Baseball – Week 1 Player and Pitcher of the Week Winners

Shore Sports Network Week 1 Player of the Week

Colin Stacy, Central

Stacy delivered on the mound and at the plate during the first week of the season for his Central team, which won its first three games before falling to Jackson Memorial to start this week. The Golden Eagles' regular starting shortstop pitched a scoreless seventh inning to save an opening-day win over Pinelands, then came back with 5 2/3 innings of one-run relief against preseason No. 1 Toms River North three days later in a big 8-4 win for the Golden Eagles. He also went 5-for-11 at the plate.

Stacy won a competitive Week One competition for Player of the Week, which saw all but one of the nominees reach a double-digit percentage of the vote total. Stacy grabbed 34 percent of the nearly 6,300 votes cast, which edged Jackson Liberty slugger Scott Wierciszewski by eight percent and 499 votes.

Pitcher of the Week

Brendan Mullins, Toms River North

A lot of pitchers are not built up enough to throw seven innings in their first start of the season and if it took Mullins a normal amount of pitches and he got more typical results, maybe that would have been the case for his opening-day start against Washington Township. Instead, Mullins cut through the Minutemen lineup for seven no-hit innings and would have spun an opening-day no-hitter had his team been able to score one run. The game, however, reached the eighth inning with no score and the senior right-hander and Penn State commit settled for a no-decision and one-hit allowed in seven-plus innings of work. Mullins struck out seven and walked one during his 77-pitch outing.

Mullins easily won this week's vote, racking up more than 65 percent of the more than 9,200 votes cast. Pinelands junior Peter Hammon (13.5 percent) and Long Branch senior Matt Mincieli (10.9 percent) were the only other candidates to top 10 percent of the vote.