Hamptons Collegiate Baseball

Hamptons Collegiate Baseball has proven not only to be a springboard for big league hopefuls, but it’s also a venue in which young coaches can polish their skills at the helm of a baseball team.

That’s exactly what Andrew Lorraine, last year’s coach for the Southampton Breakers, did in his debut season. Last week, Lorraine, a 10-year pitcher in the major leagues, signed on as the pitching coach for the Pulaski Mariners, the Seattle Mariners’ affiliate in the Appalachian League.

“I’m just really excited to get an opportunity to take the next step and coach at the next level,” Lorraine said. “As a part of a major league organization, I hope to help develop players, and I’m hoping that with my experience playing and coaching all over world, including in New York last summer, I can do a good job there.”

Under Lorraine, the Breakers finished with a record of 24-16, good for third place in the Kaiser Division behind the North Fork Ospreys and Westhampton Breakers. They bowed out of the playoffs with a first-round loss at Westhampton. After a sluggish start, Southampton posted one of the best earned run averages down the stretch. On Lorraine’s watch, Fairleigh Dickinson’s Nick Melchiorre posted a 0.97 ERA, which would have led the league if not falling just shy of qualifying.

Upon the season’s conclusion, Lorraine returned home and in November signed with the Cardenales de Lara in Venezuela. When they lost in the playoffs, he joined the Gigantes de Carolina for their postseason chase in the Puerto Rican Professional Baseball League. Through a relationship with a former teammate, Carl Willis, now the minor league pitching coordinator for the Mariners, he learned of the position in Pulaski and was soon hired.

For the short-season coaching staff, all the top prospects are brought down to mini-camps that begin in Arizona in early February. Minor league spring training takes place from the first week of March until the major league teams break for their season in early April. Lorraine, an Arizona resident, will stay there to help lead extended spring training, which includes those who don’t make the big league M’s. In June, those players taken in the First-Year Player Draft who sign are welcomed in.

“I never thought that I’d need to bridge some generational gap,” Lorraine said. “I remember when I was young. I understand kids, and to work with them is going to be a great experience. I’ll draw from last summer. What I learned was just to be honest, tell the kids the truth and help them out best you can to become better ballplayers and better men. A big part of maturing as a player is maturing as a person.”

The short-season Pulaski squad heads east to Virginia on June 15. They’ll play until around Labor Day. Pulaski plays in the Appalachian League, which also consists of teams from Tennessee, West Virginia and North Carolina. The Mariners are the seventh major league franchise to inhabit Calfee Park. Among the major league players who began their careers is Phillies Hall of Fame third baseman Mike Schmidt.

Lorraine isn’t the first to parlay his summer experience into a full-time position elsewhere. Jason Lefkowitz, last year’s manager for the Sag Harbor Whalers as well as the victorious Kaiser Division All-Star team, accepted an assistant coach position at Cal State Santa Barbara, a top 100 ranked program in the country. He had coached for three seasons at Brown. His assistant in Sag Harbor, Jonathan Anderson, went from being a volunteer assistant at Duke to a paid assistant at Dartmouth.