Putting together your best season ever automatically comes with a target on your back like none other the following year.
That has certainly been true in 2025 for the reigning division, county, sectional, and state champion Bridgewater-Raritan High School baseball team, which has seen each of its opponents go all out against a Panthers team coming off of a historic 30-3 season in 2024.
It was therefore no surprise that West Morris Central High School, ironically one of the three teams to defeat Bridgewater-Raritan last season, continued that trend on the first day back from Spring Break.
After tossing 23 innings this season without allowing a single earned run heading into Monday evening, junior Liam Costello (6.2 IP, 4 H, 2 ER, 1 BB, 8 K, 110 pitches) picked up right where he left off by starting with three perfect innings en route to reaching the pitch-count limit for West Morris Central (8-2), which built an early three-run cushion in the bottom of the first inning it never relinquished against Bridgewater-Raritan (1-8).
Sophomore pitcher Nico Moore (3 IP, 4 H, 0 ER, 4 BB, 3 K, 74 pitches) quickly bounced back and did not allow an earned run in his first varsity start for Bridgewater-Raritan, which then rallied to make it a one-run game in the fourth inning before the Wolfpack broke open an eventual 7-3 victory over the Panthers with a four-run sixth inning Monday, April 21, in Chester.
In its defeat, Bridgewater-Raritan tallied four hits and three errors, while West Morris Central collected 10 hits and was charged with two errors.
“Nico is a sophomore making his first start, so I’m sure he was a little nervous,” assessed of the result by Bridgewater-Raritan head coach Max Newill: the 2024 New Jersey Baseball Coach of the Year. “Unfortunately, he had a leadoff walk and then an error, and we found ourselves behind right away. We found a way to scratch and claw and score a couple of runs, but we dug ourselves a little bit too big of a hole, and [West Morris Central] did a good job of extending later on.”
“You can’t play from behind, especially when the other teams are throwing their aces at you.”
On top of this, of the Panthers’ first eight games of 2025, five of them have started with their opponent drawing first blood. All five of these games eventually resulted in defeats for the Panthers. In three out of these five games, Bridgewater-Raritan’s opponents not only struck first, but did so in the first inning of the game.
But due to Bridgewater Raritan's rise to New Jersey’s mountaintop in 2024, one thing especially common in all of the Panthers’ nine games this season so far has been opponents planning out their pitching rotations accordingly, specifically by sending their first and/or second pitchers to the hill against Bridgewater-Raritan. Of course, this factors in the NJSIAA’s pitch-count rules along with the quick, two-day turnarounds for this year’s home-and-home series within the Panthers’ lethal Skyland Conference Delaware Division.
So for the Panthers’ newcomers and veterans alike, navigating another season with one of New Jersey’s strongest schedules as well, the aforementioned patterns unfortunately leave little to noroom for error at any point in a game – even in a high-variability sport like baseball.