10 the Chronicle, Willimantic, Conn., Wednesday, May 16, 2018

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PROUDLY HONORS ATHLETES of the WEEKRachel Salamone

Softball, RHAMRyan Skaff

Baseball, Lyman Memorial

Locals deliver on the hill and at plate

RyanSkaff might be wise to considermajoringin history at whatever college or university he attends in the fall after

he graduates from Lyman Memorial in June. Why? Because the talented pitcher is certainly making some history of his own with his baseball Bulldogs this spring.

And even though we’re not sure if RHAM High’s Rachel Salamone is a fan of heavy metal music, the talented junior is certainly swinging some heavy metal for her Sachems on the softball dia-mond.

All that history and heavy metal has landed both Skaff and Salamone on Page 10 of the Chronicle today as our selections as the male and female athletes of the week.

Skaff twirled a 5-inning perfect game against Windham High in a 14-0 Eastern Connecticut Conference Division III victory over the Whips last Wednesday to improve his record this season to 5-1 with a 1.12 ERA.

Skaff struck out seven Whips that day and induced seven ground-ball outs as his Bulldogs improved to 11-5 overall (8-2 in the ECC Division III standings).

And the victory also enabled Skaff to match former Bulldog ace Adam Murphy (1993-95) for the most victories in program history (23).

“Good choice on Ryan,” Lyman Memorial coach Marty Gomez said of Skaff, who leads the Bulldogs in innings pitched and strike-outs.

“First noticed his live arm while he was in middle school. Started playing AAU ball where he developed his pitching savvy.

“He became a rotational pitcher his soph year when he went 10-0. Has tremen-dous command on all four of his pitches. His biggest asset is how he attacks hitters and very seldom gets himself in hitter’s counts. Certainly will go down as one of Lyman Memorial’s greatest pitch-ers.”

How did a young hurler

develop into a dominant pitcher who should soon become Lyman Memorial’s winningest mound man in program history?

“I think my strengths as a pitcher are location and movement and the amount of pitches I can throw for strikes,” said Skaff. “My role has evolved greatly since freshman year. I started as a swing player that didn’t pitch a varsity inning until halfway through my sopho-more year. I got a start ver-sus Bacon Academy after we had no one left in our rota-tion to throw and I pitched a complete-game shutout and it really just took off from there.

“My improvements from junior year to senior year are velocity, about 7-8 mph, and I developed my knuckleball enough to throw it in games and that has really helped with my success this year. For instance, in the Griswold game they were hitting every pitch except the knuckleball so from the second inning on I threw majority knuck-leballs.

“If that was last year, they would have won that game because they were on every pitch except the knuckle-ball.”

Griswold finally knuck-led under to Skaff and his Bulldogs, 6-5, during that ECC Division III game back on April 28 at Hanover Field in Lebanon.

Skaff struck out 10 Wolverines in 6-plus innings that day as Lyman Memorial handed Griswold its first ECC Division III loss.

“This year I’ve tried to help everyone in our rota-tion evolve and become better fundamental pitchers and the growth in some of our younger kids like Zach Bazzano and Alex Lotts is really showing,” said Skaff. “I think most of our success this year has come from our younger guys maturing.

“There are only two returning starters from last year and we needed some of our less-experienced guys to step up and fill roles and they have more than done that. Also, a key to our suc-cess is our coach who is the best coach I’ve ever had. The amount of passion he coaches us with is crazy. He has really pushed to get the team where it is today and I think this is also a product

of his hard work.”The product of Salamone’s

hard work is a .548 bat-ting average with 17 hits, 11 RBI, five stolen bases and a pair of homers. And once she returned from a school-sanctioned trip to Spain, Salamone has helped her Sachems collect their only three wins of the sea-son in victories over Bacon Academy (17-2), East Hartford (10-1) and East Catholic (11-3).

“I think my particular strengths would be almost always making contact at the plate,” said Salamone, who went 9-for-14 at the plate with eight RBI and eight runs scored during that 3-game winning streak.

“I think another one of my strengths is tracking and predicting where the ball will land in the outfield. On my travel team, the assistant coach, Rob Falcigno, always jokes that I must be doing math in my head and figur-ing out where the ball will be using the quadratic foru-mula.

“I think many people really underestimate the dif-ficulty that an outfielder

faces when trying to track down a ball that could end up anywhere on the grass,” Salamone continued.

“I also try to be an aggres-sive base- runner. If my jer-sey doesn’t have dirt all over the front of it from diving, that’s disappointing to me!”

Disappointment was the watch word for Salamone during her sophomore year at RHAM High when the hustling center fielder could not play a single inning after dislocating her right throw-ing shoulder during the win-ter travel season, an injury that necessitated surgery in April of 2017.

“I think a large part of my appreciation for the sport now is that I know what it’s like to fall down and physi-cally not be able to pick yourself back up again,” said Salamone. “I was dying to start playing again. I used GameChanger and kept the score for the coaches, but I obviously wished that I was still playing, sometimes making it feel like I was a little left out and didn’t have too big of a role on the team.

“But this year, after a sum-mer of having to learn how

to throw all over again with my brother and my Dad, I’m back in center field and sec-ond in the lineup.”

And as Salamone returned to the game she loves so much, she recalled how that love was first created.

“I was first attracted to playing softball when I was around 8-years-old,” said Salamone. “At the time I was just a cheerleader and didn’t do another sport, but my brother, Michael, played baseball. I really looked up to him and he inspired me to give softball a try, espe-cially after sitting at so many games, learning how to eat sunflower seeds, keep the book and do the scoreboard with my Dad.

