Molloy Hammers CK

Tom Boggiano found himself on the bench to the start the season. It was not necessarily punishment or a demotion for a vacation that forced the junior outfielder to miss four days of practice. Molloy Manager Jack Curran just wanted to give senior James Hounsell a chance in right field at the season’s outset.
Hounsell did well, but five games ago, Curran reinserted Boggiano into the lineup. Over that stretch, the Rockaway Park resident had not exactly torn the cover off the ball.
That all changed Monday afternoon when he went 4-for-4, homered twice, and drove in a career-high eight runs to lead the Stanners’ 18-3 rout of Christ the King.
“We expect him to do that every day,” Curran joked.
The start of the Molloy onslaught was no laughing matter though. After scratching out just a single run the first time through the order against Royals ace Bobby Tesseyman, the Stanners adjusted by going after first pitches instead of sitting back and allowing the crafty southpaw to use his off-speed pitches to get them off-balance. “We just told them, ‘you’ve got to be more aggressive and swing the bats,’” Curran said.
That they did, scoring twice in the third on Boggiano’s opposite-field triple. Brendan Regan drove in a run, Pat Sheehan had a pair of run-producing hits in the fourth, a solo homer to start the inning, and a two-run double off the left-center field fence to cap the scoring, and Boggiano hit his first of two long-balls, waiting on a hanging changeup to launch a three-run shot.
“I was just looking to hit the ball hard,” said Boggiano, who also homered twice in a jayvee playoff victory over Regis last spring. “It feels great.”
Of course, the rally was set in motion by three Christ the King errors which undermined Tesseyman’s performance. “You can’t give great teams extra outs,” CK Manager Allen Watson said.
For his second consecutive outing, Molloy right-hander David Bellinger went the distance and received double-digit run support. He allowed just two hits in his last victory, a 12-0 throttling of Bishop Ford, and yielded just three earned runs this time around in another complete-game performance. “It just makes it so much easier,” he said of the cushion. “I have to just throw strikes and let them hit it.”