Baseball: Rematch of last year’s hit-by-pitch fest set for Friday

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No one can accuse Palisades Coach Mike Voelkel of looking ahead to a potential quarterfinal game against Chatsworth. Voelkel said he never once considered saving his best pitcher for the top-seeded Chancellors because it would’ve meant risking a loss in Wednesday’s first round.

‘A lot of coaches will roll the dice hoping they can steal that first game. I’ve even done it myself,’ Voelkel confessed. ‘Occasionally it works but more often than not it comes back to bite you. We had our reasons for not trying it.’

In retrospect, starting ace Jonathan Moscot proved to be the correct move, as the eighth-seeded Dolphins needed every last pitch to get past ninth-seeded Banning, 3-2, and set up a rematch in the quarterfinals Friday of last season’s City championship division semifinal, which turned ugly when Palisades pitchers hit seven Chatsworth batters -- an incident that led to the dismissal of Dolphins’ coach Tom Seyler.

That all happened long before Voelkel arrived on Palisades’ campus, yet he suspects there’ll be no welcome mat awaiting his team when it steps onto Chatsworth’s home field for Friday’s game against the defending City champions, who edged Sun Valley Poly, 1-0, on Wednesday.

‘I wasn’t here so there’s no bad blood as far as I’m concerned, but I don’t know what the guys in the other dugout think,’ Voelkel said. ‘We’re going there to play baseball. We have a lot of respect for that program and what they’ve accomplished but at the same time we can’t be intimidated. If we are, then we don’t belong there in the first place.’

-- Steve Galluzzo