2016 Perfect Game High School Preview Index
Over the last 28 years, every ballplayer that waked through the halls at Saint Joseph Regional High School in Montvale, N.J., and then walked out onto the SJR ballfields could expect to be greeted by the smiling face of head coach Frank Salvano. During those 28 spring seasons, Salvano led Green Knights teams to 628 victories, the most ever by any coach in the history of Bergen County (N.J.) high school baseball.
Over the last 22 years, Mark Cieslak has served as a police officer in his hometown of Palisades Park, N.J., while also serving as Salvano’s top assistant coach at SJR for the past 10 seasons. When the baseball season rolls around each year, Cieslak works nights, heading out on patrol in his police cruiser for a shift that begins at midnight. This spring, when his shift ends sometime in the mid-morning, Cieslak will eventually make his way out to the ballfield with some added responsibility.
Salvano called it career at the end of the 2015 season, retiring after not only winning those 628 games but also 13 league, seven county, six New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association (NJSIAA) state sectional and six NSIAA state group championships. It is Cieslak who was asked to fill those sizable shoes as St. Joe’s next head coach.
“It is kind of tough because (Salvano is) definitely a baseball legend,” Cieslak told Perfect Game during a telephone conversation last week. “I’ve been with him for 10 years so I feel comfortable there and the only thing I’m nervous about is the paper work and making sure I fill out the forms to get us into tournaments and making sure I get the schedule lined up with my (work) schedule. I feel comfortable on the baseball end of it; I’m a little nervous about the administration end of it.”
One can only assume those administrative duties will find a way of taking care of themselves, allowing Cieslak to concentrate on getting the Green Knights back into championship form. They won a state sectional title in 2014 and league and Bergen County tournament titles in 2013, but didn’t collect any hardware in 2015 after a 22-9 season. It was the program’s 18th straight season with 20 or more wins.
Considering the talent returning for Cieslak’s inaugural season as head coach, a 19th straight 20-win campaign looks inevitable. This 2016 SJR squad is loaded with 11 seniors, juniors and sophomores that Perfect Game ranks among the nation’s best in their respective classes. They include 2016 right-hander/utility Austin Bodrato (No. 214 nationally/No. 7 N.J.), 2017 right-hander/infielder Devin Ortiz (Nos. 105/1) and 2018 infielder/right-hander Justyn-Henry Malloy (Nos. 48/1).
The Green Knights open their season April 2 in the No. 31 spot in PG’s Preseason National High School Top 50 Rankings, the highest ranked team in the PG HS Northeast Region (Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont). No. 39 Gloucester Catholic (N.J.) and No. 40 Poly Prep Country Day (N.Y.) are the other PG HS Northeast Region schools included in the rankings.
Optimism certainly abounds in the SJR camp: “I’m really excited about this,” Cieslak said. “There are a couple of little twists I want to put in and a couple of things I want to focus on but I just think it’s a great (foundation) that I can build on. These guys are very motivated; our winter workouts have been going fantastic. They’ve been working out (on their own) for the past two months already getting ready for the season; they’re a very focused group.”
A player like Bodrato embodies that focus. The 6-foot-2, 200-pound University of Florida signee was a football-first kid coming when he entered high school and thought when he was younger that he would play football in college, not baseball.
He was a varsity starter on a nationally ranked St. Joe’s football team during the fall of his sophomore year, but that spring he also excelled on the baseball team that won a New Jersey State Sectional Championship. The season was transformative and Bodrato became a baseball-first kid and he gave up football. He has signed with the No. 1-ranked Florida Gators, but right now is anticipating a senior season playing under a new – but familiar – head coach.
“I’m looking forward to playing for (Cieslak) but really it’s just going to come down to how we play as a team,” Bodrato told PG over the phone last week. “We have to listen to him and then we have to stay together out there. We’ve got a lot of good kids coming back and if we all play the way we should and stick together we should have a really good year.”
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SAINT JOSEPH REGIONAL HIGH SCHOOL IS A PRIVATE, ROMAN CATHOLIC, ALL-MALE, college prep school in Montvale, which sits a little over 30 miles northwest of The Bronx, N.Y. The school’s enrollment for the 2015-16 school year was 772, according to the NJSIAA. That places it right in the middle of the 17-school Non-Public A, North classification that the NJSIAA designates for schools with enrollments between 402 and 1,450. Archrival and New Jersey athletic power Don Bosco Prep is also in the Non-Public A, North classification.
“It’s a small academic school but in all of its (athletic programs) are very strong,” Cieslak said. “The atmosphere around here is pretty focused in terms of the athletes getting their schoolwork done so they’re eligible to play and get their futures set for these big (colleges). It’s a pretty focused group in terms of their regimen and doing the same thing just about every day to get ready.”
Cieslak was a baseball, football and basketball star at Palisades Park High School in the late 1970s – one of the rare athletes to be named first-team All-Bergen County in all three sports – and the left-handed pitcher went on to become an NCAA Division-III All-American at William Paterson University in Wayne, N.J. He went undrafted out of college, but signed a free-agent contract with the Cincinnati Reds in 1984.
That summer, Cieslak went 7-2 with a 1.49 ERA while pitching for the Reds’ affiliate in the Gulf Coast Rookie League and was named the league’s Most Valuable Player. A year later, while pitching for Cedar Rapids (Iowa) in the Class A Midwest League, he first came down with the chicken pox and then developed arm problems and his career was over.
