GMCT kicks off Saturday with play-in round, including defending champion St. Joseph-Metuchen; North Plainfield gets a no-no from Zotollo heading into Invitational

The play-in round of the 2024 Greater Middlesex Conference Baseball Tournament begins Saturday, and there’s a little something for everybody.

There are two GMC Red Division teams in the play-in round – a first in the second year of the expanded 20-team field – including the defending champion St. Joseph-Metuchen, and a coach sitting just four wins from 300.

Last year’s 20-team bracket had all seven teams from the Red Division seeded 12th or higher. This year, East Brunswick (4-10) was awarded the 16-seed, while defending GMCT champion St. Joseph – which has played in all three finals since the 2020 COVID shutdown, winning in 2021 and 2023 – is seeded 14th.

And South River head coach Mike Lepore is on the road to his 300th career coaching win, now at 296-316-2. The Rams are seeded 18th in this year’s bracket. Last year, they won their play-in game as the 16-seed, then got knocked off by eventual finalist North Brunswick in the first round.

Here’s a look at the four Saturday play-in games:

18-South River (8-7) at 15-JFK (8-6), 10 am
Winner plays at 2-Woodbridge on Monday

The GMC seeding committee isn’t allowed to look at brackets during the seeding meeting, the idea being that looking at matchups could improperly influence the seeding. Clearly, that rule was followed here, as the Rams and Mustangs just played each other this past week in their home-and-home Blue Division series.

South River won both games, 5-3 on Tuesday in Iselin, and 15-5 at home on Thursday. The Rams walked that second game with four runs in the bottom of the sixth. And what’s most impressive for South River is they won both without their ace, Julius Rosado, on the mound. He’s 3-2 with a 1.65 ERA, and his two losses were hard-luck ones where his team got shutout both times.

The first was a 5-0 loss to Piscataway, where Chief pitcher Bobby Bressler threw a no-hitter. The second was a 13-0 blowout by Spotswood, which threw its ace, Seton Hall commit Carter Cumiskey.

Rosado should go today for the Rams, his last start coming Monday in a 5-0 win at South Amboy. He is also tearing it up at the plate in a league where some of the top pitchers also have been slugging it (see Cumiskey, and Edison’s Jaxon Appelman). Rosado is hitting .410 with 19 runs batted in and eight home runs.

Kennedy is a bit of a light-hitting team, batting just .225, but led by sophomore Grant Lorentzen, hitting .354 with 6 RBIs.

17-Perth Amboy (4-11) at 16-East Brunswick (5-10), 11 am
Winner plays at 1-South Plainfield on Monday

The Bears dropped six of their first seven games, but have won three straight heading into the tournament, sweeping last year’s GMCT runner-up North Brunswick in a Saturday-Monday home-and-home, then winning at Notre Dame (9-8) 5-1 on Friday.

In their first ten games, the Bears had only won two, and those were the only two games ace pitcher Dustin McGuinness has started this year. He picked up a 3-2 win against eventual top-seed South Plainfield, as well as an 8-5 win against Union Catholic a week later. He’s been on the shelf since then due to injury, but head coach Chris Kenney says he’s available in relief Saturday, if needed.

Perth Amboy, meanwhile, looked like it might have turned the corner in mid-April, stringing together a three-game win streak with home victories over Edison and Colonia, and a road win at JP Stevens, but they have stumbled into the tournament with five straight losses, including a pair to second-seed and GMC White Division champion Woodbridge.

19-JP Stevens (5-12) at 14-St. Joseph (3-15), 1:30 pm
Winner plays at 3-Old Bridge on Monday

Calling St. Joseph-Metuchen the “defending champs” is more of a technicality, considering how many key parts of last year’s GMC title team graduated. But Mike Murray’s young team is not to be counted out. In two games this week against GMC Red champion South Plainfield, they went 0-for-2, but by a combined four runs, losing 4-2 at home on Tuesday, and 11-9 on the road Thursday.

And consider this: South Plainfield, the top seed, won the tournament as a 14-seed in 2018, although that team was 15-9 when the tournament started, and there was no play-in round.

Still, we wouldn’t want to be in the other dugout when St. Joe’s eventually puts it together and breaks out. But it’s entirely possible.

Stevens, meanwhile, started the year 4-6, but has slipped since, going 1-6 in its last seven games. Just 2-10 in the division, they have White wins over Middlesex and Perth Amboy.

20-Metuchen (5-11) at 13-Middlesex (5-12), 2 pm
Winner plays at 4-Spotswood on Monday

The GMC has been aligning its divisions lately based more on performance than simply school size, and is cozying to the idea of one-year scheduling cycles. For Middlesex, that idea might not come too soon. The Blue Jays have typically had great success in the state playoffs, reaching the sectional finals in all three years since the COVID interruption, winning the state Group 1 title in 2021, the first year back. All three years they faced Point Pleasant Beach, but only beat them the first year.

The Blue Jays have won at least 17 games each of the last three seasons, but this year, knowing they had a young team, might have been better off with Metuchen in the Blue Division.

But they also play a challenging out-of-conference schedule, which can be deceiving. Their resume includes a close 4-0 loss to a very good North Hunterdon team, and a 14-4 defeat to Governor Livingston (14-3) in the Autism Awareness Challenge late last month.

The Bulldogs, meanwhile, started the season 1-7, but have won three of their last five, and are coming off a 13-12 win over JP Stevens Friday. And they narrowly lost to much bigger Piscataway twice this week, 6-5 on the road Tuesday, and 6-4 at home on Thursday.

Sophomore Lucas Malamug leads the team with 12 runs batted in, while fellow soph Matt Jelleme has a team best .326 batting average. Bottom line: this is a young team, as is Middlesex.

A look at the GMC Invitational:

Since the inception of the “second tournament” in 2019, the debate has been whether it’s better to be in the “main” tournament as one of the lowest seeds. South Amboy, for example, is the Gold Division champion at 10-1, 9-0 in their division.

It was between them and Metuchen for the 20th seed in the main bracket, and it went to the Bulldogs. So now, the team undefeated in division play gets to be top dog in the invitational. It’s a great opportunity for a team that has had a great season in its assigned division. With so much disparity between talent levels in baseball, the Invitational gives teams that wouldn’t have a shot against the big boys a chance to have something to play for, rather than face a first-round blowout against the No. 1 or No. 2 seeds.

And it’s even a ray of hope for a team like a North Plainfield, which is just 1-14 but coming into the GMC Invitational on a high note. They beat Carteret on Thursday 8-0 for their first win of the season behind a no-hitter from Tommy Zottolo. Coming in with an ERA over five, he shut down the Ramblers – not a shabby team, by the way, at 10-5 – allowing two walks and striking out six in an uber-efficient 76-pitch outing.

He is no stranger to big pitching performances. Zotollo also threw a perfect game with his U16 team at Diamond Nation last summer, and threw one for North Plainfield Middle School against Bound Brook in May of 2021.

The common thread? All three games were caught by his brother, Jake, who threw out one of the Rambler base-runners in Friday’s no-no against Carteret, while Tommy picked off the other.