Windham varsity baseball drops season-opener to Biddeford

By Matt Pascarella

In the season opener. Windham varsity baseball took on Biddeford at Windham on Friday April 25 and while Windham was slow to swing the bat and didn’t cross the plate, resulting in a 10-0 loss to the Tigers, there’s plenty of time for improvement.

Windham senior Grant Coppi throws a strike during the
prep baseball season opener against Biddeford at Windham
High School on Friday, April 25.
PHOTO BY MATT PASCARELLA

Windham senior Grant Coppi pitched four innings, had zero earned runs, one walk and six strikeouts. Senior Cayden McCartney pitched two innings, had one walk and one strikeout.

Windham varsity baseball coach Chris Doughty said these statistics tell him Biddeford scored one run that they earned. Windham made six errors and struck out 10 times, so 16 opportunities shifted in Biddeford’s favor, and the Tigers took advantage of that.

“I know we’ll shore up the defense,” said Doughty. “We just lacked that big hit today; if you don’t try, you’re going to fail every time, we just got to get going. We’re playing right now like we’re afraid to fail, and we just need to play confidently. When you start making error clusters, that’s when you get in trouble. You can’t play baseball being afraid to fail, it’s a game of failure. We don’t want to be peaking in game one, we want to be peaking in game 12, 13, 14, 15 – that’s when we want to be getting to our best baseball. We’ll get there.”

At the start of the game Windham sent three batters back to the dugout after two strikeouts and a fly out to shortstop was caught by Windham sophomore Alex Pastore.

McCartney singled and freshman Aiden Rinaldi walked. Unfortunately, they were left on base.

Biddeford scored one run in the second inning, to lead 1-0.

Windham kept after it. After a walk and senior Josh Plummer was hit by a pitch in the second inning, sophomore Mike Redlon singled.

In the bottom of the third inning, Windham freshman Mason Rulman notched his first varsity hit with a grounder to left center field.

“It felt good,” said Rulman. “I put the work in, and it shows when I go up there and hit off a good pitcher pitching. Our pitchers were throwing strikes, they were letting the other hitters hit it right to our defense, we just need to make the plays. We did OK swinging the bat, but we need to do a lot better. I feel like we could have a lot more communication. We could have beat them, we just need to lock in and not make errors.”

By the fifth inning, Biddeford was up, 7-0. Redlon had a diving catch in right field. Windham was unable to catch Biddeford, and the game ended after six innings.

“Right now, we’re stilling trying to figure out how to play as a team,” said Coppi. “We’re kind of playing scared; we got to focus on what we all want and that’s to win, but we just got some things to figure out. We had a couple young kids step up and make great plays. It definitely got harder, but I think we did a good job of not hanging our heads. I think we got to play with more confidence and make less errors, swing the bat more and us pitchers got to pound the strike zone.” <