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Tournaments  | Story  | 9/27/2019

Cangelosi Splits Day 1 in Florida

Blake Dowson     
Photo: CJ Byrdak (Perfect Game)

FORT MYERS, Fla. – There are a lot of teams in Fort Myers, Fla. this weekend for the WWBA Sophomore World Championships that call Florida or Georgia their home.

Cangelosi Sparks 2022 Black is not one of them. The Sparks call Lockport, Ill. home. The team spends most of its time winning a bunch of games and tournaments back home in the Midwest, including the Midwest Freshman Championship a year ago in Iowa.

An early Thursday morning flight and a long day of travel made for an interesting Friday morning game down in Fort Myers, however.

You know that saying that goes something like, “You’re only as good as your next day’s starting pitcher.” It applied here.

A good performance on the mound woke everyone up. CJ Byrdak, Most Valuable Pitcher at this same WWBA Sophomore World Championship a year ago, delivered that performance for the team, and the Sparks won, 8-2.

“It was a little different, coming all the way down here from Illinois,” Byrdak said. “We had a 4:00 am flight [Thursday], got here around noon. So then coming out today and pitching, it was long and tiring, but I felt like I got in a groove.”

Byrdak didn’t give Cangelosi a ton of length – he only pitches 2 2/3 innings due to pitch limit restrictions. But he battled when the team needed him. Two fielding errors caused problems for Byrdak in the top of the second inning, and Cangelosi gave up two runs in the frame – both unearned for Byrdak.

He got a strikeout to end the inning and the damage.

“He didn’t get down,” head coach Tim Byrdak, CJ’s father, said. “We had a couple mishaps there in the second inning, but he was aggressive on the mound and that’s what we like to see out of him.”

Significant damage had been done, however. Not necessarily on the scoreboard; the two-run second inning for Tri State Arsenal only tied the game at 2-2. But the game felt sloppy all of a sudden.

The speed of the game slowed way down. Both teams were playing tight. Opening game at one of the biggest tournaments of the year, with two teams from Illinois and New Jersey. A little tightness is to be expected.

Cangelosi went scoreless in the bottom of the second inning, but Brydak grabbed momentum back when he struck out the first two batters of the third inning, before being lifted to preserve his availability. Noah Schultz, who came in to replace Byrdak, picked up a strikeout to end the inning.

Teams want shutdown innings right after they hang a crooked number on the scoreboard. Tri State Arsenal had one right after they tied the game. Brydak and Schultz’s combined frame, however, in which they struck out the side, felt more important in the moment.

And it turned out to be.

Nate Voss, a Michigan Wolverine commit, started the bottom of the third with a triple over the left fielder’s head that almost cleared the fence. After a hit-by-pitch and walk, Beau Polickey smacked a double down the third base line that scored two and gave the lead back to the Sparks.

Two batters later, Byrdak delivered a two-RBI single to push the lead to 6-2. Cangelosi would add one more in the frame and another in the bottom of the fifth inning to secure the 8-2 win to open up pool play.

Coach Byrdak said he gathered up the guys after the second inning lapse, and felt like the team took what he said to heart.

“We just talked about the pace of the game,” he said. “It looked like after we made a couple errors that we really tried to slow the game down. I just told them they control the pace of the game, and that we could come back and score a couple quick ones. We want to try to control the game as much as we can from the first inning to the last.”

Cangelosi couldn’t get any sort of rally together in Game 2 on Friday. They lost, 3-1, to Team All-American, who is 2-0 in the pool after one day.

It was a matter of not stringing anything together consistently. The Sparks put together quite a few hard-hit baseballs, but seemingly none were back-to-back, and most were right at defenders.

Voss started the seventh inning with a double over the center fielder’s head – his fourth extra-base hit of the day – and came around the score on George Bilecki’s RBI single. But the rally fizzled out after that.

A diving catch in center field robbed Cangelosi of another baserunner and a sliding, over-the-shoulder catch in foul territory at first base ended the game just as Team All American’s starting pitcher, Jake Rupp, hit the pitch max.

Rupp ended up tossing seven innings, giving up six hits and the one earned run, along with four strikeouts.

The six hits were spread out just enough, which is the opposite of what Coach Byrdak got out of his squad in their first game.

“That’s the thing that the kids have to understand,” Brydak said after Game One, regarding his team’s crisp play. “If they play good defense and they get timely hits and that stuff, that helps out with pitching and really helps out in the long run.”
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