FORT MYERS, Fla. – A championship mentality is first created through talent and training and then cultivated through hard work and positive reinforcement. Suffice it to say that many of the players performing for the Eagles Baseball Scout Team at this week’s Perfect Game BCS 16u National Championship have that winning attitude ingrained into their very being.
Credit their baseball backgrounds, the ones that have really taken root since they began their prep careers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., two years ago. The school was the site of a horrific mass shooting in 2017, and the Eagles baseball program has led a resurgence and rebirth that is garnering headlines for much more positive reasons.
This was a truly magical spring for the Stoneman Douglas Eagles. They finished the 2021 campaign with 28-2 record on their way to winning the Florida Class 7A state championship, the big-school class largely regarded as the strongest in the state and one of the strongest in the nation.
As a result, at season’s end the Eagles sat in the cat-bird seat as the No. 1 team in the final PG High School National Top 50 Rankings.
“It was a really good collection of kids [with] talent, chemistry, coaching. It was really a close-knit unit and probably the tightest group of guys that I’ve had in a long, long time,” Stoneman Douglas/ Eagles BST head coach Todd Fitz-Gerald told PG on Thursday, speaking from the Lee County Player Development 5-Plex.
“They were just fun. They came to practice every day and they worked hard. They had one goal in mind and that was to be a state champion.”
Turns out they earned even more than the state championship they had set their sights on winning. Eagles Baseball Scout Team top-500 2022 outfielder/corner-infielder Grant McDonald was a key component on that Stoneman Douglas team and he’s still soaking everything in.
“The experience was amazing, let alone winning a state championship and then we got voted to win the national championship,” he told PG on Thursday. “I won’t forget that for the rest of my life; I’ll always remember that. It was probably the most fun season I’ve ever had.”
Fast-forward a couple of months and many of those same players have traveled across the state to compete on the national stage that is the PG BCS 16u National Championship. It’s an event with 112 teams from across the country and Puerto Rico chasing PG national championship rings that carry a great deal of significance in their own right.
“It’s pretty cool to see all the different teams and how they get ready and how they go about their business,” McDonald said. “It would be awesome to win [this] championship; that’s the goal.”
McDonald is one of eight Stoneman Douglas underclass players rostered with the Eagles BST, and they’re all very talented. Each one finds himself at some level of PG’s national class of 2022, 2023 or 2024 prospect rankings with ’23 outfielder/right-hander Christian Rodriguez leading the way at No. 22. A dynamic presence, Rodriguez is an alumnus of both the 2019 PG 13u Select Baseball Festival and the 2020 PG 14u Select Fest.
In addition to Rodriguez and McDonald, the Eagles Baseball ST also boasts the talents of other Douglas standouts like 2022 outfielder/right-hander Brandon White (t-1,000); left-hander/outfielder Jacob Gomberg (No. 276, Florida commit) and Dillon Moquin (t-1,000) from the class of 2023, and catcher/left-hander Niko Benestad (No. 172) and middle-infielder Devin Fitz-Gerald (follow) out of the 2024 class, among others.
“Staying with the same group, staying with our boys, keeping that chemistry and keeping our bond tight” is very beneficial,” Rodriguez said. “And rolling into next year [after] this great summer together, it’s a lot of fun.”
Todd Fitz-Gerald firmly believes that when you have guys who have been playing together, learning from one another and accomplishing great things during their high school baseball experiences, it only makes sense to try to keep them together during the summer. He sees it as a bit of a win-win because these underclassmen represent the future of his program at Stoneman Douglas.
“And they’re getting coached by their high school coach. What more do you want?” he added. “They’re getting plenty of exposure, plenty of notoriety, plenty of everything – it’s really a no-brainer.”
There are, obviously, highly-touted players from other schools on board with this team as well, including No. 291-ranked 2022 Edian Espinal; No. 262 ’23 Paul Guerne (Duke); No. 392 ’23 catcher/infielder Javier Gorostola (FIU). There is also top-500 2023s Bradley Link (Richmond), Andrew Ildefonso, and Robbie Demetree, top-1,000 Joshua Ramos and high-follow Mel Rubiera (FIU), all from the Miami area.
Coach Fitz-Gerald emphasized that this is one team owned and operated by Scott Link and it is not an expansive organization. Link allowed Fitz-Gerald and his other coaches at Stoneman Douglas to put the team together while also bringing in several players of his own to round-out the roster.
