Falls Church Baseball Shows Character in Tough Loss

Her team may have been down by more than 20 runs, and the temperature had dipped below freezing, but Polley Tanks-Hargrove hadn’t given up on her beloved Falls Church Jaguars baseball team.

“We can do this!” yelled Tanks-Hargrove, a Falls Church special education and history teacher who was swaddled in blankets to guard against the cold. “This is our time!”

Tanks-Hargrove never quit and neither did her team, but despite the enthusiasm, the Jaguars were suffering a severe beating at the hands of Hayfield on Friday night in Falls Church. Soon, a 21-run deficit turned into 33. And then it started to snow, prompting Hayfield supporters to begin to root against their own team so as to bring the game, which had descended into a farce, to a merciful conclusion.

But there would be no mercy, at least not yet. Virginia AAA Northern Region high school baseball rules dictate that games can only be called if a team is up by at least 15 runs after the fifth inning. So as the snowflakes fell, the players carried on. But the Jaguars’ third pitcher of the evening, Farzad Mohammad, was having trouble finding the strike zone. He walked in three more runs, putting the score at 36-0, where it would remain an inning later when the game was finally called, giving Hayfield (3-0) its third win of the season, and dropping Falls Church to an 0-3 start after a winless 2010 season.

“It wasn’t painful, because our kids, they play hard every day,” said second-year coach, Freddy Rappina, a Fairfax County police officer who played third base at Belmont Abbey College in North Carolina. “Talent-wise, I like my group of kids, they work hard and don’t get down on themselves no matter what the score is, but a lot of them don’t have much baseball experience at all.”

The lack of experience showed on Friday night.

Their night indeed. The Hayfield pitching staff limited the Jaguars to just one hit on Saturday in an 18-0 pasting, and duplicated the 1-hit feat on Friday, with the only hit coming in the very first at-bat of the game, a single from the Jaguars Logan Harris. The offensive attack was even more relentless, as the Hawks hit five home runs, scoring 12 runs in first inning, seven runs in the second, nine in the third, and eight in the fourth. Near the end of the blowout, Hawks players could be heard openly rooting for their opponents to make plays on defense.

Senior third baseman Brian DiRosario, who is headed to Shepherd University in West Virginia on a baseball scholarship next year, led the attack with a towering home run, his fifth on the young season, along with two doubles, and four RBI.

Senior Brady Larkin had a home run, a double, a triple and four RBI, while catcher Brad Johnson was also a single shy a cycle with, a double, a triple and three RBI. Cameron Lundmark, a junior shortstop, had a home run and three RBI. And Ben Harris came off the bench to hit first home run on the varsity squad. But none of his teammates could be coerced into searching for the ball amidst the muddy patch of pine trees beyond the left field wall.

Senior Michael Askew started the game for the Hawks and was dominant throughout, hitting corners, spotting his fastball and changing speeds to keep the Jaguars off balance.

The Hawks, who were scolded by the umpire at one point for running the bases too aggressively after the game was already out of reach, appeared to ease up near the end of the game, and some players felt a little bad about the blowout.

After the debacle the Falls Church team seemed to bare no visible scars from the loss. Each player got to work after the game, raking the dirt, fixing divots in the field, reclaiming their sacred turf, which had just been trodden upon by the conquering Hawks. Rappina was proud of his team, in spite of the beating.

“Character is the one thing this team doesn’t have to build, this team already has it,” he said. “This is a high character team. We’ve been through this before, unfortunately. I don’t have to tell them much, I know they’ll come to the next game ready to play, ready to go. They know the score will start out 0-0 and it’ll be a clean slate.”