NEW YORK—Senior starting pitcher
Tyler Arella (East Northport, N.Y.) was named the BIG EAST Pitcher of the Week and senior center fielder
Chris Rotondo (Redding, Conn.) earned a spot on the weekly Honor Roll in an announcement made by the conference on Monday afternoon. Arella is the third different Villanova pitcher in the last three weeks to earn Pitcher of the Week honors. This is the first time since BIG EAST weekly baseball awards began in 1985 that the Wildcats had ever earned three Pitcher of the Week honors in the same season.
Arella had one of the best outings of his collegiate career on Saturday afternoon at Stony Brook. Making his second start of the year, he worked six scoreless innings and tallied a career-high 10 strikeouts in a 2-1 victory. Arella pitched the first five innings of the game in a scoreless pitchers' duel, then ended his outing with two straight strikeouts in the bottom of the sixth after Villanova took a 2-0 lead in the top of the inning. He scattered six hits and walked two in his outing but made his biggest pitches when they counted and stranded seven Seawolves runners on base.
After working around a leadoff single in the bottom of the first inning, Arella struck out the side in the second and fanned two more while stranding a runner at second to end the third inning. He was in a jam in the fourth with runners at second and third and one out, but he got two infield pop-ups with a walk in between and left the bases loaded. Stony Brook left 14 men on base and went 1-for-11 with runners on base in the 2-1 game. Arella threw 56 of his 83 pitches for strikes on the day.
Rotondo went 4-for-8 in a weekend home-and-home series with the Seawolves, including a triple in each game which were the eighth and ninth triples of his collegiate career. He moved into a tie for sixth place on the Wildcats all-time career triples leaders and raised his season slash line to .258/.395/.484 with the big weekend. In Saturday's 2-1 win, Rotondo batted in a scoreless game in the sixth inning and singled to advance a runner to third base. A safety squeeze brought that runner home with the game's first run, with Rotondo advancing to second and subsequently scoring on an RBI triple later in the inning.
In an 8-3 win over Stony Brook on Sunday, Rotondo drove in the tying run and scored the go-ahead run in the bottom of the third inning as Villanova turned a 2-1 deficit into a 4-2 lead that they would not relinquish the rest of the day. Rotondo was on base three times with a single, a triple and a walk in Sunday's contest.
Villanova is riding a six-game winning streak – its longest win streak since 2010 – after sweeping a weekend home-and-home series with the Seawolves. Those wins pushed the Wildcats record to 6-2, their best start to a year since the 2010 squad opened with a 13-2 start.
