Historic state title was truly a team effort for Marple Newtown

STATE COLLEGE >> Jim Balk stood back, away from the mob — some of its members covered in dirt, others in freshly dumped ice water — to take in the scene. When he was summoned into the churn, he walked slowly, as a man of 75 will do, to take his medal and dispense his wisdom.

“If you coach long enough or you umpire long enough,” Balk was saying at Medlar Field, later on Thursday night than he expected, “you’ll see something you’ve never seen before.”

What the Marple Newtown pitching coach witnessed astounded even a man with 51 years of baseball coaching experience under his belt. He saw 21 hits, 27 runners stranded, four pitchers who combined for nearly 20 innings without allowing more than one run each. And for the first time in his life, he saw a Delco team crowned the baseball champion of Pennsylvania.

That’s because the last ball that Balk glimpsed was crushed off the bat of Luke Zimmerman, thudding off the wall in right field between a gigantic picture of a sub and a gargantuan cutout of a liquor bottle, followed by Rob Weimer stomping on the plate to give Marple Newtown a 2-1 win over Lower Dauphin in the 10th inning of the PIAA Class 5A final.

The second-longest PIAA final in the 41 years of competition was one for the ages. And for Marple Newtown, it was the polar opposite of the last time that it — or any Delco program — had been there.

Back in 2007 there was a sore shoulder, a deputizing right fielder and a Punxsutawney catcher who’s now got eight years in the bigs under his belt.

That day in Altoona, Pete Massaro camped under a fly ball in the final inning of a tie game, yet the ball found a way past all 6-5, 240 pounds of him and to the ground, allowing a team led by Devin Mesoraco to win a state title and break Tigers’ hearts.

Eleven years later, the Tigers were back — fittingly enough, in the shadow of the stadium in State College where Massaro made a career for himself as a defensive end of some renown. Mark Jordan was the coach then, and again now after a district title-winning stint at the program that Balk incubated at Radnor for 37 years (more of that serendipity).

Thursday, Jordan spared just one thought for that last final: In the bottom of the eighth, when Lower Dauphin’s Nick Bennett lofted a fly ball to Weimer, a back-up left fielder, with the potential go-ahead run on third.

See where this is going? Jordan did, but only for a moment, Weimer made sure.

“The deep fly ball to left field, I had visions,” Jordan said. “I thought it was out when I first saw it. I forgot we were playing in a minor league ballpark. I had visions of him camping under it and dropping it. But Rob Weimer, god bless the poor child for catching it. If he would’ve dropped it, him and Pete Massaro would’ve been linked forever together.”

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