2016 Perfect Game High School Preview Index
The South Florida counties of Miami-Dade and Broward are bordered by the often wild and untamed but always intriguing Everglades National Park and Wildlife Management Area to the west and the often wild and untamed but always intriguing Atlantic Ocean to the east.
In between the wide open spaces offered by the Everglades and the vastness presented by the Atlantic, more than 4.5 million people are packed into big cities like Miami and Fort Lauderdale and dozens of smaller cities and towns that line up north-to-south along the coast in the two counties.
More than 100 public and private high schools call the mega-metropolitan area home and dozens, perhaps hundreds, of the country’s very best age-group baseball players walk their halls. When Perfect Game released its 2016 PG High School National Preseason Top 50 Rankings on Monday, six of those counties’ schools were ranked among the top 46:
No. 8 Archbishop McCarthy (Southwest Ranches), No. 10 Marjory Stoneman Douglas (Parkland) and No. 44 North Broward Prep (Pompano Beach) from Broward, and No. 12 Westminster Christian (Palmetto Bay), No. 20 Gulliver Prep (Pinecrest) and No. 46 Christopher Columbus (Miami) from Miami-Dade.
Westminster Christian, Archbishop McCarthy, Columbus and Gulliver Prep have combined to win 19 Florida High School Athletic Association (FHSAA) state championships, with Westminster winning 11 and McCarthy capturing five titles in the last six years; Columbus (Class 8A), McCarthy (5A) and Westminster (3A) won state championships in 2015.
Ninety-five prospects from the six schools have been selected in the MLB June Amateur Draft since 1972, according to baseball-reference.com, a number that includes 32 from Columbus High and 22 from Westminster Christian; the Seattle Mariners selected Westminster’s Alex Rodriguez with the No. 1 overall pick of the first-round in 1983. Fourteen of those players reached the big leagues.
“It’s a religion, it’s an obsession; we’re going 12 months down here,” McCarthy ninth-year head coach Rich Bielski told Perfect Game. “With the weather we have here, these boys are able to get out on the field and play the game they love 12 months out of the year. We have a very passionate fan-base of people who love baseball and we’re just very blessed with a lot of talented players because of that.
“I think we fit right in with the other top areas of the country, in the warm-weather states especially, that have all kinds of talented kids.”
The PG High School Florida Region is the only one of the 10 regions that include only one state; California shares the Pacific Region with Hawaii and Texas the Texahoma Region with Oklahoma. The Texahoma Region has 11 teams (nine from Texas, two from Oklahoma) in the PG HS Preseason Top 50 but the Florida Region is the second most highly represented with 10. The other ranked Florida schools are farther north: No. 11 Oviedo HS (Oviedo), No. 18 Mosley HS (Lynn Haven), No. 24 Venice HS (Venice) and No. 48 Windermere Prep (Windermere).
The South Florida programs are so good because they have so many talented players and coaches. McCarthy and Gulliver both have eight players – seniors right down to freshmen – sitting in PG’s top-500 in their respective class’s national prospect rankings, and that includes McCarthy junior first baseman Alejandro “Alex” Toral, the No. 1-ranked overall national prospect in the class of 2017.
Douglas, with head coach Todd Fitz-Gerald, returns two of the nation’s highest-ranked seniors with left-hander Jesus Luzardo (No. 37) and shortstop Colton Welker (No. 79), both of whom have signed with the University of Miami. That is not uncommon, either. According to PG’s records, at least 14 prospects from these six South Florida high schools have signed with/committed to the Hurricanes’ program in nearby Coral Gables and that total is likely to grow as more underclassmen make their college decisions.
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THIRTY-SEVEN-YEAR-OLD MANNY CRESPO JR. EMBODIES THE NOTION of what a prototypical South Florida ballplayer is all about. He was a 12th-round pick of the Atlanta Braves right out of Westminster Christian in the 1997 MLB June Amateur Draft but didn’t sign and headed to The U.
He enjoyed three great years in Coral Gables where he was part of the Hurricanes’ 1999 College World Series National Championship team, and was a 14th round pick of the Mariners in the 2000 MLB Amateur Draft. After four years in the minor leagues, he spent seven seasons as an assistant coach at Gulliver Prep and is starting his first season as head coach this spring.
Crespo Jr. compared the high school baseball culture in South Florida to the high school football culture in Texas. For many of the young men coming of age in the Lone Star State, the No. 1 priority is to grow up and be a football player and wrap yourself in an environment when an entire community turns out to cheer your actions every Friday night.
“In Florida, it’s kind of that way with baseball; that’s what we do,” Crespo Jr. said. “The weather here in Florida is really nice and that allows us to play the sport longer than most other places, and you grow up around it and hearing about a lot of great programs.”
