Syracuse softball’s ace AnnaMarie Gatti looks to bring fire to Orange in junior season

At a camp with 16- and 17-year-old softball players, 9-year-old AnnaMarie Gatti reached down to field a hard groundball. As she extended her glove to stick the ball, it took a bad hop and smacked her in the face. As tears streamed down her face, Gatti barehanded the ball and fired to first base. She almost threw out the batter.

“She really wanted to compete,” Vince Gatti, her father, said. “She really wanted to show people what she could do. She wouldn’t come off the field.”

Gatti shouldn’t have been on the field, Vince said, because the camp wasn’t open to girls younger than 11. Yet his daughter won the camp’s “Will to Win” award, even though most campers were almost twice her age.

Growing up in Scottdale, Pennsylvania, about 45 miles from Pittsburgh, Gatti played Wiffle ball and video games with the neighborhood boys over “girly” pursuits like Barbie dolls. The fierce competitiveness she developed from an early age has turned her into one of Syracuse’s top pitchers. After missing most of her freshman season with a foot injury, the junior right-hander is poised to compete and lead the Orange following its first winning season in four years.

“Syracuse softball, we’re on the rise but we’re not the Yankees yet,” Gatti said. “One day I believe that will happen.”

As a young girl, Gatti loved playing with boys because they kept score. No dolls or playhouse. She couldn’t see the point in doing something you couldn’t win, and credits much of her inner fight to that.

Before she turned 5, she sat next to her father at Three Rivers Stadium watching Pittsburgh Pirates games. Gatti fell in love with baseball, and in turn, softball.

As a freshman at Southmoreland (Pennsylvania) High School, Gatti earned second team All-State honors. During summers, she played for the New Jersey Inferno before switching to the Beverly Bandits, a nationally ranked team based in Chicago. The No. 66-ranked player in the class of 2014, per FloSoftball, faced elite hitters as college coaches looked on.

Despite being highly touted, her parents remained skeptical that a college would offer their 16-year-old a scholarship. It simply didn’t happen to girls in her area. So, when their daughter wagered a tattoo on receiving a Division I offer, Vince and Rachel, her mother, accepted.

Then Syracuse came calling her junior year. Gatti held her parents to their word, and got inked once she verbally committed to the Orange. She likes quotes and deeper meanings. Her forearm now reads, “Vene. Vidi. Vici.” I came. I saw. I conquered.

In her first year at Syracuse, she injured her right foot, the one she pushes off with when pitching. The doctors diagnosed a sprain, which didn’t concern the Gattis. But soon Vince realized how serious the injury could be for his daughter. She struggled moving to the plate normally and maintaining velocity while pitching became uncomfortable.

For the first time in her life, she couldn’t be on the field competing. Confined to the dugout, she struggled with sitting out most of her freshman season.

“I didn’t really listen to what the trainer wanted me to do,” Gatti said. “I was a complete jerk because I thought they were purposely trying to keep me out.”

Gatti appeared in seven games later that season, though Vince wishes they had taken the injury and recovery even more seriously.

One day last season with the Orange’s bats struggling, Gatti and Olivia Martinez, her catcher, got in a heated exchange at the Gatti’s home in Pennsylvania. When Gatti said SU’s players couldn’t hit off of her, Martinez retorted that she had hit well off Gatti in the batting cages that morning. Gatti didn’t drop it because of her “I beat you” mentality, escalating the argument.

“I guess you have to realize who you’re talking to,” Gatti said, “and how you’re talking to them sometimes about your accomplishments. To rub it in someone’s face, that’s not competitive. That’s just being a jerk.”

Brandon Bielinski | Contributing Photographer

This season, Gatti wants to be a sparkplug and SU’s ace for the second straight year. She’s pitched against No. 10 Florida State, No. 13 UCLA, No. 19 Notre Dame twice and North Carolina. Syracuse head coach Mike Bosch said her out pitch, a quality change-up, coupled with her fiery attitude creates a force in the circle.

“Boy, if I could bottle that up and sell it,” Bosch said, “I tell you, I could make a million.”

Gatti sometimes can’t help her competitive streak taking over, including in mid-January preseason workouts. Last Wednesday, as the team practiced in groups of four, a teammate called out Gatti for cheating. It ticked her off. After Gatti’s group won, she suggested the losers run a timed mile. Vene. Vidi. Vici.

That competitive fire constantly smolders inside Gatti, waiting to be stoked. Sometimes it burns overwhelmingly hot, but she tries not to let that happen. The heat has always seemed more useful directed at the batter 43 feet away.

“Softball is a team sport, but it is also very individual,” Gatti said. “I get to compete, just me and that batter in that one second.”