Alex Lutky dreamt of walking off Franklin. The King Philip senior did so in the Division 1 quarterfinals

Boston Globe

10-06-2025

With a swift motion, Lutfy caught the pitch with the end of his bat, lifting it the opposite way to left, and the ball was not handled, dropping in to lift the fourth-seeded Warriors to a frenetic 2-1 win.
Fairy-tale ending!
Alex Lutfy lifts a bases-loaded single over Franklin's left fielder, who barely caught a piece of the ball but didn't manage to haul it in. Unreal.
— Graham Dietz (@graham_dietz)
KP (20-4) will take on No. 8 Braintree (15-8) in a state semifinal (TBD).
'You can't make that feeling up,' said Lutfy, who was 3 for 4 in the designated hitter spot. 'It's like Christmas morning. I don't know how else to put it. Probably the greatest thing I've ever done.'
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'We battle Franklin every year and they've had our number for quite a while,' King Philip coach Jeff Plympton Jr. said. 'This year, we got two wins against them [in the regular season] probably [for the first time] since 2016. If we won those two, we needed to win this one.'
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The game was a duel into the seventh, with Cam Hasenfus and Franklin's Zach Winer matching pitch for pitch.
Winer yielded two hits over six innings, fanning seven, allowing an unearned run. Hasenfus scattered seven hits in a complete-game effort, walking one and striking out four.
'Unbelievable. MVP of the Hockomock, and it's not an easy thing to do — pitch like that in front of this environment,' Plympton Jr. said. 'Anytime he takes the mound, this team has tremendous energy, and they want to play for him … It felt like a basketball atmosphere there at the end.'
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The Arlington Catholic baseball team shows off its new banner after advancing to the Division 3 state semifinals.
Graham Dietz
Division 3 State
Arlington Catholic 5, Foxborough 3
— In the bottom of the sixth inning, in a bases-loaded, two-out jam, Arlington Catholic senior Matthew Toland saw his pitch ricochet off the bat of Foxborough's Ben Angelini. His reaction? 'Oh no.'
A trip to the semifinals, the first in program history, was on the line.
'You know, this could be a bases-clearing double,' Toland said. 'But [Ryan Tarello]'s the fastest kid I know. He covers ground so well.'
By the time Angelini's moonshot to center field reached its apex, Tarello was already perched under it with his mitt open. The ball landed safely into his glove, and 11th-seeded Arlington Catholic (16-6) was on its way to the victory in a game that was suspended Saturday (with AC on top, 3-1) because of rain.
Toland put away all but one batter in the seventh, who walked, and recorded the final out himself by tossing a short grounder to first.
'Toland, he's the [Catholic Central] league MVP two years in a row,' Arlington Catholic coach Chris Hall said. 'We have confidence in all our pitchers, but he's been the central core. And it's ironic that when Matt pitches, Ryan goes to center, and he maybe made the catch of the program on that play.'
In addition to pitching the final five innings, Toland also had two RBIs — one Saturday, and another in the top of the fourth when play resumed.
Coleman O'Neill, Tyler Valente, Pat Clair and Trey Flaherty all collected hits, with Clair's RBI double to left-center in the top of the fifth increasing the lead to 5-1.
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Aidan Stow had an RBI double for Foxborough in the fifth.
'It's obviously easy to pitch coming in with the lead,' Toland said. 'We just knew we had to come in here and get on them early, because we had to keep up the momentum and couldn't let them get anything.'