PEABODY — There are now only a few wins standing between the Peabody West Little League team and the Little League World Series East Regional.
Thursday night, Peabody West will play the first game of a four-team, round-robin-style tournament to decide the Massachusetts Little League state championship. The other teams involved in this year’s Final Four are Pittsfield American, Needham National and Middleboro.
The Peabody West team is experienced and battle-tested, and it’s also red-hot. The team has only lost one game all summer, making it through District 16 and Section 4 largely unscathed. And lately, the bats have come alive. Mark Bettencourt Jr. and Brendan Kobierski have both launched multiple home runs in recent games, and the clutch hitting up and down the lineup has been easy to come by.
But that’s not to say that the pitching hasn’t been good as well, because it has. Cullen Pasterick along with Bettencourt, Kobierski and Jimmy DiCarlo — who have also been hot at the plate — highlight a four-headed monster of great pitching for Peabody West.
The contributions have come from all over this summer, with clutch play from guys like Jackson Taylor, Ryan Skerry, Gabe Casiano, Ty Lomasney and many others.
And the Peabody West team is experienced at this level of competition. Most of the players on the roster also played on the 10-year-old team that made it to states two years ago and fell to Needham National.
“A lot of these kids were on that 10-year-old team and they know that the level gets better from here,” said Peabody West Coach Mark Bettencourt. “Our practices will be crucial in raising our own level, and then we’ll come out and just try to get one win at a time.”
The Final Four will begin Thursday and continue each day through Sunday, when the championship game will be held at noon between the two squads with the best records (with runs-allowed ratio being the tiebreaker in a three-way draw).
Peabody West drew the late game for each day, playing at 7 p.m. on Thursday and then at 7:30 p.m. on Friday and Saturday.
It all gets started Thursday night (7), when Peabody West takes on Pittsfield American at Boudreau Field in Gloucester.
