Sports
Photo by Julian Perricone ’20
Baseball players garner awards for strong individual performances
By Levi Lorenzo ’19
April 13, 2017
Tags sports
Over the past few weeks, three Hamilton baseball players have been honored with awards for individual performances. Kenny Collins ’17 and Brett Mele ’17 received awards for their play last week, while Danny Depaoli ’18’s impressive performance during the week of March 20-26 earned him honors.
D3baseball.com selected Collins, the Continental’s center fielder, as one the three outfielders on its Team of the Week for the week of April 3-9. In the five games Hamilton played last week, of which they won four, Collins stole six bases to boost his total to a NESCAC-leading 13. Collins’s 13 stolen bases have come on just 13 attempts: he has not been caught stealing once. At the plate, Collins hit a staggering .714 while driving in two runs and scoring six himself. Collins also threw out a key runner at the plate from center field in sixth inning of Hamilton’s second game against SUNY Polytechnic, which enabled the Continentals to score the go-ahead, and eventual winning, run in the bottom of the inning. Collins has Hamilton’s toughest out all season: he is hitting .370 with a .493 OBP (On Base Percentage), both team highs.
Mele, Hamilton’s starting catcher, was selected as the NESCAC player of the Week for his performance in Hamilton’s four games this past weekend. In those games, Mele hit .533, and his two doubles and three triples gave him a slugging percentage of 1.067. The triples gave Mele five on the season and seven in his career, good enough for a tie of the single season program record and sole possession of the program career record. Mele also drove in ten runs on the weekend and scored 5. He was flawless behind the plate, not making one error. Mele has a .320 batting average on the season and a team-best .600 slugging percentage.
For his performance against Bowdoin in Florida on March 20, Depaoli was selected as both the NESCAC and the Division III North Region Pitcher of the Week. Depaoli registered his first complete game shutout against the Polar Bears; he struck out ten batters while walking three and yielding just four hits across seven innings. Throughout the season, Depaoli has pitched 21 innings over four starts, has registered an impressive 1.66 ERA (Earned Run Average) and has averaged 9.55 strikeouts per nine innings.