Rich Duffell wasn’t sure of the remedy, but he knew something had to give.
The Xavier baseball team, a preseason favorite to return to the CHSAA Class AA intersectional title game, couldn’t get its offense going of late and the tight losses were piling up as the Knights fell further back in the Bronx/Manhattan division standings.
“It’s a struggle,” the Knights coach said. “When we don’t score, one mistake can kill you. That’s what happened against St. Joe’s and Regis.”
Looking to find a way out of the offensive rut, Duffell called Xavier seniors James McCool, Matt Drucker and Sean Meekins together before practice Wednesday.
The answer, as it turned out, was a light-hearted game of wiffleball.
“We’ve just been pressing lately, but yesterday we had a fun practice,” Dan D’Angelo said. “We played wiffleball and we were just goofing around and had a fun time.”
Still, Duffell wasn’t taking any chances and made wholesale changed to his lineup. Every move was rewarded Thursday in a 14-2 run-rule shortened win against St. Raymond in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
“It was very frustrating the other day against Regis, very frustrating,” Duffell said. “This was a good one.”
And a shock, even to Xavier players.
“We know they’re good and we know we can’t expect this to happen every game,” Nick DiLeo said. “We have to expect close games because these are all good teams, especially St. Raymond. We played them once this year and they beat us, but we wanted to show them that we want to be the best in the division again.”
DiLeo was moved to the top of the lineup, where he was for much of his sophomore year, and he responded by going 3-for-4 with five RBIs, belting a pair of home runs to break the game wide open.
The junior left-hander gave up two unearned runs on three hits in six innings.
“I didn’t have my off-speed today, which was surprising,” he said. “Usually I have my change-up, but not one off-speed pitch was in the strike zone until the sixth inning. It was predominantly fastballs.”
Duffell also moved David Eschen, who was the designated hitter, to first base and put backup second baseman Kenny Sumsky at DH. Brian Flanagan started at shortstop, Cosgrove started in right and Nick Aguilera was behind the plate.
“That’s a lot of changes,” the coach said.
Flanagan’s single that took a wicked bounce off the dirt in front of St. Raymond second baseman Jordanis Nunez plated two runs in the third inning and then Xavier (5-6) exploded for five runs in the fourth as D’Angelo (2-run) and DiLeo (3-run) both hit home runs off ineffective Ravens starter James Santiago.
“They said Nicky’s home runs were popups, but I’d like to believe mine was a shot,” D’Angelo said.
DiLeo wasn’t done there. He hit a two-run bomb in a six-run sixth inning as the Knights lead expanded to 13-2.
“Nicky’s second home run, I think, was legit,” Duffell said. “The others I think were wind-aided.”
Still, the Knights scored 14 runs on 13 hits, about a week’s worth of offense in one surprising blowout of a St. Raymond team that fell to 6-6.
“I think we came in today a lot more relaxed,” DiLeo said. “We’ve been tense. We know we have to win and every game we lost makes the next more of a must-win. We came in today loose. We had a change in the lineup, we had a fun practice yesterday and we came with a change of attitude and it worked out.”
The big question, though, is if this outburst can carry over to Saturday’s league game against Salesian and beyond.
“It has to [carry over] because we put ourselves in a bad spot,” Cosgrove said. “We don’t really have that much room for error. We have to keep performing and get ourselves into the playoffs.”