In the bottom of the 11th, with a place in the Southern Connecticut Conference tournament semifinal on the line, North Haven’s Luca Lawrence reared back and delivered across home plate.

Scissors sliced paper, and Lawrence’s team won.

When a quarterfinal meeting between North Haven and Amity high schools was pushed back by a rain delay, the teams came up with a solution. Rock-paper-scissors. It was a unique way to decide a baseball game, but if you watched the players dueling or read the game report, you’d wouldn’t notice a drop-off in intensity.

GameTimeCT.com’s Pete Paguaga covered the game like any other, writing a blow-by-blow account complete with a box score full of stones and scissors.


Paguaga reports that both teams sent out their starting pitchers for the first round. Amity’s John Lumpinski burst out to a 1-0 lead with rock-over-scissors. Then North Haven’s Peyton Farina used Lumpinski’s move against him twice in a row to take an early lead of his own.

From there, the teams traded rounds until it was tied up heading into a winner-take-all 11th round draw.

“Lawrence went out of his comfort zone,” Paguaga wrote, “and surprised everyone in attendance with a scissor and [Peter] Spodnick, who didn’t see it coming, went with paper.”

The Indians walked away with a thrilling 5-4 victory, but it remains to be seen whether the SCC commissioner will let the result stand.