Mike McLeod’s one-run complete game to answer Rushwick’s performance in game one, Bristol earned a 6-1 victory that sent the series back to Conwell-Egan’s Vincent B. Carosella Field July 13 for a winner-take-all showdown.
“Yesterday, they had a little of difficulty in the field and stuff like that,” Monaghan said of his team’s game two win. “I thought if we could put up a lot of runs early that the pressure would mount on them and we could maybe force them into more mistakes.”
For a while, it looked like game three was going to be a thriller. Bristol jumped out first with a one-out, RBI hit from Joe Tepper. Post 317 starting pitcher Rick Brebner, however, got out of any further damage, and in the bottom of the first, he tied the game with an RBI groundout after his team had gotten the first two runners on base.
But that would be the last time Yardley-Western could say tie. Brown started for Bristol and got out of his own trouble, and his team would never look back. Truman graduate Ed Connelly led off the second inning with a double, and three batters later, Post 317 committed the third of their six errors on a ball hit by leadoff man Chris Fischer. Connelly scored on the gaffe, and following a strikeout, Post 317 opted to intentionally walk catcher Pat Sevick to load the bases for Tepper.
It was a move that would cost them. With two strikes, Tepper got a pitch to hit, and the possible soon-to-be Police Academy student belted a two-run hit to centerfield. That put Bristol on top, 4-1, and was followed by back-to-back RBI singles from Brown and Truman’s Dave Blount.
“I had complete confidence in Joe [Tepper] to make them pay,” said Sevick, who played for Bensalem’s legion team last year.
“We’re both pretty good hitters, but I came through with a nice single and two RBIs,” said Tepper, who went 2-for-4 with three RBIs. “That was big.”
That proved to be enough for Brown. The Post 382 hurler struck out five batters while yielding only three hits and two runs in six innings of work before Magyar closed things out. Both of those Post 317 tallies were also on sacrifices, with the second coming in the fourth on a fly ball by Neshaminy pitcher and second baseman Kevin Ballester.
“It’s been a long season and we just didn’t come through today,” said Yardley-Western catcher Doug Fleming. He went 1-for-4 in what will be his final American Legion game, but that lone hit was a three-run double in the bottom of the seventh inning to cut the Bristol lead to 12-5.
Fleming graduated from Penn Charter this year and will be attending Coastal Carolina University this fall, where he will continue his baseball career.
“It’s upsetting, of course, but they’ll come back next year,” he added. “Unfortunately I won’t be here, but they’re going to have a lot of great success next year. They’re just going to take what happened all in this game and [win the league playoffs] next year.”
Despite the loss, Western learned a lot about itself in winning the regular season title. There were times during the campaign that Post 317 had to play with just 11 players, but the lack of depth and ability to make moves didn’t hurt the team as the season progressed. Western still finished with the best regular season league record and made the postseason yet again. It wasn’t easy, but Post 317 then got through a three-game series defeating a never-say-die Yardley-Morrisville team, thanks to a 4-3 July 10 win that got them to the championship round.
In the beginning of the season, we weren’t hitting, we weren’t pitching, we weren’t doing anything, and then after half the season went by, we started picking everything up,” Fleming said. “I’m happy where we made it. I have no regrets [about] this year.”
He will leave the program, but only two others, namely Rushwick and fellow pitcher William Bresnahan, will as well. So, Post 317 will be more experienced next year, and on top of that, will have two young but emerging pitchers in juniors David Gaydula and Chris King.
“Guys put it behind them, enjoy the rest of their summer,” Vaccaro said. “It’s going to hurt them for a little while, but they’ll get over it and hopefully it’s a learning experience for them.”
Certainly, it seemed to be just one of those nights for Bristol, which kept the offense churning throughout. In the third, Sevick smacked a long two-run double to left center field that made it 8-1. Two innings later, Truman’s Adam Ashwell hit an RBI single after replacing Fischer, and Sevick continued his great night with another double to score Bristol’s eleventh run. Then, Brown capped his team’s scoring with an RBI triple.
By game’s end, Post 382 had racked up 14 hits and all starters had reached base.
“My first double, he just kept it up in the zone and I turned on it, and the second one was a curve ball that I had to go down and get,” said Sevick, who’s actually Monaghan’s cousin.
Sevick said he loved getting to be a part of this team this year, and the team’s certainly love having him, too. In the regular season, he batted .385 with 25 hits and 13 RBIs, but just as importantly, played lights-out defense.
“Doug’s [Doug Fleming] a great player and I don’t want to take anything away from him, but if Doug is No. 1, Pat is 1-A,” said Monaghan of the best catchers in the league this year.
He’ll be a key person in Bristol’s lineup for the upcoming regional tournament, which begins July 18 in Spring City. Post 382 will open play, which is double-elimination format, at 7:30 p.m. against Spring-Ford.
“As long as we keep hitting the ball and our pitching stays strong, we’ll be fine in regionals,” said Sevick about what the team needed to do to succeed.
“That’s one of the things we discussed when we went out into the outfield there, is that our season’s not over,” Monaghan added. “Our goal at the beginning of the season was to make the playoffs and obviously, as you reach that goal, you have to readjust.”
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