Douglas Falls To Royal Palm Beach In Preseason Opener

The final result on the scoreboard for Douglas was a 4-2 loss to Royal Palm Beach, but the lessons learned and positive things put forth by his team left Eagles Manager Todd Fitz-Gerald content Monday night as Douglas opened the HSBN Preseason Challenege at Flanagan High School.

The Eagles banged out a double-digit amount of hits but had almost as many men left on base as the timely hit was hard to come by. Still, Fitz-Gerald was not as concerned with his team’s offense as he was its defensive issues, which factored into two of Royal Palm’s runs.

“Offensively, I thought we did a good job,” Fitz-Gerald said. “I thought we ran ourselves out of one inning, out of a run in the first inning. Second and third, there were two outs, we take a strikeout looking. I think we hit like I thought we’d hit. We pitched better than I thought we’d pitch. We played defense not as good as I’d thought we’d play defense.”

Royal Palm took a 1-0 lead in the first courtesy of an error when Chris Rodriguez’s grounder was misplayed in the infield, allowing Brandon Hernandez to score.

Rodriguez smacked a two-out double in the third to bring in Kevin Cordero and then came home during some indecision by the Douglas defense.

Down 3-0, Douglas showed its trademark character trait of not quitting by plating a run as Dominic DiCaprio singled and scored on Anthony Gallo’s base hit up the middle.

Royal Palm stretched its lead to 4-1 in the bottom of the fourth. Justin Douglas led off with a single and came home on a Cruz Alcazar’s sacrifice fly.

Douglas narrowed the margin in the fifth after Luis Silverio ripped a double down the left-field line and scored on Michael Greenberg’s base hit.

“It was a good game. It was a good start. It’s preseason,” Fitz-Gerald said. “You iron out the kinks and you go from there. There are things that are very fixable, not a whole lot to be disciplining about. I saw some good things, not some good things obviously with the baserunning and the walks for our pitching staff, but other than that, I thought we did OK. So we’ll go play Heritage on Thursday and see what happens.”

KJ Mayo hit two doubles, and Derek Fritz and Colton Welker also hit doubles.

On the other side of the field, the Wildcats and their first-year coach Bart Wible were pleased with a strong start by Jordan Lauginiger, twin brother of last year’s ace, Justin Lauginiger. Justin is sidelined this year after having undergone Tommy John surgery, but Jordan showed why he’s going to be a fine replacement for the number one role. He allowed five hits and walked two in four innings of work Monday.

“He’s going from being that number two or that closer guy to having to be the guy who comes out and dominates,” Wible said. “He’s going to be the guy who’s going to be very important for us. I’m pretty pleased with what we saw out of him tonight.”

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