Miller Place baseball's Nick Frusco brings the heat in win at chilly Sayville

Blankets, wool hats and winter coats filled the stands behind home plate. Players wore extra layers and ski masks as the wind howled in West Sayville, where the temperature was 44 degrees and the wind chill was 31 at first pitch.

Miller Place pitcher Nick Frusco brought the heat.

The senior Clemson commit showcased his 93-mph fastball Tuesday in a 7-4 win over Sayville in Suffolk League VI baseball. Frusco struck out 10 and allowed one run on two hits and two walks in four innings. He threw 72 pitches.

“The ball just explodes out of his hand. He’s so long and lanky that the ball sneaks up on you,” coach Joe Mancini said. “And he throws the offspeed, too. You’re thinking fastball and he throws a breaking ball that ends up at your back foot.”

Before Frusco took the mound, the Panthers gave him a 4-0 lead. Evan Fallon and Shane Kiernan each had an RBI single before Chris DiGennaro beat out an infield single and a throwing error allowed two more runs to score.

“Coming out on the mound in the first inning with a big lead helped me out a lot,” Frusco said. “Just knowing that my teammates had my back gives me a lot more confidence to know that I can go right at batters and just try to get outs.”

Frusco picked up two quick outs before junior catcher Shane Meehan launched a solo homer to right-centerfield for Sayville (2-1).

Frusco got right back to business and didn’t run into trouble until the fourth inning, when a faced runners on first and second with one out. He struck out the next two batters to get out of the inning, freezing the last batter with a sharp curveball.

“Any situation, you know he’s gonna battle and you’ll have a shot,” Mancini said. “That fourth inning, you just knew that you had a shot. He’s gonna show up and deliver a tough at-bat to the batter.”

Frusco went 1-for-3 with a double and a walk. Fallon and Kiernan each hit a home run over the 15-foot fence in leftfield. Fallon went 2-for-4 with three runs and two RBIs and Kiernan went 2-for-3 with two RBIs and a run. Fallon, a lefty sophomore, didn’t get all of it but was able to muscle it out the other way to give Miller Place (3-1) a 5-1 lead in the third.

“I got it off of the top of the bat, so I just tried to extend through it,” Fallon said. “It played the field, though. It felt really nice. I’ve hit two home runs in my entire life. I just started hitting the ball far now.”

The ball traveling in the frigid weather was a welcome sight for hitters. By the end of the game, the wind chill had reached 25 degrees.

“I tried to keep my body moving in between innings,” Frusco said. “That first inning, I was kind of sitting there for a while so I went outside the dugout and did a few sprints to get warm again. I tried to tune the cold out. When you’re on the mound, you can’t let it get to you or you’ll be all over the place.”