Wildcats Rally Past Boca Eagles; Panthers Baseball Club Advances

The Boca Eagles needed to give up nine or fewer runs against the Wildcats to advance out of Bracket E and into the second round of the HSBN Fall Classic.

After seeing their 4-2 lead evaporate into a 10-5 deficit after a fifth-inning rally that sparked the Wildcats to a 10-7 win Saturday, the Eagles missed out on their chance to advance. Instead, Panthers Baseball Club, which defeated the Gators 8-5 earlier in the day, finished as the bracket winner and move on as the sixth seed to play the third-seeded Cannons in a best-of-three series starting Wednesday at Coral Springs High.

After spotting the Wildcats a 1-0 lead going into the bottom of the first, the Eagles got on top with a three-run blast by Stephen Gogreve.

The Wildcats came back with a run in the second after Anthony DiFabio doubled for one of his three hits and scored on Alex Balter’s single.

Josh Parker knocked in Zander Retamar to broaden the Eagles’ lead to 4-2 through three, but the never-say-die Wildcats evened the score in the top of the fourth. Carlos Rodriguez homered and DiFabio came in on an error.

The Wildcats, who tallied 14 hits for the game, took the lead in the fifth with a six-run inning keyed by Rodriguez’s three-run single and Balter’s two-run home run.

“I was just trying to put the ball in play for us to score runs,” Rodriguez said. “That was all that was going through my mind. Just score runs.”

DiFabio said the rally was the spark the team needed to secure the win.

“That’s how we got energized,” DiFabio said. That’s how we started to rally. One kid gets a hit and then the whole team hits.”

A little bit of luck helped in that inning, Wildcats coach Paul Barnes said.

“Everyone was focused,” he said. “No one tried to be a hero. Everyone just did their job. We got away with some stuff. If we didn’t get a sack bunt down, we’d get a hit in the at-bat. One of those things that worked out in our favor. So there’s obviously execution stuff we need to work on. We hustled, and that’s all you can ask for.

“I definitely didn’t expect to score six runs in one inning off of that team. That was the third time I’ve seen them play this week. They’re a really good team with really good pitchers. We’ll take it, but definitely it was a surprise.”

The Eagles mounted a comeback in the seventh and managed two runs on Retamar’s two-run single. He had three hits on the day.

“[The Eagles] were a good opponent, but we came out stronger,” Rodriguez said. “That’s how we came out with a victory today.”

Barnes said his message to the team before the game was simple: Score early and often.

“We knew had to win and win by a lot to even have a chance to advance,” Barnes said. “We told them to play hard and don’t leave anything on the field, score every run we can score and prevent every run we can from scoring. It wasn’t enough.”

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