West Warwick baseball is rolling; Is this the year the Wizards halt a long title drought?
WEST WARWICK — West Warwick baseball isn’t just winning. The Wizards are dominating.
It might be the hitting, or it could be the stellar pitching, but it’s certainly not magic. It’s clear through five games, West Warwick is a frontrunner with eye-popping wins in Division III.
West Warwick topped Mount Pleasant, the league’s defending champions and ousted the runners-up, Exeter-West Greenwich, 11-0. Logan Dean tossed five innings against the Kilties, allowing just one hit with six strikeouts in the 2-0 win.
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The senior, one of 11 on the roster, then silenced EWG over another five innings with just one hit allowed and seven strikeouts. Sandwiched between those starts, Dominic Carollo, a starter for the Wizards last year, pitched two perfect innings against Hope in a 17-0 win.
Last spring the Wizards were on the cusp of their first championship appearance since reaching the Class B title game in 2004. West Warwick raced to the top seed in the division but fell in the Pod One final to EWG in a pair of 2-1 games.
“We're just coming out here and doing better, just picking up slack from last year,” Dean said. “We want to win it. We don't want to do what we did last year and lose. We want to win and we have that [winning mentality] as a team.”
If the Wizards bring a championship back to McCarthy Field, where they downed the Times2 co-op 18-1 in five innings on Wednesday afternoon, it’ll be the first crown for the program since 2002. Anthony Burt picked up his first win of the season allowing an unearned run and fanning seven in the triumph.
“It’s just been a lot of working on getting better and getting ready as a new team,” Kody Fretts said of the Wizards’ perfect start. “It’s going to take a lot of pitching and just not making errors in the field and then hitting when we need to get runs.”
They’ve surrendered just two runs, both unearned, the entire season while plating 54. And Josh Pedus, a University of Massachusetts Dartmouth commit and the 2023 D-III coaches’ Player of the Year, hasn’t needed to take the mound yet this season for the Wizards.
“It's not really one thing, it's just all things come together as one full game,” Fretts said of their success. “And just getting the runs in when we need them.”
Despite the loss to West Warwick early this season, EWG responded with back-to-back wins for a 4-1 start. On Tuesday, the Knights’ Kole Kilduff tossed a no-hitter and tallied the lone run on a sacrifice fly against Classical for a 1-0 win. The sophomore didn’t pitch against the Wizards, but fanned nine against the Purple in a near-perfect start.
Rogers (3-0) is also leading the division and downed the Kilties 4-3 on Tuesday. Conor Donahue, a sophomore, threw seven innings and allowed just one earned run while striking out 15 in the win.
Tolman/Shea (4-0) and Classical (2-1) round out a top-heavy league in D-III. The Pawtucket co-op used four pitchers to escape against Mount Pleasant with an 8-6 win. Jeremy Torres is the program’s ace to start the year with only two earned runs over 11 innings.
jrousseau@providencejournal.com
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This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: West Warwick baseball is the frontrunner in Division III
