Lafayette Grads Play in SLU Summer Classic

SAINT LOUIS UNIVERSITY—In the end, the team from Chicago just had too much for the 30-plus team field at the 2011 SLU Summer Baseball Classic.

The Illinois Sparks Nationals had too much hitting, too much pitching, and too much depth, and proved Sunday with three impressive wins at the Billiken Sports Complex that they deserved to be called champions of one of the Midwest’s best summer baseball events.

“They’re a good team, one of the best we’ve faced,” St. Louis Pirates 18U coach Brandon Robinson said, after his club lost 9-1 to the Sparks in Sunday’s championship game. “It was rough out here today, definitely. But that’s baseball.”

The Sparks, a team of recent high school all-stars from near the Windy City, won all seven games they played over the four-day weekend at SLU, and were the only team to go undefeated throughout the event.

The Pirates 18s went 6-1 over the weekend, but with a much shorter available roster than the Sparks, seemed to run out of gas after playing three games on Sunday, all in over 90-degree heat.

“And some of our guys live an hour and a half away, so they had to get up at 6, 6:30 (Sunday) morning,” Robinson said. “This was a long, hot day. But what more could we ask from twenty 18-year-olds.”

Until that final game, no one could’ve asked nor expected any more from the Pirates 18s, who blew through every opponent they faced, and won their first six contests by a combined 31-6 score.

Hitting stars for the Pirates 18s during pool play included Oakville High grad Ryan Simmons and grad Khalfani Mar’na, while Steven Diel of Francis Howell High and Austin Bossart of O’Fallon (IL) High stood out on the mound. Recent Lafayette grad Sean McIntyre also plays for the Pirates.

“I’m proud of these boys,” Robinson said. “We just came back from a tournament in Georgia. We took one day off, then we were right back at it in this tournament. I’m proud of how hard they competed.”

Even with the loss to the Sparks, a program that this year alone had 18 players accept scholarships to NCAA Division I schools, and had two players selected in the high rounds of last month’s MLB Draft, the Pirates 18s’ most difficult matchup might have come in their semifinal contest. That game was against their program mates, the St. Louis Pirates 17s, who also went undefeated in pool play at the SLU Classic.

“That was a big game,” Robinson said. “There’s no way we wanted to lose to those guys. We’re supposed to be the big brothers, so we played that game all out, like we always do.”

The Pirates 18s won 6-2, but didn’t pull away until a three-run sixth gave them some breathing room.

In the championship game, the Pirates 18s led 1-0 in the top of the second when Granite City (IL) grad Kaleb Depew stole home after a Sparks pickoff attempt at first base.

But that lead didn’t last long, as the Sparks scored three runs in the bottom of the second, then added single runs in the third and fourth, before finally putting the game away with four runs in the fifth.

“We missed some opportunities to score early,” Robinson said. “I wish we had capitalized on them a little better. But I’m still proud of how we played.”

After several weeks of traveling the country for different games and tournaments, the Pirates 18s will get some much-deserved rest this week, with nothing but intrasquad games scheduled for Friday and Saturday.

The following weekend though, July 21-24, they expect to play in another in-town event once Robinson and his crew figure out which event they’d like to enter.

The Pirates 18s were scheduled to play in a tournament in Ohio next week, but have elected to pull out of that event, in favor of staying home to play.

The Pirates 17s will play in the College of the Ozarks Tournament in Branson, MO. this coming weekend before heading to Indianapolis next week for a tournament showcase hosted by Butler University.