New Sayreville head coach and Bomber alum Tim Ballard talks to his players on the mound in the preseason. (Submitted photo)
UPDATE: Today’s game has been postponed due to rain. A make-up date has not yet been set.
Mother Nature was nice to high school baseball in New Jersey in 2023, relatively speaking.
If the forecast for this week holds, it might be in trouble from the start.
But like that old Saturday Evening Post cover by Norman Rockwell, everyone’s going to try and play Monday, if they can. After all, it’s Opening Day.
And as of now, the window to play looks like it’ll be right when first pitch is scheduled for the season-opening broadcast on Central Jersey Sports Radio, as Piscataway visits No. 9 Sayreville in a Greater Middlesex Conference crossover matchup.
You can hear that game – weather permitting – with pregame at 3:45 and first pitch at 4, as Mike Pavlichko and Vin Ebenau call all the play-by-play. Click here to listen.
The Chiefs are coming off a 7-15 season that saw them go 4-9 in the GMC Blue Division, and last year on Opening Day, they took the Bombers to extra innings, falling in nine by a 7-3 score.
Piscataway didn’t lose a ton in terms of graduation. Michael Wojick (.365, 15 RBI) and Mahir Shah (.257, 23 RBI, 2 HR) will be the biggest pieces missing from the lineup, while Shah also pitched 35 innings, with an ERA under five.
The good news is, head coach Rob Stoddard will have two pitchers back who missed all of last season on the mound due to UCL injuries: Bobby Bressler and Kenny Barksdale. Bressler was able to play second base, but Barksdale was completely shut down. They were P’way’s aces in 2022, but it leaves Stoddard an interesting decision as to who will get the ball on Opening Day, with last year’s ace, Jaden Peace, also in the mix.
Meanwhile, the Bombers are playing their first season in two decades with a new head coach, as Bomber alum Tim Ballard comes over from JFK. Ballard played for Mike Novak at Sayreville, then went and played college ball at Monmouth. Now, he takes over for his former mentor, who retired at the end of last season.
Sayreville was 15-10 last year, and GMC White Champions with a division record of 10-2. They’ll return top hitter Jake Romanello, who batted .425 with 13 RBI as a junior last season, and Ballard plans to start junior Thomas Schlaline, who tossed 37 innings in 2023 to a 3.03 ERA, striking out 43 and walking 30.
Ballard having been a Bomber – and playing for the previous coach – means he won’t be reinventing the wheel, but he is excited about how his charges hit the weight room hard in the off-season, and he’s expecting a little more pop out of the bats this season.
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