FORT MYERS, Fla. – It should come as no surprise that the majority of the 80 teams duking it out for a title at this week’s Perfect Game BCS 15u National Championship made relatively short trips to Lee County from their home cities in the Southeast, most from within Florida itself.
But there are six teams here from the great Northeast (two each from Massachusetts and New Jersey, one each from New Hampshire and New York) who represented themselves very well during the first set of three pool games played Monday and Tuesday on fields spread across SWFL city.
One of those six Northeast dynamos is the Long Island Body Armor Titans 15u out of Plainview, NY, which rolled past its three opponents a combined count of 19-5 with four of those runs allowed coming in its victory on Tuesday.
The Body Armor Titans 15u are a loose and confident group despite having only one player on its roster that appears in PG’s national prospect rankings and no one with a college commitment as of yet. That means nothing, of course, since these are teenagers who still have most of their high school baseball careers in front of them. And, besides, these guys arrived here with one singular purpose derived from a singular objective.
“We play a lot of baseball up in the New York area and we like to go where the competition is,” LI Body Armor Titans 15u head coach Larry Bruno said matter-of-factly Tuesday morning from the Lee County Player Development Complex, not far from this city’s historic Downtown River District.
“We’ve definitely been looking forward to this all year,” standout 2020 right-hander/corner-infielder Hector Alejandro told PG Tuesday. “It’s really exciting to come down here and compete with the best.”
The Long Island Body Armor Titans 15u’s official 12-man roster consists of eight players from the class of 2020, three from the class of 2021 and one 2022, Rocko Brzezniak – a player Bruno called “an absolute monster – who wasn’t able to make the trip.
The players live primarily in New York cities and towns, but three are from New Jersey and one each from Connecticut and Pennsylvania. This 15u group is in its third year playing together, and Bruno describes it as an outfit that plays hard, always plays as a team and simply loves the game of baseball.
Alejandro, from Waterbury, Conn., is the team’s only nationally ranked prospect, coming in at No. 345 in his class, but it is a team not lacking in prospects who already highly regarded. Bruno said colleges have shown a lot of interest in both Alejandro and Lonnie White, a 2021 jack-of-all-trades from Coatesville, Pa.
“What I would say is, a lot of these kids will get interest (from colleges) but it’s not that we’re getting it right now this minute – remember, we’re up in the Northeast,” he said. “They’re not getting committed as early as the kids down here because the colleges are all over those kids down here. We don’t have as much as exposure as they get down here but these kids will (get recruited) and they will play in college.”
When asked which players on this roster he is especially excited about, the diplomatic – but genuinely sincere – Bruno said that he’s excited about each and every one of them. Each of them can bring a unique talent or personality to the table and those talents and personalities only serve to make the team better over the long-haul.
Looking at the box scores of the team’s first three victories here – 7-0 over Florida-based Elite Squad 15u Palm Beach, 6-1 over Georgia-based 5 Star Pigg and 6-4 over Florida-based ChandlerWorld 2021 Black – it’s easy to pick out the early contributors.
Of the guys who played in all three games, Justin Ortiz led the way with four singles in at-bats (.571) with three RBI. Drew Vincent, Cole Boyan, Brock Mercado and Lonnie White all hit .300 or better, and Michael Sadowski was 4-for-5 (.800) with an RBI in the two games in which he batted.
Bruno used eight pitchers in those three games – no one threw more than 3 2/3 innings – and the 2020 right-handers Ortiz and Vincent, 2020 lefty Sadowski and 2021 righty White combined to strikeout 20 in their combined 13 innings of work.
Everyday players like Jordan Delucia, Kenny Franquiz, Dylan Bruno and Adelson Molina – Bruno is a 2021, the others 2020s – have also contributed to the Titans 15u’s winning ways through the first set of three pool-play games, whether it be with their bats, gloves, arms or legs.
“I feel like we’re a bunch of cool kids who can be goofy with each other, but we take things very serious out on the field,” Alejandro said. “We feel like we can compete with anybody. The teams from down south, they don’t really know about Northeast baseball so we want to show them what it’s like.
“It’s a bunch of different of styles of baseball but everybody just plays hard when you’re playing against the best,” he added. “It’s just a lot of fun.”
Bruno is aware of the misconception that the teenagers playing baseball in the Northeast go into hibernation during the winter which, of course, is not the case these days. Baseball is a year-round sport for a lot of these guys who are able to utilize a large indoor facility that that the Long Island Titans organization owns and operates.
They’ll begin their indoor training in December and continue with it into the new year until they get started with their high school teams. Once the high school season is finished, the players jump back on board with the Titans for the three-month summer season and while some play football in the fall, others will continue with baseball until shutting it down in October.
“These kids, they work all year-round; they’re in the cages, they’re throwing, they’re taking grounders,” Bruno said. “These are big indoor facilities so I think a lot of ‘Northeast baseball’ has kind of caught up to what’s going on down south.”
The LI Body Armor Titans 15u will get a lot of exposure here this week and that will intensify when they play at the PG WWBA 16u National Championship in the north Atlanta suburbs July 6-13. The decision to have this group of 15u Titans “play up” at next month’s PG WWBA 16u really wasn’t that difficult of a decision at all.
\“We want to challenge them a little to see exactly where they are facing some real tough pitchers. Hopefully that makes us even better than where we are now,” Bruno said. “I just feel like if we say, hey, this is the level above us and we can play with that, when it comes time to play against our level, we’re going to be that much more dominant.”
It’s not that they’re necessarily hurting for exposure – Perfect Game holds numerous showcases both outdoors and indoors in the Northeast and the Titans 15u also do a lot of college showcases – but every bit helps.
The Long Island Titans Baseball organization is owned by Jim Clark, who is also the president of Blue Chip Prospects in Bayport, N.Y. Tom Downey acts as the LI Titans Baseball general manager and those two are largely responsible for assembling the Titans’ teams at the various age-groups, according to Bruno.
“They have a lot of kids go through this organization, and they put them in front of the right people that can see the way these boys play baseball,” Bruno said.
He went on to explain that the Titans team that gets the “Body Armor” name is usually the top team in that particular age-group. There will be, for example, an LI Body Armor Titans 15u and then an LI Titans Blue 15u, White 15u and so on, or something along those lines.
“The team that you see here is probably one of the top ones in the 15-year-old age group,” Bruno said. “These kids want to play in college, so when I put together my schedule – and I also confer with Jim and Tom – I try to put them against the best competition in the country. I try to find that competition by going to these Perfect Game tournaments.”
If finding top competition was indeed the mission, the LI Body Armor Titans 15u and the other teams from the Northeast came to the right place this week. Georgia-based Team Elite 15u Prime boasts a roster with three 2020 prospects ranked in the top-74 nationally and six 2021s ranked in the top-20. No. 4 shortstop Luke Leto, No. 6 right-hander Grant Taylor and No. 7 right-hander Carlos Rodriguez are among that latter group.
Florida-based Elite Squad 15u National has five 2021s ranked in the top-57, including No. 14 right-hander Irving Carter. Be careful what you ask for? Based on his personnel, Bruno never gave it a second thought.
“This is what these guys definitely live for,” he said. “I took some of them to a college showcase last week and they know that you kind of play for yourself at a college showcase; you want to show them who you are. But the way these kids are – and they’ve been playing together for the last three years – they want to compete; they want to win.
“They want to go out there and know that they’re playing as a team and they definitely are a team. Nobody is above the next guy here. … They love the game and they love to compete.”