St. Thomas Tops Plantation To Reach District 7A-16 Championship

St. Thomas broke open a tight game with a four-run fourth inning en route to an 8-2 win over Plantation in a District 7A-16 semifinal Tuesday at Nova High School.

The win puts the Raiders in the district championship against Nova at 7 p.m. Thursday. Nova beat Cooper City 6-0 behind Trent Monaghan’s no-hitter.

St. Thomas established a lead early, as Enrique Finol scored on a wild pitch in the bottom of the first.

The Raiders (14-7) extended the lead to 2-0 in the third after winning pitcher Alec Byrd singled and his pinch-runner, Brock Disney, scored on Frank Rubio’s double.

St. Thomas took advantage of a couple of errors and four hits to score four in the fourth. William Aprin, Ben Siegal and Enrique Finol singled and scored, and Peter Nicoletto, who gone on with a dropped third strike, added another run.

Plantation, which finished the season 11-11, managed two runs in the top of the fifth. Felipe Garcia led off with a double and scored on a wild pitch, and Jhulian Spaulding singled and came in on Adam Schorr’s base hit.

St. Thomas capped the scoring in the bottom of the fifth. Nicoletto singled and scored on Finol’s double, and Finol came in on Byrd’s double.

Byrd, who said his curve ball and fastball were effective, said the Colonels didn’t make things easy on St. Thomas and showed a fighting spirit throughout the game.

“They’re a good team, they’re scrappy, they kept battling,” Byrd said. “They’re a good team all around.”

Raiders coach Robert Lawson expected Plantation to be a tough opponent to overcome.

“We knew we were going to have to score runs and pitch well and have to play good defense,” he said. “You can’t really look at the record on any team in the playoffs because they had a better record then us going in. They were 1-0, so we had to go out here and play hard and get some timely hits and play some defense, and it’s playoff baseball. That’s the way it is.”

After the game, Plantation coach Albert Destrade reflected on his team and the adversity it overcame to reach the district semifinal.

“I was real blessed this year,” he said. “We didn’t have the most talented team in the world. We didn’t have All-American guys all over the place, but I’ve got a bunch of scrappers. I got a bunch of guys who will go to war, and I have a senior class that’s really special. In my five year’s coaching, I told the guys today, this is the best group I ever had in terms of loving baseball and just understanding it and just understanding how to play it right. I had some really good leaders on this team. We had a few guys who we lost early in the year that ended up hurting us defensively and put us in a spot, and we had to count on a few guys who we preferred to have different roles. At the end of the day, they persevered and they did the best they could. When this season started, people looked at this district and they probably thought Plantation would finish fifth or sixth. And we proved a lot of people wrong. We played with the best teams in the area. We came out and battled every day. I’m just real proud of this group.”

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