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Bridgehampton/Ross captains include, from left, Scott Vinski, Milo Tompkins and Kris Vinski. COURTESY BRIDGEHAMPTON BASEBALL
During a Board of Education meeting in October 2018, Lou Liberatore laid out a five-year plan to slowly work Bridgehampton back into baseball.
That day is finally here.
This Tuesday, April 5, baseball will be back in Bridgehampton when the Killer Bees host Shelter Island in what will be the school’s first varsity baseball game in over 40 years. Liberatore, the team’s head coach, and athletic director Mike DeRosa, who also serves as the team’s assistant coach, can’t wait until opening day, and the two plan to make it a festive day with an opening ceremony that will include the unveiling of a historic marker just outside the baseball field to honor Carl Yastrzemski by the Suffolk County Sports Hall of Fame and Bridgehampton legend Carl Johnson will be throwing out the first pitch.
Liberatore methodically planned Bridgehampton’s return to the varsity ranks with camps and clinics starting right after that Board of Ed meeting in 2018. The program continued its precipitous growth when it played a junior varsity season leading to this season.
The Ross School in East Hampton is sending half of the team with nine student-athletes, matching Bridgehampton’s nine, and Liberatore said his team has what every good team wants to be, which is to be strong up and down the middle of the field. That includes junior twins Scott and Kris Vinski, who will lead the team as captains along with Ross sophomore Milo Tompkins. The Vinski Brothers will be starting pitchers and play outfield and first base when they’re not throwing. They’ll also bat atop the lineup.
“They are big pieces to the team,” Liberatore said.
“They know the game. They’ve been playing baseball since they were very young,” DeRosa added.
Liberatore is very high on Tompkins who he said could be the best player in League VIII. Ross junior Yudai Morikawa (shortstop) and Bridgehampton junior Dylan Fitzgerald (second base) will pair up to make up a solid defensive pairing of middle infielders for the Bees.
Juniors Jack Boeshore (outfield) and Hugo Kapon (utility), freshmen Evan Buccigross (outfield) and Neo Simmons (outfield) and eighth-grader Tyler Fitzgerald (utility), are the rest of the Bridgehampton players that will make up the team. Ross junior Eli Wolf will be the team’s third starting pitcher behind the Vinskis. Ross freshman Shawn Gnyp, (pitcher/outfield/first base), freshman twins Alexi (outfield) and Ari Kardaras (outfield/catcher) and eighth-grader E.J. McAuliffe (utility) round out the rest of the roster.
“We’re going to learn a lot about our team after the first week of the season,” Liberatore said. “We’re going to have contributions up and down the roster and we all know that the lineup you roll out in game one is not going to be the lineup you roll out in game 19.
“Overall we’re really excited about the progress that we’ve made with this roster,” he continued. “We think we have good players who are even better kids who are extremely coachable and a pleasure for Mike and me to show up to practice to.”
Bridgehampton/Ross will compete in League VIII, and since it is a combined program, is a Class C team along with neighbor Pierson, which has won the league title the past few seasons, Port Jefferson, which has dropped down to the league, Greenport and Southold. Shelter Island is the only Class D school in the county and Hampton Bays will also play in the league as well.
“Coach Schwartz has done a great job at Pierson, but we don’t really focus too much on the other teams,” Liberatore said. “What we preach is what we can control which is getting better every day and playing our brand of baseball. We never really have conversations about the other teams, we just talk about our goals and hopefully come late May we’ll be in a position to keep playing.”
