NJ baseball: South Plainfield southpaw Jones stymies East Brunswick
Greg Tufaro,
Bridgewater Courier News
Published 8:19 p.m. ET April 4, 2019
After losing nearly 80 innings pitched to graduation, the South Plainfield High School baseball team entered this season looking for a third starter to complement ace Chris Shine and veteran Rob Gonzalez.
The Tigers very well may have found their man in senior Justin Jones, a sneaky fast southpaw with excellent command of a breaking ball who did not allow an earned run in a complete-game effort while guiding the Tigers to a 5-1 victory over East Brunswick on Thursday.
“I’m really trying to be a third guy here,” said Jones, who scattered six hits and fanned six without walking a batter on a 93-pitch effort in his first varsity start.
“I’m working really hard in practice, working hard in my bullpens and taking everything seriously because I haven’t established anything yet. I came out here today looking to put my name on the map.”
Consider the kid they call “Jonesy” to have claimed his rightful spot in the rotation at South Plainfield, whose team ERA plummeted to 1.00 after Jones extended the team’s string of consecutive innings without allowing an earned run to 11.
Shine, who has signed a National Letter of Intent with Seton Hall University, opened the season with a complete-game shutout of a quality hitting North Brunswick team that features two future Division I players.
Jordan Hamberg was the winning pitcher in the back end of the series with North Brunswick, allowing three earned runs over four innings before Gonzalez hurled three scoreless innings of relief for a save.
“I think we are pretty deep with pitching,” said South Plainfield head coach Anthony Guida, whose Tigers, ranked No. 2 in the Home News Tribune Top 10, may have the mound depth to rival that of top-ranked St. Joseph.
“We have a lot of arms. We just don’t have much varsity experience after Shine and Gonzalez. So we are kind of toeing the line with how good we are going to be late in the game if someone can’t go the full game.”
Jones, whose velocity and command were as strong in the seventh inning as they were in the opening frame, said going the distance was on his mind.
“Finishing is a big thing here in our program,” Jones said of the Tigers, who are the defending Greater Middlesex Conference Tournament champions. “We’ve got to finish and that’s what I went out here to do.”
East Brunswick finally broke through in the seventh inning. Jay Bartus legged out an infield single, took second on an infield error and scored when, on his steal of third, South Plainfield’s catcher made an errant throw that sailed into left field.
The consummate team player, Jones smiled at his profusely apologetic batterymate, whose miscue spoiled the lefthander’s shutout.
“He’s a tremendous catcher,” Jones said of Brody Donovan, who walked and scored a run and caught an exceptional game. “You’ll be hearing about him this year and next year. It (errors) happen to everyone. I made bad pitches today. You’ve just got to keep your head up and try to win a ballgame.”
Guida believed the Tigers (3-0) should have entered the late innings with significantly more breathing room, but they left the bases loaded twice and stranded a total of nine runners, adding a little bit more pressure on Jones.
“We had opportunities to put them away and we didn’t,” said Guida, who would have liked his hitters to be more aggressive in the batter’s box, especially with a plate umpire calling the game with a big strike zone.
“For us not to be swinging with guys in scoring position is mind-boggling. To not tack on (runs) with a team like East Brunswick on a field like this (hard diamond) where you get a lot of bad hops, I was a little scared.”
The three-time defending Red Division champion Bears, who opened the year with consecutive one-run losses to J.P. Stevens, which won each game in its final at-bat, graduated eight players who batted over .300.
“The biggest thing right now is we are inexperienced,” said East Brunswick head coach Chris Kenney, who had to replace 180 hits, 109 runs and 101 RBI. “You are seeing growing pains. Right now, we are playing a little scared. We need to relax a little bit and start believing in ourselves. I think we will be alright. Once we get a couple of games under our belt, we should be fine. Our talent level is there, but it’s brand new. To them, the game is just so much faster, and that’s the one thing we are stressing. They are watching and trying to catch up, whereas those guys (South Plainfield) are reacting.”
With Gonzalez, a chatterbox in the dugout keeping the team loose and upbeat, South Plainfield does not appear to press, nor does it lose focus. The Tigers returned the majority of their field position players and entered the contest with a .360 team batting average.
East Brunswick starter Max Fallon retired the first seven hitters he faced before allowing a one-out double in the third to No. 8 batter Chris Born and a single to No. 9 batter Matt Cassio. The consecutive hits ignited a three-run rally during which Fallon, who threw 31 pitches over the first two innings, labored to the tune of 41 offerings. He was pitching from behind and worked the count full to three batters in the inning, two of who walked including one which forced home the inning’s third run. Mike Marrero fueled the outburst with an RBI double.
South Plainfield added single runs in the fourth and fifth innings. Born delivered an RBI single in the fourth, while Gonzalez singled and scored on an error in the fifth.
East Brunswick entered the game with a 1.87 team ERA and its pitchers, who have allowed 15 runs over three games, were victimized Thursday by three errors, two of which led directly to runs.
South Plainfield’s hottest hitters, TJ Massaro and Hamberg, who entered the contest a combined 9 of 14 from the plate, were collared on Thursday. Marrero, who entered 0-for-7, went 2-for-3 with a walk. Born, who was 2-for-4 on Thursday, was the only other Tiger with a multiple-hit game.
East Brunswick, which had a runner on base in three of the first four innings, had an opportunity to break the shutout in the fifth when Jack Thiel singled and took third on a double. Thiel, however, was erased after being caught in a rundown on a failed suicide squeeze attempt.
After the Bears got two runners aboard in the seventh, Kenney said he wanted to try to manufacture a run, thus he called for the double steal, which led to East Brunswick’s lone run.
“They were leaving us alone,” Kenney said. “I figured, why not put a little pressure on them to give (the Bears) something good coming out of the game. We got that overthrow, thank God, and scored that run.
“Maybe it brings a little bit of life back into the team, so it’s not totally demoralizing.”
