Visiting St. Thomas Aquinas shellacked Pelham’s baseball team.

“So what?”

It’s that phrase that Pelham’s head coach, Matt Stone, repeated to his players throughout the contest on Wednesday, April 29, to help them maintain an even keel during an 11-3 setback and a 2-7 start to the season.

“You can’t show emotion. You can’t lose your composure. That’s what ‘So what?’ means,” said Stone. “You have to be able to brush it off and look yourself in the mirror after the game and say that you didn’t take a single pitch off.”

In the early going, Stone could be heard saying the expression repeatedly, as the Pythons fell behind 8-0 in the first three innings. It appeared the game was headed for a mercy-rule conclusion.

But Stone’s bunch buckled down, held the Saints without a run in back-to-back innings, then began to chip away at the score.

After Louie Lebel and Corey Couillard worked walks, Joe Morin plated Pelham’s first run in the bottom of the third with an RBI groundout.

In the home half of the sixth, Mike Perruccio came off the bench and produced a sacrifice fly, and Jesse Vaiknoris brought the third Python run of the day home with a single that cut the deficit to 9-3.

The hard-hitting, slick-fielding Saints proved too much, but Stone was glad to see his team play for seven innings.

“We’ve gone down before, but we’re not here to get mercy-ruled,” said Stone. “We’re going to keep kicking, keep scratching to try to keep playing.”

Pelham’s most impressive win of the season came April 24 in a road tilt with Kearsarge when the Pythons left with an 8-7 victory, the Cougars’ only setback in five April games.

Following the loss to St. Thomas, the Pythons fell to Souhegan, 11-1, on Saturday, May 2, and Coe-Brown, 10-5, on Monday, May 4. In the setback to Coe-Brown, played at MerchantsAuto.com Stadium, James Moran went 3-for-4 with a single, double and triple, Lebel singled and doubled in two official trips to the plate, but Northwood’s boys scored five in the top of the seventh to pull away.

“They’ve learned how to handle being on the underside of some games,” said Stone. “It’s not a sport where if you’re angry you can take it out on your opponent. It’s a game where you have to stay cool mentally to be successful.”