Locked Up Sports:Sayville Varsity Baseball Manager Joe Esposito

T00:00:12 Yo! What's up everybody? I'm Bob Walters. That is Brett Grosso and he is with Joe Esposito, the manager of the Sayville Golden Flashers. Champs here! Championship team headed to the states. Can we do Mets, Yankees? Now we're gonna do local Sayville. No, no. Not even local anymore. Suffolk champs. Long Island champs.00:00:36 New York regional champs. We're moving on. We're going to the semis, right? Yeah, it's crazy. You know what? We tried to have the football coach on when they were going in. How far did he go? We don't even know what the end is. He blew us off. He blew us off. So, listen, now we got Joe Joe. He's a classmate of ours. He's a friend of ours. Welcome to the show, Joe. Two more? Two more. Two more. This is a chance we got, man. You know, we made it to the Final Four of the states right now, so we get a chance to go upstate. We get to play at the Mets affiliate, Rumble Ponies.00:01:05 Double A affiliate. I saw that. We're playing there on Friday. Mirabito Stadium, right? Mirabito Stadium. Yeah. This team you're playing is only 7-7, right? We're 18-7 now. Oh, 18-7. Okay. They are 7-7. That's what I got. That's what I saw. Okay. And now you guys, your team, listen, tell us about your team. You're obviously, and we'll get into it, a pitching team, right? You've let up only more than three runs three times this year. So you guys are really a pitching team. Tell us about the team. Well, first off, before I get into it, I just want to thank00:01:35 you two for having me here in the Brian Gunzel studio here. How can we know? Brian's a fantastic, you know, friend and great, great guy that we all grew up with. This is our classmate. This is our classmate, man. We love him to death. I've heard about this place. This is awesome to be here, guys. Thank you. Big Sable baseball guy. Big lefty pitcher for Sable baseball. Let me tell you. Team guy, team first guy. Eight, breathe, and sleep baseball. Hey, little nugget for you. He was on my team in Little League, our last Little League year on the senior field with Leslie and Leslie.00:02:05 the coach, and we beat you and your brother and your father. We beat you in three games in the championship. You're lying. The only championship I've ever won. You're lying. No, I actually made a nice play out on center field for you. That was definitely wrong. That was the second year, and that was not my father coaching because of me. He wasn't? I remember your brother. You were 13. I struck you guys out 15, 16 times. Your brother was throwing curveballs. Yes, he was. He was a junk baller. I hated Pete back then. I was like, who is this? Joe was his brother. Me and Brian. Glenn.

