Newark Star-Ledger, Matthew Stanmyre and Paul Bruno
Tony Ferrainolo sat on the beige leather couch in his West New York apartment yesterday afternoon, nervously tapping his feet and wiggling his fingers. He lifted his cell phone from the coffee table, flipped it open and stared at the screen, begging it to chime with another update.
“I’m being ruled here by a phone,” the Memorial High School baseball coach said.
He got up from the couch and walked to the balcony. Pausing for a second to gaze across the Hudson River at the New York City skyline, he then walked to the kitchen table and sat down. After just a moment or two, it was back to the couch.
The phone call finally came, at 7:14 p.m. Through shouts and screams on the other end of the line, Ferrainolo listened to the words he had waited more than three hours to hear:
“We won.”
A quick smile flashed across his face and his brown eyes came alive. He looked down and nodded his head softly.
“We won,” he repeated in the phone.
Memorial’s 6-5 victory over Marist High School in extra innings yesterday pushed Ferrainolo past Morristown’s Harry Shatel to become New Jersey’s all-time leader in career high school baseball coaching victories.
Ferrainolo nervously waited out the result in his eighth-floor apartment with his wife, Anne, because he was too exhausted to journey to the game. Diagnosed with lymphoma last year, he is in the middle of intense chemotherapy treatments that have sapped his energy.
He finished the second round of a four-day, 24-hour chemotherapy cycle Saturday night. Because of his treatments, Ferrainolo has made it to just six of the Tigers’ games this season.
“It’s a great day,” Ferrainolo said moments after assistant coach Dan Marroquin called with the news. “You’re on top. You’re here. I guess right now you could say this old coach from West New York is on top.”
About an hour after the win, which improved Memorial’s record to 13-7, a yellow school bus carrying the team pulled up in front of Ferrainolo’s building. The players poured out in grass-stained uniforms and rode the elevator up to their coach’s apartment.
When Ferrainolo opened the door, the players clapped and shook their coach’s hands. Some wrapped their arms around him. Once they gathered in the living room, the team presented Ferrainolo with the signed game ball.
Ferrainolo has compiled a 753-205 in 34 seasons at Memorial, where he was a three-sport star in the 1960s. He started working at the school in 1967, making $300 a week as an assistant football coach and $5,400 as a business education teacher.
He never left.
“It’s a huge deal and it’s well deserved,” Anne Ferrainolo said of her husband’s record. “He put the time in. It wasn’t something that was handed to him. He earned it.”
Wearing his black and orange coach’s shirt, jeans and flip flops, Ferrainolo received constant text updates from the game, courtesy of his assistant coaches.
For the first five innings, he sat out on the balcony, watching boats sail across the Hudson and helicopters buzz across the sky. At the start of the sixth inning, he moved inside, but continued to checking his phone for updates, then thumbing text messages back to his assistants.
Because of the chemotherapy treatments, Ferrainolo hasn’t been able to attend many games or practices this season. He misses both — and especially his players — desperately.
But, Ferrainolo says he expects return to the dugout Saturday, when Memorial takes on Harrison in the quarterfinals of the Hudson County Tournament.
“Bottom line, I want to live,” Ferrainolo said. “I feel like I have a lot more years ahead of me. You get mad inside that you have to deal with this. Then they pump the poison in you. But you just hope you can get back up to bat.”
In yesterday’s game, starting pitcher Bryan Vizcaino was the biggest reason Ferrainolo ended the day with the record.
The senior right-hander threw 139 pitches over the eight innings and delivered the biggest hit of the day, crushing a fastball over the left center field fence with Jose Toribio aboard in the top of the eighth to give Memorial a 6-4 lead. In the bottom of the inning, Vizcaino got the final out by inducing a groundout to shortstop.
Memorial first baseman Anthony Urdaneta squeezed the throw from second baseman Tyler Saurborn and then let out an audible, “Yes!” Urdaneta hugged Saurborn and they rushed to the Memorial dugout with the game ball.
“It feels great,” said Vizcaino, who struck out nine and walked two. “That’s what I wanted — to get this win for coach Ferrainolo. I felt confident that we could win. I felt great today.”
