Penn-Trafford Palomino baseball team gets started

By Matt Grubba

Published: Monday, June 18, 2012, 10:32?a.m.
Updated 12 hours ago

Some of the players are the same for the hometown team, but it's a whole new league this summer.

Penn-Trafford has a team entered in the Quad County South Palomino Baseball League, in which the team will play a 17-game schedule against top competition from around the area.

The team is coached by Mark Raco, who last summer led the Penn Township Colt "A" team to an unbeaten mark, and five of the players off that team help make up the 13-man roster for the Palomino squad.

The undefeated mark of last year's Colt team won't be matched, however, as P-T dropped a pair of close contests - 3-1 against Mongoose (South Hills) and 10-9 to Chartiers Valley in a scheduled nine-inning contest - to open its season.

"We're new to the league, and it's a really good league," Raco said. "Despite the losses, we've done a lot of good things. That first game, we played pretty good defense for early in the year, and the pitching has been good."

Five players on the Palomino team were part of the P-T varsity squad this spring. Two of them - Zak Wright and Danny Owoc - are rising seniors, and the other three - Joe Raco, Zach Susalla and Tommy Williams - completed high school this year. Another, Mark DeAngellis, played on the school's junior varsity team.

The rest of the team is made up of players who, for a variety of reasons, did not play with the school teams during the spring. Jordan Puskar, Anthony DelBene, D.J. Petrovay, Grant Grasha, Brett Coffman, Mitchell Bacco and Mark Tressler round out the Penn-Trafford roster.

The team came out on the short end of its game against Mongoose - a team composed of players from Upper St. Clair and its surrounding areas - after a well-placed double broke open the low-scoring affair.

Against Chartiers Valley, the teams agreed to play a nine-inning contest, and that gave P-T's opponents time to rally.

Wright threw seven strong innings against CV, but the additional two innings ended up being the difference. Chartiers Valley scored five runs in the bottom of the ninth to complete a comeback and drop Penn-Trafford to 0-2.

The Penn-Trafford team was scheduled to play West Allegheny in its next game, after this edition's deadline, while other games in the Washington, Pa.-based league will pit Penn-Trafford's players against players from Hempfield, Green Tree and Washington, as well as a handful of select traveling teams, such as the Mongoose squad they faced to open the season.

"Because we're new to the league, I really can't say just how good some of the teams are," Raco said.

"I do think we're going to continue to improve, as a team. It's been our trademark through that years to get better as the year goes on."

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