He’s not afraid to share his experiences with the young SJRHS players. He emphasizes the fact that he came from a small Jersey town, made his way into professional baseball and even earned an MVP Award while realizing the entire time that he really wasn’t that much different from a lot of his friends back in Palisades Park. He stresses to his high school players the importance of believing in themselves as they strive to reach a higher level of success.
“I think they are tuned-in because I was at where they’re going,” Cieslak said. “I can give them that foresight of what they have to look forward to. I can tell them about some of the mistakes that I made when I was going through those things, and I think that kind of helps put them on the track of what to focus on and what not to focus on.”
Several of these players have been focused enough to have already earned scholarships, like the one Bodrato secured at Florida. Senior right-hander Joseph Neglia has signed with Rutgers, the junior Ortiz has committed to Virginia and the sophomore Malloy has verballed to Vanderbilt. Senior outfielder Matthew Cocciadiferro is a top-500 national prospect, as is junior right-hander Hiro Mizutani, and both are uncommitted. The varsity roster features 20 players (as do the JV and freshman rosters) and Cieslak said he could send 14 of them out to pitch if he so desired.
“These are kids that play the year around on all these travel teams – you’ve got Malloy, you’ve got Ortiz, you’ve got Bodrato, Neglia, Hiro (Mizutani) – all these kids that have played with Perfect Game and they’re going to good schools,” he said. “To me, that’s kind of like the number-one goal.
“It’s not so much the championships – we want to win the states; we want to win counties because we’re a very competitive group of people – but our job (as coaches) is to prepare these kids and get them into college. I feel like I really want to get everybody into college playing baseball; that’s what I’m shooting for.”
Dozens of SJR baseball alumni have continued their baseball careers in college and five have gone on to play professionally, including Chicago Cubs infielder Tommy La Stella (SJR class of 2008, 8th round 2011 MLB draft out of Coastal Carolina). 2012 Perfect Game All-American left-hander Rob Kaminsky (class of 2013) was a first-round pick (28th overall) of the St. Louis Cardinals in 2013 and catcher Isaias Quiroz (class of 2014) was a 20th-round pick of the Texas Rangers in 2014.
Although Cieslak was not the head coach when Kaminsky and Quiroz (known at I.Q.) were at SJR, he worked with both of them very closely during their formative years. He began working with Kaminsky when the young southpaw was 10 years old – “I could tell you a million Rob Kaminsky stories,” he said appreciatively – and sensed what set him apart from the others was his unharnessed drive to achieve his goals. Kaminsky knew exactly what he wanted to accomplish from a very young age.
“That’s what I find in those special players that get drafted is that they’re pretty focused and they have a thing inside of them where they’re not worried about failure,” Cieslak aid. “I think the biggest quality in all those good players is that they’re focused on what they want and they’re fearless about going and getting it.”
SJR’s rich baseball history isn’t lost on the current crop of players, either: “It means a lot to be able to say you played (at SJR),” Bodrato said. “There are so many guys that have been in and out of the program that have been drafted and played at the college level. You go around the school and you hear about all these guys … and when you put that uniform on it’s an honor to go out and play on that field and be in a program that has such a good reputation.”
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WHEN BODRATO TAKES A LOOK AROUND THE GREEN KNIGHT’S DUGOUT AND ASSESSES the breadth of talent that occupies it, he sees a team that has the ability to climb into the top-25 of PG’s national rankings, which is what the 2013 SJR team accomplished late in that season. The depth on the pitching staff is what jumps out, but it’s also just the camaraderie that develops when players are part of a powerhouse program. And these players are eager to rally around their first-year head coach.
“We need to stay together as a team and I think if that happens we have so much talent it’s going to be hard to beat us; it’s exciting to have this many kids coming back,” he said. “Playing at St. Joe’s you have the same goals every year, and that’s to win the league, county and state championships – win it all. This year, it’s really just more of the same thing.”
That’s the line of thinking and the overall mindset Cieslak will encourage and build upon as the season progresses. This is a special group in his eyes, and not just because he’ll remember it for being his first team as a head coach, the same way Salvano most likely remembers his first team back in 1988, a group that won league and Bergen County championships. These Green Knights spent last summer performing for upper-level travel ball teams like the Indiana Prospects, Team Citius and the Tri-State Arsenal, and received a lot of individual accolades and attention.
Bodrato was named all-tournament at the PG WWBA World Championship in Jupiter, Fla., playing with the storied Midland Redskins and to the Top Prospect Team at the PG National Showcase in Fort Myers, Fla.; Ortiz was all-tournament at the PG WWBA Underclass World Championship in Fort Myers playing with Team Citius Red; Malloy was an all-tournament selection at the 15u PG EvoShield Classic in Cartersville, Ga., playing with the Northern Valley Hurricanes and more impressively was on the 40-man roster for the USA Baseball 15u National Team.
Having pocketed the individual accolades and secured their college scholarship offers, the top prospects on this Saint Joseph Regional HS Green Knights squad can now concentrate on winning team championships. And no one is more eager to see how everything plays out than the first-year head coach, the 22-year veteran New Jersey police officer who accepted the challenge of stepping into a New Jersey baseball coaching legend’s sizable shoes.
“I want to get in there, really, and just keep them high as a kite,” Cieslak said. “I want to motivate them about the routine, not to get complacent, not to be settled-in; I want when they get to practice to give me two hours … to come in with a purpose for two hours, do their work and get out.
“We have 60 kids in our three programs and I want all of them to feel that, that we’re here for a purpose,” he concluded. “That’s what I want – hard work when you’re there and it will pay off in the end. You won’t have to sweat it.” Just like he won’t sweat those messy administrative duties.