Brian got you the last year, though. Me, Brian Glenn, and Dick Glenn got you guys the last year. The only championship I ever won. Brian's a great guy. He is, Brian. Oh, yeah. And he's a good coach, too, right? He's an excellent coach up at Rocky Point. And he's got a guy who just closed out a game to go to the World Series for Coastal Carolina, right? Wow. That was nice. I saw that one pop up. That's got to be a great thing for a coach. How rewarding is a coach to watch your guys go forward? And please, give us some examples of these guys.00:03:04 I had a moment, guys, this year. A couple years ago, I had one of my former players, Brock Murtha, transfer over from Notre Dame to Navy. So he got into Annapolis Navy, and he's doing fantastic things there, trained to be a Navy SEAL. Wow. And then two years ago, I had one of my former players, Jack Quinlan, join Army West Point. So this past year, they're playing each other. And so Brock's up, and Jack's catching.00:03:30 And the parents all take pictures of this moment. And I'm on the field coaching somewhere else, and I start getting text messages. And I start looking at my phone, and it's the pictures of these two together on the field, playing against each other. Army-Navy? Army-Navy game. That's sick. My former shortstop, speaking of what we're doing now, he was the one who led us there last time, throwing a no-hitter in the Long Island Championship in 2019. And Brock was playing for Navy up at bat with Jack catching for West Point.00:03:56 And it was a pretty special moment as a coach to see two of the best guys you could ever have joining the service academies like that and competing against each other represents Sable. It's a great thing. Yeah, and listen, you guys just named the field after what? Barry Fitzpatrick? I'm wearing a hat. This is the hat we had for Coach Fitz Day. You know, we always do the salute to Troops Day. And, you know, Barry had over 315 wins on that field, coaching over 20 years as a head coach. And Barry came back, man. A lot of guys don't.00:04:25 And when Coach Cox took over, Barry came back and was assistant with Coach Cox for 15 years. 15 years. Yeah, we're old. We're old. 14 years. Yeah, I know. Yeah, we were just talking about how old you are. I'm almost 10. I'm in like my ninth year at Sable. I was coaching many years before that. So is this job now the stepping stone to superintendent? I hope so. Hey! Give yourself raises in the budget, right? Yeah. That's a lot more schooling. Now, let me ask you. Let me ask you.00:04:53 You're not – because to me, I thought this was weird. You're not a teacher at Sable. No. You can – has it always been like that? You could be a coach and not a teacher or – Yeah. My district, you know, I work early enough where I get out early enough and I can, you know, coach in other places when there wasn't availability in my district for, you know, availability for coaching opportunities. So, you know, Ryan had a coaching position back in 2017. He invited me back to come back to Sable and I took the job as an assistant and, you know,00:05:22 the plan was for about a year or two and he got a job right away. I took over two weeks later. He became the athletic director of Pat Med and it was kind of like I got there right time, right place and took over two weeks later. They got very lucky. Yeah, very lucky. Listen, Joe. You're a kid. Ever since all I'm out of, you know, I bleed purple and gold. We've played with Joe since we were little kids. Joe's been a great baseball player since then. A little overrated. A little overrated. A little overrated. Well, let me tell you. Pretty quick, though. I will tell you this.00:05:49 Joe and I and Mr. Lewin will tell you this. The fastest three-legged race in the history of the Lincoln Avenue field day you've ever seen. We were awesome. There's nothing that's ever come close to that. We were insane. Nobody. It was like a three-legged chapel. I've never. It's not even. You're just lucky if there's no videotapes on that today. We'd be viral. Champions. Champions. Just so you know. So who's together right now? We'll take down anybody. So what about your team? Tell us about your team. Who are you? Who are you? Big guys. Your pitchers. All right.

So coming into this year, you know, we had three stud senior pitchers. You know what I mean? Three guys have been doing it since they were sophomores. Word them up as sophomores to give them that experience, knowing, seeing the future, that a couple years they're going to be the guys and, you know, the ones you depend on to get the job done. So coming into the year, we were kind of high hopes for our pitching staff. We had some pretty good relief guys as well. So, you know, the question was always about hitting, you know. Like, we always had some pretty good hitting teams. Last year was a little bit of a lull.00:06:44 So we were a little, you know, skeptical about our hitting performance. And I think, you know, we ended up getting put in a really tough league this year. You know, every team were playoff teams in the past. Every team had real strong baseball programs over the many, many years. And it was just an up-and-down league, you know. You had good games. We had numerous one-run games. And, you know, so I feel that that really battle-tested us, man. Being in this league, like, you know, you complain about it all year. You're up and down. You know, we won the league.00:07:13 We're 11-7, you know. But, like, a lot of other teams are winning leagues, and they only got two or three losses. I saw how you started that year, and you pretty much started off, like, 2-2. Now, what was that like? Because you've got to probably be a tipping point. Like, how do you get your guys motivated at that point? And, like, what do you tell your players at 2-2? Well, you tell your guys just to kind of take one game at a time. You know, one at bat at a time, one inning at a time. And not to look too far in the past. You have a bad game, you flush it. That's the beauty of baseball. You don't really kind of, you know, you don't dwell on it. I might behind the scenes.00:07:43 But don't let those guys dwell on it. Flush it and kind of get ready to play the next day. And that's kind of your attitude with baseball all the time, you know. Yeah, you guys got hot at the right time. I think you've won 8 of 9, right? You've won 8 of 9. Your last two games just this week are back-to-back shutouts. So you're going into this game on a two-game shutout thing. The game against Wontor, I guess it was, what, earlier in the week, right? The Long Island Championship? Yeah, Long Island Championship. It was a 1-0 game. The final was 1-0. You scored the run on a sack fly in the first inning.