Matthew Ward’s no-hit gem delivers San Mateo American to District 52 All-Stars 10-year-old championship

While the 10-year-old Ward obviously never got to see Nolan Ryan pitch, the youngster knows his baseball history. After the postgame celebration in the middle of the infield, Ward — hat crooked to the side, uniform drenched in water after being doused by his teammates, his patented eye black dripping down his cheeks — didn’t miss a beat in answering the question: Do you know who Nolan Ryan is?

“Yes,” Ward said. “He threw seven no-hitters.”

As for Ward’s track record in the no-no department: “This might be my first,” he said.

What a beauty it was. The right-hander used a darting fastball and a sharp, sweeping curveball to dominate from the start. He also has a changeup in his repertoire, but catcher Connor Workman only put down three fingers once all day, as the two-pitch combo was working to near perfection.

“He did really good,” Workman said. “His curveball was working really well, and his fastball was working really well. Everybody just swung and missed on his curve, and they couldn’t do anything on him.”

Alpine managed just two baserunners on the day. In the second inning, cleanup hitter Lane Okarma led off with a walk. In the fourth, Roman Trujillo got hit by a pitch. From there, Ward set down the last eight batters he faced.

It was the first complete game through five tournament wins for American.

“We’ve been trying to limit the pitch count … so this is the first time we’ve let somebody go,” San Mateo American manager Jason Gordon said. “Obviously, you’ve got a no-hitter, you don’t take a kid out of the game. And the way he was pitching, that was about as dominant of a Little League outing as I’ve ever seen.”

Ward got some help from his defense to keep the no-no intact. Of Alpine’s two baserunners, Workman used his catcher’s arm to cut down one of them. With the game still deadlocked in a scoreless tie, Alpine’s Okarma attempted to advance from second to third on a ball in the dirt. But Workman pounced on it and fired a strike to third baseman Jagger O’Brien for the out.

“We have three catchers that are just elite arms,” Gordon said. “Nobody has run on us this entire tournament, and I think they just reminded them why. The ball hits the dirt, a split second — most Little League catchers, you get a good jump on a ball in the dirt, you’re going to make it — he hoses the guy by far. So, we’re very, very blessed with catching arms on this team.”

American’s pinnacle defensive gem came in the first inning when Trujillo, Alpine’s second batter of the game, hit a sinking liner to center. American center fielder Hudson Wong initially broke back on the ball but recovered, sprinting straight in to nab it with a basket catch.

“It was high, so I took one step back, but then it started dying,” Wong said. “Then I came in on the ball, but I could get there in time, so I just put my hands up and it went straight into my glove.”

Alpine made several defensive gems as well, most notably, the Killer Bs playing the corner outfield spots. Right fielder Noah Berkowitz made a brilliant running catch in the third inning, streaking into the right-center gap and using every inch of his left-handed glove to nab it on the run, taking extra bases away from Workman.

Left fielder Grant Bochnowski — the natural infielder only started playing outfield this summer with the Alpine All-Stars — set the tone for the game in the first inning, ending a one-two-three opening frame for starting pitcher Lucas Maffia by sprinting straight in and making a shoestring catch on a crisp liner off the bat of O’Brien.

“I just started sprinting to where it was coming,” Bochnowski said, “and I put my glove down to catch it. … I thought it was going to hit the ground before I caught it.”

But American broke through in the third inning, sending 11 batters to the plate amid a six-run rally. Ward got his team on the board with an RBI single. Maddox Stone followed with an RBI knock, and Wong mashed a two-run single to right field.

Wong was 3 for 4 in the game.

“Throughout this tournament I hit pretty good,” Wong said. “And my team, they did super good, and they were cheering each other on the whole entire time. And the energy helped us get more hits.”

American pushed two more runs across courtesy of a pair of Alpine errors on one play. In the fifth, American added an unearned run with the Alpine infield mishandling a hard grounder off the bat of Christopher Moreno with a runner in scoring position.

“They had a lot of confidence,” Alpine manager Mike Budelli said. “It’s just, they’re 10 years old. They’re coming out here to battle. We made some defensive, 10-year-old mistakes, and that puts you down.”

Ward took care of the rest. Not that there was much difference in his stoic demeanor and dominant stuff from the start of the game to the finish, other than he seemed to get even better as the game progressed.

“I thought I was pitching well from the start, and I just kept rolling to the end,” Ward said.

In the sixth, Ward came one pitch away from finishing off the no-hitter with an immaculate inning. He struck out the first and last batters of the inning on three pitches. Only Jack McDonough, the second batter of the inning, saw four pitches in an at-bat in the sixth.

“I just didn’t want to allow a hit and strike everybody out,” Ward said.