HIGH-SCHOOL

Another late rally lifts Cougars

Eric Rueb Journal Sports Writer
North Providence's Nick Conte scores the winning run in the top of the seventh inning on a sacrifice fly to center field by Marcus Brotherns. Scituate catcher Evan Pendergast waits for a throw that never came in Tuesday's game. [The Providence Journal / Bob Breidenbach]

SCITUATE — It’s just the third week of the season but the North Providence baseball team is already plenty experienced with comeback wins.

With their bats kept quiet by Scituate’s Max Pierce for the first four innings, the Cougars stayed calm. Down two runs with Pierce finally off the mound, North Providence tied it in the sixth and Marcus Brotherns drove home the go-ahead run in the seventh. Starter Dom Pontarelli went the distance in NP’s 5-4 win over the Spartans on Tuesday.

“We’re not afraid of being behind, that’s for sure,” said Pontarelli, after the Cougars picked up their third comeback win of the season to get to 4-1 in Division II-B. “That just shows the grittiness we have and what we can be later on in the year. We can be that team that fights back.”

Scituate scored three of its four runs thanks to errors, but Pontarelli didn’t care. With a fastball that wouldn’t get pulled over on Route 6, he used his array of gravity-defying, off-speed magic to keep the Spartans’ contact less than solid. He struck out only five, trusting his teammates behind him even when things were going bad.

“That helps on the field,” Pontarelli said. “You’re not fighting back and forth when one makes an error. It’s just pick each other up and stay as one.”

Things came together for NP once Pierce departed after five innings of work. The Scituate righty struck out 11 and gave up two hits and two runs, one on a routine fly ball to right by Nick Conte that Mother Nature carried to the parking lot.

Facing reliever Ben DeAngelis in the sixth, the Cougars scored a pair of runs on a one-out RBI single by Matt Mandeville and two-out pinch-hit single by Jeremy Gervais.

The clutch hitting continued in the seventh. With one out Conte walked, PJ Rioles singled and Peter Pimentel was intentionally walked to load the bases for Brotherns. The DH with the Oscar Gamble hair lofted a ball to center for a sacrifice fly that scored Conte with the go-ahead run.

“The first pitch I took," Brotherns said, "that wasn’t the one. So I took a breath, relaxed and just waited a little longer on it and put it in the air.”

Pontarelli gave up singles to DeAngelis and Logan Butkins in the seventh, but got Evan Pendergast to pop out to short to end the game and hand Scituate a loss that was tough to take.

“We just have to go out and make plays. That’s what killed us today,” Pierce said. “It was just a lot of errors.”

The teams play again on Wednesday in North Providence.

North Providence 110 002 1 — 5 7 5

Scituate                201 100 0 — 4 9 3

Dom Pontarelli and Ben Rastelli; Max Pierce, Ben DeAngelis (5) and Evan Pendergast.