Tough start for Valley Stream North

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The schedule makers were not kind to the Valley Stream North baseball team to start the 2022 season, and the Spartans are hoping to survive one more tough stretch while still having enough time to make a late playoff push.

North (2-5, 1-5 Conference A3) began the season with an 8-3 victory over crosstown-rival Valley Stream Central on March 25, but dropped five of its next six to Bethpage, last year’s Conference IV champion, and defending A3 champ South Side. The Spartans began a three-game series against undefeated Division (6-0) on Monday before taking on teams in the lower half of the standings starting on April 25.

The Spartans handed South Side its only loss of the season, 9-2 on April 5 to snap a four-game losing streak behind the strong pitching of Jimmy Stroehlein and hitting of sophomore Nick Naumov, who went 2-for-2 with two RBI.

“It was a daunting start to the season,” coach Phil Sanfilippo said. “I do think you saw the capability that we have in the South Side win. I think that game is proof that we are capable of beating the best teams out there because South Side is as good as anybody out there.”

After a tough-luck 2-0 loss to Bethpage on March 31, Stroehlein went the distance against the Cyclones, allowing two unearned runs on three hits with eight strikeouts to improve to 1-1 on the campaign. He also lowered his earned-run average to 1.11 and his WHIP to 0.95 at press time.

Opponents are batting just .159 against him.

“He has fantastic stuff,” coach Phil Sanfilippo said. “Bethpage is another team that won the championship last year and they scored a lot of runs off of us the other two games when Jimmy wasn’t pitching, so so far he’s been doing a fantastic job for us.”

Thomas Santo won the opener against Central, allowing just one run while fanning seven over six innings and then yielded just one earned run over five frames in his next start against Bethpage before suffering a non-baseball related injury that will sideline him for an undetermined amount of time.

After playing sparingly as a freshman, Naumov has firmly entrenched himself at shortstop with four RBIs thus far.

“He’s a part of our future,” Sanfilippo said. “He’s one of the better athletes in the entire school.”

Senior catcher Eric Castrogiovanni has thrown out several would-be base stealers already this season and contributed an RBI double against Central, pitcher-third baseman Michael Capolino homered in the series finale against South Side to up his RBI total to three and right fielder Brian Farrell has two RBI and four runs scored.

Despite the slow start, Sanfilippo believes his team can still steal one of the final playoff berth no matter what happens in the Division series.

“I’m still optimistic,” he said. “I do not think we’re a bad baseball team, even though the record doesn’t look great right now. Hopefully we can get everybody healthy, everyone feeling good and end this season better than we started.”