By TERRY NAU

Sports editor

We don’t often focus on junior varsity sports around here. The explosion of varsity sports, both male and female, on the high school scene over the past two decades has shoved the junior varsity and freshman teams into the background.

This doesn’t mean the kids don’t play as hard or that the games don’t mean as much, because they do. Take Saturday morning’s junior varsity baseball game at Tucker Field between first-place Cumberland and defending champion St. Raphael Academy as an example. These two teams played a tight 2-1 contest that featured strong defense, pitching and an attention to fundamentals that varsity teams could learn from.
Cumberland emerged with the victory.
“It was a tremendous game,” said losing coach George Patrick Duffy, who at the age of 87 continues to work with teenage athletes, passing on what he has learned about sports over the years.
“I think the message I send to the kids,” Duffy was saying on Sunday morning, “is that you have to stay with it. You never give up. I struck out as a player many times. I dropped passes in football, missed key shots as a basketball player. But I kept coming back for more. You just have to keep going.”
Duffy, who graduated from high school in 1940 and was proclaimed the top athlete in Pawtucket by legendary mayor Thomas McCoy, played semi-pro football and basketball for many years.
“I played basketball at St. Raphael Academy’s old gym until I was 79 years old,” he said. “Then the pain from arthritis in both knees became too much to bear. I stopped playing and eventually had knee replacement surgery, one at a time, in 2004 and 2005. Now I have no pain and I can hit grounders to the kids for infield practice and pitch batting practice … from behind a screen, of course.”
Duffy isn’t the only old-timer who pitches batting practice. Hall of Famer Bob Feller hurled four innings of shutout ball in a Cleveland Indians Fantasy Camp earlier this year. Feller just turned 90 the other day.
“If your body is strong enough,” Duffy said, “and you have the will to do it, then people my age can continue to be active. You can’t stay home and watch television every day. You’ve got to believe your life is going on for a few more years.”
Does Duffy have a secret to his own longevity?
“I don’t sleep a lot and I don’t eat a lot,” said the man who awakens each morning by 5 a.m., reads the morning newspapers and plans his day along with wife Helen, who is even spryer than her husband.

Pawtucket’s Jay Rainville pitched a solid five innings for New Britain on Saturday night, limiting New Hampshire to five hits and two runs while striking out five during the Rock Cats’ 8-5 victory. That was just the kind of performance Rainville needed to boost his confidence after a recent spell of rocky outings.
Pitching is a process, as everyone inside the game understands. Rainville climbed to Class AA baseball this season after pitching in Class A Advanced down in Florida last year while recuperating from shoulder surgery. Nobody expected him to dominate at the next level but the former first-round draft choice of the Minnesota Twins must also show that he can adapt to a new league while he regains arm strength and learns more about his craft.
Class AA is known as the “make-or-break” league for most young prospects. That’s one of the cruel realities of professional baseball. It is a level where athletes must become accountable to themselves while working without a support system of family and coaches from their formative years. They are on the road and alone, for the most part.
The New York Yankees suspended one of their top prospects – 19-year-old outfielder Jose Tabata – last week when the young man left his team following a poor start for Class AA Trenton in the same Eastern League Rainville competes in. Tabata wanted to quit baseball and go home because he was batting less than .200 and had been supplanted as the organization’s top outfield prospect by Trenton teammate Austin Jackson, who is hitting around .300 for the Thunder.
As fans, and even sports writers, we can’t appreciate all the pressure pro baseball players must deal with as they advance upward through the minor leagues. They see teammates who are told to give up their dream at every stop along the way. Each player must become inured to the pressure while continuing to do his own difficult job.
This weeding-out process is designed to develop mental toughness in an athlete. Maybe it didn’t start out that way but this is what happens to the players as they  work off their youth and inexperience. Somewhere along the way, they turn into hardened professionals who block out all the negatives and just focus on the positives.
Jay Rainville took another step along the road to survival on Saturday night. And believe me, that’s what this is all about, not just for Rainville but every player you see on the field and in the dugouts tonight when the PawSox return home to host the Durham Bulls in a Class AAA game. Only the strong survive the challenges of minor league baseball.
Just imagine how tough you’ve got to be to make the big league roster?
This is why my father told me 50 years ago that you never boo a major league baseball player. “They’ve made it to the top of their profession,” he would tell me and my brothers as we headed into Forbes Field in Pittsburgh or Philadelphia’s Connie Mack Stadium. “You don’t boo these guys, even the .220 hitters.”
Those words still ring in my head whenever I stop in at McCoy Stadium. They ring true at the minor league level, too.