HCBL Drops the Riverhead Tomcats, Signs First-Ever Division I Female Ballplayer Olivia Pichardo of Queens, Brown University

The 2022 summer was the last for the Riverhead Tomcats.

After 13 mostly successful summers, the Riverhead franchise of the Hamptons Collegiate Baseball League has been shuttered, league president Sandi Kruel confirmed last week. The North Fork Ospreys, she said, will take over any and all operations of the Tomcats and will be able to use any available resources left over from the previous franchise, such as housing families, equipment and anything else that may be of use.

The Tomcats were a part of the HCBL’s initial expansion in 2009, when the program grew from one team, the Hampton Whalers, to five teams, which saw the Hampton Whalers become the Sag Harbor Whalers in addition to four more teams, the Tomcats, Ospreys, Southampton Breakers and Westhampton Aviators. Those teams actually made up the Kaiser/Hamptons Division of the Atlantic Collegiate Baseball League before breaking away from that organization a year later to create what is now the HCBL.

And Riverhead, originally led by Patti White and the late Bob Furlong, was one of the league’s more successful clubs year in and year out. Although they did finish last this past summer with a 13-23 record, they were coming off a season in 2021 in which they had reached their third consecutive HCBL Championship Series, just the third team in league history to do so, joining the 2009-2011 Ospreys and 2015-2017 Aviators.

Kruel said there were many factors that led to the decision, which was made, she said, not long after the summer season ended. First of all, Patti White, who ran the club herself following Furlong’s death in 2017, was retiring and expected to move out of state. But, just like any other time the league has dropped a team, such as the Montauk Mustangs or the Center Moriches Battlecats, finances are typically the main culprit. And it was no different in this case, Kruel said.

The league president praised White, though, for her years of service to the league.

“Patti’s kids were always happy,” Kruel said. “We never received any complaints from colleges, from players, from parents. They kind of did their own thing out in Riverhead and always made it work. Corbin Burnes, who was the National League Cy Young Award winner just a few years ago, came out of there, and I do think that the coaches who were there, like Bill Ianniciello, had a lot to do with their success. Guys just produced for him.

“But we have to think about what’s in the best interest of the league, financially, day-to-day operations, fields wise,” she added. “Patti did a great job, but it was time for us as a league to take a look around and see what we could do to put ourselves in a better position financially.”

While dropping a team may look like a step backward for the league, Kruel said being back to having an even number of teams, as opposed to the seven it has had the past few years, will give it a flexibility, mainly in scheduling, that it hasn’t had in recent years. All six teams will now have common days off, which will allow for easily scheduled make-up dates for rainouts.

The major drawback of having one less team, Kruel said, is that the league will have 28 less ballplayers to showcase.

“There are kids out there who possibly could have played out here and now they’re not,” she said. “It’s not like we had drafted them and then closed up the team, but maybe there were kids on that team last year who thought they could come back and now they can’t. But again, an even number of teams makes everything easier.”

That’s not all to say that future expansion will never happen. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

Kruel said she “sees the rainbow” at eight teams one day. She mentioned areas such as Shoreham-Wading River, Hampton Bays and East Hampton as all potential landing spots for new teams in the future, but it’s going to be up to people in those areas to make it happen.

“It would be fabulous to have someone who is willing to step up from those areas that would make that happen,” she said. “Part of the benefits of playing on eastern Long Island is that travel time is so minimal. I’ve had many people come up to me and say that is a huge benefit because if you play anywhere else, a lot of the times you’re traveling hours just to play a game, so that’s very appealing to coaches, and even adding those places wouldn’t add a lot of travel time for teams.”

It appears Marika Lyszczyk’s legacy is already paying dividends for the league.

In November, when Brown University announced that undergraduate Olivia Pichardo had become the first female athlete in NCAA Division I history to be named to a varsity baseball roster, it marked a historic moment for women in sports and sent shockwaves through the baseball world, leading to stories with various media outlets, including Major League Baseball, People magazine and NPR.

This summer, Pichardo, a Queens resident, will roam the fields of the East End, as Kruel announced she was signed a few weeks ago.

“Brown called us, they actually reached out to my recruiter [Casey Harms], and they had said how the Hamptons League already had a female player and it seemed to go well, how [Lyszczyk] came back for a second year,” Kruel explained. “And with Olivia from the area, they would like to keep her in the area and if we were interested in picking her up. I said no question, absolutely.”

Lyszczyk, when she made her debut for the Division III Rivier Raiders, became the first — and at the time only — female to play collegiate baseball at the NCAA level. According to Baseball for All, a nonprofit working to improve gender equity in baseball and provide girls across the country opportunities to play, coach and lead within the sport, since then, nearly 20 women have been members of collegiate baseball rosters at various schools, with at least eight slated to suit up for the 2023 season — but none at the NCAA Division I level.

Lyszczyk has since transferred from Rivier to Sonoma State University in California.

“Marika picked up a lot of endorsements while she was here. She got to walk the red carpet at the MLB Home Run Derby. She really did open up the world for a number of females,” Kruel said. “Marika is coming off a labrum tear, so I don’t know if we ever got to see her full potential on the field. But she’s going to be great wherever she goes, and we couldn’t be more excited to welcome Olivia when she gets here this summer.”