AnnaMarie Gatti’s father wouldn’t let her play softball when she was a kid.

Growing up in small Scottdale, Pennsylvania, there wasn’t a local softball team for her to play on. She had to plead with her father to let her play.

“To this day he’ll apologize to me and he’s like, ‘You proved me wrong,’” Gatti said, “because he just didn’t know because it wasn’t heard of.”

Gatti was one of the highest-ranked prospects ever to come to Syracuse (17-25, 1-13 Atlantic Coast) — which travels to Hofstra (25-11-1, 11-3 Colonial Athletic) for a Tuesday 3 p.m. matchup — but has pitched to the tune of an 8.67 ERA.

After convincing her family to let her play at 10 years old, she joined a slow-pitch team, and then moved up to fast-pitch to become a pitcher. She began practicing daily in the backyard with her dad and played for more than a dozen travel teams en route to SU.

“We worked every single day in the backyard for hours,” Gatti said. “Just pitching, nothing else.”

It carried over from the summer to the school year, and softball practice in the backyard came before anything else. Gatti found her way onto many different Pittsburgh-area travel teams before joining the New Jersey Inferno, where future SU teammate Corinne Ozanne was already a star.

“For some reason, something clicked, she looked up to me and wanted to follow in my footsteps,” said Ozanne, a shortstop at SU.

But while Ozanne spent an hour and a half traveling to practice, Gatti spent six — one way.

Ross first saw Gatti pitch when she was a member of the Inferno and immediately took notice.

“She had command of her change-up then and she had (a) good mix of speeds,” Ross said. “And we knew with the build and the power that she already had naturally, that change-up was going to make her a really good pitcher.”

Gatti’s drop ball and change-up were perfected by Mike Bosch, her personal pitching coach before becoming SU’s current pitching coach. Ross said her change-up is one of the best she’s ever seen at Syracuse.

She can top out around 65 miles per hour while her change-up, thrown with the same arm speed and four-fingered grip, drops into the mid-50s.

“It’s my bread and butter,” Gatti said.

To throw a drop ball, she leads with her knuckles toward the catcher and flicks the ball toward the plate, stopping her arm motion around her waist. For the change-up, the arm continues and Gatti flips her hand, causing the ball to spin violently and slow down.

The mix of speeds and pitches Gatti boasted early in high school got her noticed by one of the top-ranked travel teams in the country, The Beverly Bandits in Chicago, before her senior year of high school.

So Gatti traded the six-hour car rides with her parents for lonely plane rides, and one future SU teammate in Ozanne for another in Maddi Doane.

“She basically had her own room at my house,” said Doane, an Illinois native.

But joining one of the best teams in the country, full of players who knew each other for years, wasn’t easy for Gatti. It showed in her pitching.

“I would throw a lot of passed balls in the fall,” Gatti said. “I just literally could not throw a strike in the fall because I was that nervous.”

With each poor performance, Gatti worried her team wouldn’t want her. When she returned to Chicago for the summer and moved in with Doane, Gatti grew close to her new roommate and fellow teammates.

Now in Syracuse, Doane is one of SU’s best hitters while Gatti has struggled to recover from an ankle injury.

Usually brimming with confidence, Gatti admitted this season hasn’t gone as she planned. But she’s going back to Chicago this summer with Doane, hoping to regain her form.

Said Ross: “Potentially, she could be one of the better ones that comes through here, one of the best.”

Published on April 20, 2015 at 8:59 pm