‘Going To Be Virtually Unhittable’: After Winning National Championship, Mavrick Rizy Joins Brewster Bullpen

BREWSTER – At any and every Cape League game, there are little kids running around, many asking for autographs from players. Years ago, Mavrick Rizy was one of them. 

 A Fiskdale native, Rizy and his family vacationed in Dennis every year. He looked up to the Cape League players, he said. 

 Now he’s back on the Cape, and he’s one of them.

Just weeks after winning a national championship with Louisiana State, Rizy, a right-handed pitcher, joined the Brewster Whitecaps and has already emerged as a closer for the team, and a commanding one at that.

“I couldn’t be more blessed,” he said. “It’s my favorite place on Earth, coming to the Cape.”

Before Brewster and Baton Rouge, Rizy pitched for Worcester Academy, where he won a Central New England Prep School Baseball League championship as a junior in 2023. He was ranked the number one overall high school prospect in Massachusetts for the class of 2024 by Perfect Game, an amateur scouting service. He is the nephew of MLB pitcher Alex Cobb, a fellow right-hander. 

In his first year at LSU this spring, Rizy, 20, threw 24.2 innings to a 4.74 ERA. En route to the Men’s College World Series held annually in Omaha, Rizy pitched 1.2 scoreless innings in the regionals and one scoreless inning in the super regionals. LSU swept the finals to win the national championship.

“It’s so surreal,” Rizy said. “I always dreamed as a kid going to Omaha, just as a fan, but to make it there and then win a national championship with some of my best friends ever, it [meant] a lot.”

In between winning a championship with the Tigers and coming to the Cape, Rizy took a week to vacation with family. Then he came to Brewster, immediately adding a hard-throwing arm to the back end of the Whitecaps bullpen. Rizy earned a save in his first Cape League appearance in a 2-0 win July 9 against Chatham.

“In Brewster, when it’s starting to get a little dark outside and you bring him into the eighth and ninth inning, he’s going to be virtually unhittable, so it’s just a huge presence, scary body, huge athlete,” Whitecaps manager Jamie Shevchik said.

Indeed, at six-foot, nine-inches tall, Rizy is tied for the tallest player in the Cape League currently (only Hunter Watkins of the Yarmouth-Dennis Red Sox measures the same height). 

He had yet to allow a baserunner in three innings of work on the Cape as of Tuesday. With the sun setting at Stony Brook Field last Saturday, Rizy pitched the eighth and ninth innings, striking out five of six total batters, to finish off the Harwich Mariners in a 5-0 win.

“He’s the guy that’s easy to catch,” said catcher Cade Arrambide, a current Chatham Angler and teammate of Rizy’s at LSU. “I mean, he throws hard. His pitches have a lot of movement on them. But I mean he’s not a guy that’s going to go out there and spray it around. He’s going to be all around the zone.”

Rizy and Arrambide had played summer travel ball together as high schoolers, before they were both freshmen at LSU. Arrambide called Rizy the “teammate of the year.”

“There’s really no other way to put it,” Arrambide said. “If you need a guy on your team who’s going to be a positive vibe, no matter what the outcome is, he’s always going to be the same level-headed, never too high, never too low, and he’s always just going to be the positive guy on the team. He’ll always pick you up when you’re down and always keep you up when you’re high.”

Last Friday as the Whitecaps visited the Red Sox, a pair of little kids at the game were wearing purple LSU jersey-shirts bearing Rizy’s name and number. They were former neighbors who used to live on the same street as the Rizy family in Fiskdale and had moved to the Cape. Their father had been the football coach of Rizy’s brother. Rizy hadn’t seen them in forever, he said.

“I think he likes it here, and it’s going to be fun to have him for sure,” Shevchik said.