Buckley: BC baseball takes high road home – Boston Herald

This is the way it’s always going to be with New England college baseball: The season starts, the season ends, and nobody really cares.

For those who do care — and, really, we’re talking mostly parents, buddies, students, a few alums and a roving cast of connoisseurs — it ain’t easy. The games get rained out, get re-scheduled, get moved to different sites. Bring a parka and a Thermos and hope there’s a bathroom or one of those chancy porta-potty on the premises.

Yet college baseball is so awesome to watch.

And every once in a while a program demands our attention — as Maine did back in the days of Billy Swift and Mike Bordick; as Northeastern did back in the days of Carlos Pena and the late Greg Montalbano; and, yes, as was the case with this year’s Boston College Eagles, who came within one game of advancing to the College World Series before falling to Miami, 9-4, yesterday afternoon at Coral Gables, Fla.

It was a cliffhanger for a while, BC trailing 5-3 in the seventh, but then a Hurricane named Edgar Michelangeli opened it up by rifling a grand slam over the left-center field fence at Alex Rodriguez Park.

What followed was some textbook stylin’: Michelangeli not only admired his home run but chose to walk a quarter of the way to first base, bat in hand, and then, finally, he flipped his aluminum and proceeded to circle the bases. As he neared home plate, he felt the need to taunt Boston College catcher Nick Sciortino in such a way as to suggest some old playground score was being settled.

Naturally the benches emptied and there was a lot of shoving and separating of personnel and all that, and eventually the game continued. BC pushed across a run in the eighth, but that was that. The Hurricanes are going to Omaha, and the Eagles are going home to Chestnut Hill.

Some of the Eagles may turn pro — pitcher Justin Dunn was the Mets’ first-round pick in last week’s draft, and Sciortino, lefty Jesse Adams, infielder Joe Cronin and right-hander Mike King also were selected. Some will head to the Cape Cod League or New England Collegiate Baseball League. Some will grab a diploma, put on a suit and pursue the great adventure that is life after college.

As for Eagles coach Mike Gambino, it’s back to the drawing board. As always.

As for what Michelangeli did, the Eagles will get over it. The stylin’ was fine — deal with it — even if the taunting of Sciortino was very uncool.

But Gambino chose the high road: “You never want to see the benches clear or see a little scuffle (like) what just happened,” he said after the game. “But in our program we talk about character, toughness and class in how we carry ourselves on the field, off the field, in the classroom, when we travel.

“I think our boys play hard, I think they play the game the right way. They respect the game, (and I think) they respect their opponents.”

He never mentioned Michelangeli.

If you don’t follow college baseball, it’s hard to fathom how hard it is for a Division 1 program out of New England to make it to the College World Series. In the old days, the regionals were truly regional, meaning there was always a chance for a New England school to make it to Omaha. That’s why the late John Winkin was so successful getting his Maine Black Bears into the College World Series — he’d coral the top players in his state (Swift, Bordick, Stu Lacognata and Rick Lashua) and a couple of blue chippers out of Massachusetts (Braintree’s Kevin Buckley, Holliston’s Mark Sweeney) and then clean up.

Those days are gone. The New England schools play in the springtime muck and mire that’s all around us, and then, if they’re good enough, they advance to the Super Regionals against schools that offer fun, sun and big league facilities. The Eagles still play their home games at Shea Field, which is really just a parking lot for the school’s glorious football program.

Good for the Eagles that they got this far.

They didn’t get Omaha. Maybe they’ll get a ballpark.