MacArthur's Matt Sarni a maestro on mound
It wasn’t a perfect game. It wasn’t a no-hitter. However the performance that MacArthur pitcher Matt Sarni turned in against Seaford in the quarterfinal round of the Nassau Class A baseball playoffs has to rank right with those.
MacArthur defeated the Vikings, 1-0, in 11 innings and Sarni pitched all 11 unblemished frames to get the Generals into a semifinal series and avoid playing an elimination game against Seaford immediately after as the temperatures bubbled into the mid-90s.
And the senior did it with just 96 pitches, 29 fewer than the state mandates to protect pitchers’ arms.
“I’ve been coaching for 30 seasons and it is one of the greatest pitching performances I’ve ever seen,” Generals coach Steve Costello said. “His accuracy was incredible and his economy didn’t leave him feeling [taxed].”
To truly appreciate what the SUNY-New Paltz commit actually did, one has to go inside the numbers. Sarni retired the side in order nine times. In the other two innings, he needed to face just four batters to get three outs. He threw first-pitch strikes to 26 of the 35 Seaford batters and 27 Vikings saw three pitches or less.
“Every time an inning was over, I checked with him to see how he was feeling in terms of fatigue,” Costello said. “He felt good every time, but when you average less than nine pitches an inning, it’s understandable.”
Sarni has dealt with some bumps in the road on the way to this season, where he took a 5-1 record with a 1.30 ERA into Friday’s semifinal contest against Clarke. He couldn’t play as a freshman because of a broken tailbone, Costello explained. His sophomore season was wiped out by the coronavirus pandemic. During the summer of 2020 he suffered an injury that required Tommy John surgery and could not pitch in his junior season; he was however a starting middle infielder.
And this year he finally made the rotation. Said Costello: “you have to feel good for a kid who went through all that.”
Cold Spring Harbor slugger Mann
Cold Spring Harbor’s Drew Munn had such a good season at the plate that he left three decades of Seahawks coaches scratching their heads. Munn hit 10 home runs, however the school doesn’t keep baseball records. Coaches going all the way back to Jay Hegi in the 1990s couldn’t remember any CSH hitter launching that many. Hegi said that he reached out to former baseball star Wally Szczerbiak — who graduated in ’95 and went on to play in the NBA — and he couldn’t remember a season where he hit more than six.
Stony Brook finds Brewer a perfect fit
Stony Brook school first-year coach Jon Brewer has an accent but it's not from around here. He was a highly successful coach in his native Georgia — a regional Coach of the Year in 2016 — before coming north. He ended up on the Island when he and his wife, Nina, started a family and wanted more support around them. She is from Levittown and has a lot of family here.
It was kismet for SBS that he is a history teacher and the school needed one. Brewer took a young team all the way to the state private school championship game where it lost to Brooklyn’s Poly Prep. The Bears return all their key players next season.
Roger Rubin returned to Newsday in 2018 to write about high schools, colleges and baseball following 20 years at the Daily News. A Baseball Hall of Fame voter since 2011, he has covered 13 MLB postseasons and 14 NCAA Final Fours.
