Behind senior pitcher Oliver Henke’s stellar game, Cambridge Rindge and Latin bested Boston College High, the top seed and the team ranked first in Eastern Massachusetts by the Boston Globe. The Falcons won 5-1 — its 14th win in a row — and a berth in the semifinals. According to coach Robert Merrill, no CRLS baseball team has ever advanced this far in the postseason tournament.
Henke was pitching on four days rest, versus getting a week of rest between starts during the season. The short cycle didn’t faze him, even facing BC High in the quarterfinals of the MIAA Division I baseball tournament.
“Yesterday in practice he told me, ‘I want the ball,’” Merrill said. “Give me the ball, and I’ll go out there and battle. It was short rest, and in these situations your bigger players step up. They do things which are extraordinary, which is what he did today.”
Against a BC High team that had averaged nearly seven runs per game and hadn’t scored fewer than two runs this season, Henke held the Eagles scoreless until there were two outs in the seventh inning. Through the first six and two-thirds innings, he allowed only two hits and struck out six batters before he began to tire after having thrown more than 100 pitches.
Henke had challenges with walking the leadoff batter, “the worst thing you can do on a baseball field, and I’m really angry at myself that I did it four times today,” said Henke. But, he said “I’’m just really happy that I found it within myself to bounce back from those leadoff walks, and I’m so proud of the defense behind me. They did a phenomenal job all game.”
In the fourth inning with CRLS leading, 2-0, BC High had a runner on third with one out and their cleanup hitter, Andrew Flaherty, at the plate. With two strikes, Henke snapped off a knee-buckling curveball to strike out Flaherty looking. The next batter flew out to center to end the threat.
Cambridge, seeded eighth in the tournament, put its first runs on the board in the fourth inning, which began with a leadoff hit from Joel Rojas-Cruz. In high school baseball, a player can be replaced by a pinch runner without having to leave the game, and Asa Brown ran for Rojas-Cruz. Brown promptly stole second base and scored on a one-out double from Logan Sherwood. Sherwood then scored on Josh Silber’s two-out single to center.
The Falcons tacked on another run in the fifth inning on an RBI single by Rojas-Cruz. They padded the lead in the seventh with two more runs, the second coming on a Rojas-Cruz solo home run over the replica Green Monster at BC High’s Monan Park. He went 3-for-4 on the day and is 9-for-11 in the tournament with five RBIs.
“I came here super excited, and I’ve been seeing the ball really well,” said Rojas-Cruz. “And I was just trying to do my thing and put the ball in play. This win feels awesome. We came here as the underdogs and we came out and won at their home field.”
“There’s a reason he’s hitting three for us,” said Merrill. “During the year he started hot and then scuffled for a little bit. He worked really hard at practice making adjustments. A lot of teams throw him a lot of off-speed pitches, and he’s been making adjustments and staying back on them. And you could see his hard work paying off.”
CRLS will face fifth-seeded Catholic Memorial in its semifinal game on Tuesday or Wednesday.
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