“I spent a long time out-side throwing with Michael and my Dad when we were younger.

“When I was 10 and look-ing for a challenge and way to play more often, I tried out for the Connecticut Eliminators travel team, coached by Wayne Card, and that really kick-started everything for me. My travel coaches have played a very important role in my softball

career, always pushing me to improve and being a rock for me.”

RHAM High coach Ray Bell didn’t know what he had at his disposal when it came to Salamone’s abilities this spring because she was injured during his first year at the helm last season.

“Actually, I didn’t really know how good of a player she was,” recalled Bell. “Last year during my first year as head coach, I had heard from my assistant, Sean Hagearty, how much we would miss her. He said she would have been our best all-around player. She makes us a completely dif-ferent team than earlier in the year.

“She has many strengths. She is a high honor student, very coachable, a leader for the young ninth- and 10th-graders on the team.

“She is what we call a ‘gamer’ who hits the ball hard most of the time, an excellent base-runner as well as an ‘A’ outfielder defen-sively. She has great softball IQ. She just gets it.”

Follow Mike Sypher on Twitter — @msyphertc.

In the photo above, senior Ryan Skaff of Lyman Memorial delivers a pitch for his baseball Bulldogs. Skaff has compiled a 5-1 record with a 1.12 ERA for Lyman Memorial this season and recently tied Adam Murphy (1993-95) for the program record for all-time victories (23). At left, Rachel Salamone of RHAM High eyes an incoming pitch. Salamone is currently hitting at a .548 clip for her Sachems. Mike Zaritheny | For the Chronicle

RHAM HIGH SCHOOL’S

RACHEL SALAMONELYMAN MEMORIAL’S

RYAN SKAFFMike

Sypher

ERIK BOLANDNEWSDAY

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Masahiro Tanaka’s Tuesday night ended far better than it started.

As a result, he and Tyler Austin had the New York Yankees in posi-tion to win their 20th game in 23 tries.

Tanaka allowed a first-inning homer, then watched the Washington Nationals tack on two more runs in the second inning, which put the Yankees in a 3-run hole against a team that had won 13 of its last 15 and had standout lefthander Gio Gonzalez and his killer curve ball on the mound.

But by the time the heavy thun-derstorms that created havoc up and down the East Coast hit Nationals Park, delaying the game at 9:01 p.m., just before the Nationals came to bat in the sixth, Tanaka had settled, allowing his offense to rally

to tie the score at 3-all.The game, officially suspended at

10:08 p.m., will be resumed at 5:05 p.m. tonight before the regularly-scheduled game kicks off 30 min-utes after the last out is recorded.

Tanaka, after allowing an RBI double to Pedro Severino with one out in the second that made it 3-0, retired his final 11 batters.

Tanaka allowed three runs and four hits over five innings. He struck out two and did not walk a batter.

The Yankees, an MLB-best 28-12 coming in and with a half-game lead over the Boston Red Sox in the AL East, slowly grinded away at Gonzalez.

The lefthander, taking the mound 4-2 with a 2.22 ERA this season, frustrated the Yankees early, strand-ing two runners in each of the first two innings.

But Austin, in a 0-for-23 slump

coming into the night but with a single in his first at-bat of the game, crushed a 2-run homer in the fourth, a 28-pitch inning for Gonzalez that cut the Yankees’ deficit to 3-2.

His sacrifice fly in the fifth, a 34-pitch inning for Gonzalez that finished his night at 111 pitches, tied it at three. Gonzalez allowed three runs (2 earned) and six hits in five innings.

He struck out five, four in the first two innings, and walked four.

Tanaka retired the first two Nationals he faced in the first but threw a flat 1-1 sinker to Anthony Rendon, who blasted it out to left for his fourth homer and a 1-0 Washington lead.

Rendon’s blast was the ninth homer allowed by Tanaka this sea-son, the most on the Yankees’ pitch-ing staff.

The Nationals added on in the second, a 27-pitch inning. Veteran

Howie Kendrick, a long-time Yankee tormentor as he came in with a career average against them of .346, led off with a double.

After Mark Reynolds struck out, Andrew Stevenson grounded sharp-ly to short where Didi Gregorius tried for a backhand stop but couldn’t quite come up with it, the play scored an RBI single. Severino followed with his double.

Tanaka then bore down, begin-ning his streak of 11 straight retired by striking out Gonzalez.

The Yankees got a break, and capitalized, in the fourth. Gregorius led off with a routine fly to left where Matt Adams drifted over and settled under it. But Stevenson, the center fielder, continued to call for the ball and knocked it away at the last moment, allowing Gregorius to pull into second on the error. Austin followed with his sixth homer.

The Yankees went back to work

in the fifth. Aaron Judge walked for the second time and Giancarlo Stanton collected his 1,000th career hit, a blooper to right.

As lightning continued to flash, Gary Sanchez worked a walk to load the bases. Gregorius grounded into a 3-2 fielder’s choice, extend-ing his slide to 1-for-38, but Austin just missed on a grand slam, set-tling for a sacrifice fly to the middle of the track in center, which brought in Stanton.

Frazier returnsOutfielder Clint Frazier is up with

the Yankees for the first time this season since a concussion suffered in spring training sent him to the disabled list.

The Yankees recalled Frazier from Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre on Tuesday, designating righthander David Hale for assignment in a cor-responding move.

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.

Suspense builds as Yankees rally to knot up game with Nationals

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