“It’s really been a really good marriage,” Fitz-Gerald said. “We just have a good time with these kids because they’re all baseball players. Maybe not the greatest top-to-bottom but they get after it and they play hard and that’s all I ask.”
Rodriguez, the highly regarded junior-to-be, agreed with his coach: “We hold ourselves to pretty high standards. Obviously, we have a lot of fun and we win and we don’t [expect] anything less than that; that’s our goal, really...Each and every one of us wants to win. We help each other to win, our coaches put us in positions to win and we can’t really ask for any more than that.”
The Eagles Baseball Scout Team had been enjoying a fine summer even before arriving here in Southwest Florida, posting a 15-2-0 record at three events. That includes a 7-0-0 championship effort at the PG WWBA 16u National Qualifier June 18-21 up in Hoover, Ala.
And the PG BCS 16u isn’t the end of the road by any means. They’ll be at the PG WWBA 16u National Championship in Marietta, Ga., July 15-22 and at the PG 16u World Series in Sanford, Fla., July 24-28.
“I still think we’re a couple of bats light from being really explosive,” Fitz-Gerald said. “But man, on the mound we can be really good. We’re always going to have a chance with the guys we run out on the mound and that’s all you can ask for.”
Off to a 3-0-0 start after two days of pool-play with two more to follow, he went with the ’22 right-hander White and ’23 righty Bradley Link in Wednesday’s opener, and the ’23 righty Ildefonso and the ’23 lefty Guerne in Thursday’s first game, both wins.
In Thursday’s nightcap, an 8-3 win over the Colorado Yard Dawgs Dillinger, Fitz-Gerald went with ’23 lefties Gomberg, Cullen McConathy (t-1000) and Mel Rubiera and the right-hander Moquin.
The hottest bats are being swung by Demetree, Espinal, McDonald, Rodriguez, Moquin and Gorostola; Espinal and Gorostola each had five RBI through three games and McDonald had four. The Eagles outscored their first three pool-play opponents by a combined 27-9.
The approach the coaches take with their players changes slightly from the high school season to the travel ball season, Fitz-Gerald said. Travel ball is a little more loose because practice time is so limited and the challenge is doing as much as you can in the little time you have to work with them. The key, he said, is finding the right combination that clicks once the players are out on the field.
“At the end of the day they’re 16 years old, right, so you’ve always got to talk to them,” Fitz-Gerald continued. “You’ve just got to keep them focused and understand the prize. You’ve got to keep them mentally in the right frame of mind, you’ve got to really condition their bodies and you’ve just got to take care of them...You can’t take a play off in this game and expect to be successful.”
Travel ball is different from the high school season in another respect, as well. Travel ball teams are much more heavily scouted than a typical high school team if for no other reason than there’s a far greater representation of scouts and college recruiters at these hundred-team PG national tournaments than at a typical high school venue.
The Eagles Baseball Scout Team coaching staff – which is also the Stoneman Douglas staff – understands that player development and optimum exposure are at the roots of travel ball. They want to promote their players and they also want to win, because the deeper a run a team makes in the playoffs translates into more exposure and more opportunities for a prospect to produce.
That’s a fact not lost on these players either, so they’re out there trying to multi-task in a sense: “We know we have to do our individual jobs but in the end it’s a team sport,” McDonald said. “We’ve got to come together as a team and win as a team...I think we’re a really close group, I think we can turn it on when we need to and we can get the job done.”
Looking around at his teammates while they took some cuts in the 5-Plex’s batting cages on Thursday, McDonald liked what he saw. He feels at ease being around these guys, a feeling of contentment brought about by a sense of familiarity and a shared commitment:
“We all have the mentality to win. We’re all really close on and off the field and we just love the grind,” he said.
It was the same grind the players who were part of the Stoneman Douglas state and national championships embraced every step of the way: “It was surreal just with the chemistry we had; the way we played with each other,” Rodriguez said. “We played hard and we had such a great season. We had fun doing it but we took it seriously and we came out on top.”
Coach Fitz-Gerald could only smile looking back on what was the second Florida state championship he’s guided the Stoneman Douglas Eagles to during his 10-year tenure, with the first coming in 2016. He called this year’s group “the cardiac kids” in reference to the large number of come-from-behind wins it pulled out on the way to that glossy 28-2 record.
“I thought we were a pretty complete team: pitching, hitting and defense all the way around, so it was really a special year,” he concluded, “and the good thing is, we’re probably on pace to do it again [next] year.”
That can only mean one thing: Keep an eye out for the 17u version of the Eagles Baseball Scout Team in the summer of 2022.