The Allentown Senior American Legion baseball team is finally hitting its stride.
Allentown won three straight games to end the season and went 10-6 over its last 16 games, finishing with a 12-10 record.
As recently as July 13, that record did not seem like enough to get Allentown into the district playoffs.
After Allentown’s season-ending victory over Hamilton Post 31, 7-6, at Mercer County Park on July 11, Allentown was still only in sixth place in the Mercer County American Legion League.
The top five MCALL teams automatically earned bids to the district playoffs.
Then, on Friday afternoon of July 13, everything changed.
Another league did not use all its bids for the Passaic district playoff, one of multiple regional tournaments that feed into a larger state tournament. Allentown was offered the bid and accepted.
“If we get let in in, we’re going to be a problem for every team we face,” said Allentown pitcher and first baseman Frank Delguercio on July 10 after Allentown beat Hopewell Post 339, the first-place team in the MCALL and the defending Mid-Atlantic Regional champion, 8-5.
Delguercio makes a good point.
Allentown scored seven runs in the fourth inning and never trailed against Hopewell. Coach Justin Ely’s team looked very much like a playoff team during the impressive performance.
“The coaches and players are a little disappointed. We let some opportunities slip through our fingers. Four or five close games that could have gone either way. We left too many runners on,” Ely said at the time. “Sometimes it just doesn’t go your way. That’s baseball. It’s a very competitive league with a lot of good pitchers and fielders. They made the plays when they needed to.”
Four Allentown players are a year out of high school, meaning 2018 is their last year of legion eligibility. All four, Delguercio, shortstop Aydon Chavis, outfielder Matt Coiante and pitcher Colton Johnson, played on Allentown High School’s 2017 team that won the New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association’s Group 3 state tournament championship.
After that state title in high school baseball, those players also led Allentown’s American Legion team to a 14-8 season and a district playoff appearance last summer. But that fell a little short of expectations.
“After the school season, we kind of got worn out,” Chavis said. “It was the end of the school season and the next week we were hopping into legion.”
Allentown faced the same problem this year, when the high school team again reached the state championship game. Allentown was defeated in the Group 3 state tournament final by Somerville High School earlier last month.
“We would start two weeks late,” Delguercio said. “So everybody’s tired and needs a break. That hurt our legion team. We are a better team than we show every year.”
“You can’t start regular season play until your base high school is finished. It led to a situation where we played a lot of games in a short amount of time,” Ely said. “That will wear on anybody. High school guys aren’t used to playing that many games, so it definitely plays a factor.”
Still, even when they thought they weren’t making the playoffs, the oldest Allentown players didn’t regret coming back to play one more year. Now they really don’t regret it. Now they get one last ride together.
“The camaraderie of being with all your teammates and coming together to try to win makes it fun,” Coiante said.
And no matter how far they go, they have already made a major impact on Allentown baseball as a whole.
“We left a pretty big legacy, winning the state championship,” Chavis said.
“This season wasn’t as pretty as we hoped, but these past two games we really showed what we can do, when we’re all here as a team and focused,” Delguercio said.
The rest of the state may be about to find out what Allentown can do, too.
