OA Baseball Tops Attleboro in Season Opener

Coming off another Hockomock League championship under Leo Duggan in 2010, the baseball team entered the 2011 campaign with high expectations. Many pegged them as the top team in the Hock again with the likes of captains Liam Noonan, Ryan O’Shea and Matt Harding, just to name a few.

Duggan, however, doesn’t like to use the term “expectations” around his team.

“We don’t talk about it and we don’t really care about it,” said Duggan. “We play in the Hockomock League and we just have to take it one game at a time.

“We don’t care about rankings, we don’t care about anything. We just want to go out there and play baseball and get better every day.”

Whatever the team’s motto this year is; it seemed to work Thursday afternoon at , as the Tigers defeated Attleboro 8-0.

The Tigers were able to shake off a jam right away at the top of the first. With one out and the bases loaded, Attleboro’s Adam Woodhead popped out to right fielder Jared Bloom and couldn’t advance catcher Keith Drucker, who was standing at third base. Then, O’Shea struck out Dylan Vallencourt for one of his eight strikeouts in six innings of work, to retire the side.

“When you have a good pitcher on the mound and you have an opportunity like that, you have to take advantage of that,” Attleboro coach Matt Bosh said. “When you face a good pitcher [like O’Shea], you’re not going to get a lot of them. When you get opportunities, you need to score and we didn’t. That was big for them and they came back to score some runs in the second and third and we couldn’t recover.”

“Ryan was immense, he was great out there,” Duggan said about his starting pitcher. “We were a little nervous in the first inning but we got out of it without giving up a run.”

Although OA couldn’t capitalize immediately in the bottom of the first, the offense got going the very next inning.

After O’Shea retired the side in order, the junior pitcher drew a walk in his first at bat at the bottom of the second. The very next batter, John Foran (1-for-3, 2 RBI’s), doubled to right center field and O’Shea scored from first base to score the games first run.

“It was nice for our bottom of our order to come through,” Duggan said about Foran and O’Shea, the sixth and seventh batters in the OA lineup. “We jumped on them first and scored the first two runs, which was awesome and then we kept on the momentum after that.”

The Tigers blew the game open with a four run bottom of the third with RBI’s from David MacKinnon (1-for-3), Matt Harding (1-for-3) and Foran off Attleboro pitcher Ryan Olmo, who put in a solid effort – despite giving up six runs – with six strikeouts in four innings.

After a scoreless fourth inning, Kyle McGillvery drove in the last two runs for OA off of Woodhead, who relieved Olmo in the fifth inning.

OA reliever David Holmes secured the first victory of the year with two strikeouts in the top of the seventh.

Both OA (at Sharon) and Attleboro (home to North Attleboro) return to the diamond on Monday.