The program he takes over at Gulliver is one of Florida’s best. Thirteen Gulliver grads have been drafted since 1991 and two – right-hander Christian Garcia (2004, Yankees) and third baseman Chris Dominguez (2005, Rangers) – made it to the major leagues.
This spring’s Raiders team features top seniors in catcher Pedro Pages (No. 199, Florida Atlantic) and shortstop Jake Valdes (No. 259, Florida International), top juniors in right-hander Robert Touron (No. 62, Miami) and third baseman Raymond Gil (No. 94, Miami), and top sophomore first baseman Chase Sanguinetti (No. 52, Florida State). The list is long and deep.
“People don’t understand how big of a deal baseball is just in general to the people who live here,” Crespo Jr. said. “There’s a big following, a big fan-base that loves the game, especially in Miami with a lot of Hispanics and Latinos here. And people from the Caribbean, too – that’s just the game they play.
“It’s something that’s in our blood, and even for the people like myself that were born in the United States, you kind of have that heritage and that tradition, and you want to follow in those footsteps.”
There is no argument from anyone that the strong Latino, Hispanic and Caribbean communities in South Florida enrich the baseball culture at the youth and high school levels. “The Latin community here is very supportive of baseball,” McCarthy’s Bielski echoed. “The community definitely embraces baseball here in South Florida and there’s no doubt that it’s the top sport here.”
The current players’ surnames certainly speak to that heritage. Bielski’s top seniors include shortstop Kobe Lopez (N. 436, Alabama State) and outfielder Alex Carballo (t-500, Broward CC). The first baseman Toral, third baseman Joseph Perez (No. 66, South Florida) and second baseman Ubaldo Lopez (No. 204, uncommitted) rank among his top juniors. Of course, it would be unwise to underestimate the contributions of junior right-hander Daniel Federman (No. 192, Miami).
Top seniors Gregory Veliz (No. 101, Miami) – a transfer from Key West HS – Evan McKendry (No. 214, Miami) and Anthony Masiello (t-500, Miami) lead head coach Brian Campbell’s North Broward Prep team; seniors Hernen Sardinas (t-500, uncommitted) and Andres Arguellas (t-600, Florida International) and junior Gabriel Rivera (No. 297, Miami) lead Columbus and head coach Joe Weber.
Westminster and head coach Emil Castellanos’s top seniors are outfielder Alvaro Valdez (No. 452, Hillsborough CC) and Jake Zarrello (t-500, North Florida), and sophomore shortstop Cory Acton (No. 69, Florida) is among the best in the region.
“With these kids, you have grandfathers that love the game and fathers that love the game, and when they were growing up ballplayers who their heroes were,” Crespo Jr. said. “It’s something that I think the newer generation might be lacking a little bit – the foundation of where the game came from – but at the same time their passion for the game hasn’t really diminished.”
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THERE ARE VERY FEW PEOPLE WHO HAVE A BETTER FEEL FOR THE HIGH SCHOOL BASEBALL landscape in Miami-Dade and Broward counties than Richie Palmer, an associate scout for the Seattle Mariners who has served as the president and a head coach at Pembroke Pines-based Elite Squad Baseball, which he founded in 2009.
A quick and very look at the top-500 prospects on the rosters of these six South Florida high school indicated that at least 20 of them have played for or will be playing for Elite Squad teams during the summer and fall, including Douglas’ Luzardo and Welker, McCarthy’s Toral and Perez and North Broward’s Veliz.
Ten Elite Squad teams have won or shared Perfect Game tournament championships at just about every age-group since 2009, including four last season. And Palmer doesn’t have to look beyond his backyard to find the championship-level talent he puts on his rosters.
“First and foremost, you have to give credit to the high school coaches for (the players’) development,” he said. “For us as an organization, we’ve always felt like we’re borrowing these guys for the summer but they practice nine months out of the year for (their high school coaches) so they play a big part in their development.”
Over the past several years, Palmer’s Elite Squad organization has started to become more involved with the younger age groups and he’s noticed that quite a few high school coaches are also donating their time to work with the youngsters.
“It all goes hand-in-hand; it isn’t any one specific reason,” Palmer said. “But just in general, the coaching from the high school level on down is getting better in South Florida, and even though we’ve always been a talent-rich area, the kids are starting to get better at a younger age.”
Bielski employs the services of former Florida Marlins pitcher Alex Fernandez and former Montreal Expo Nelson Santovenia as assistant coaches at Archbishop McCarthy. He pointed out there are a lot of current major league players who are either from Miami-Dade or Broward counties or who now come to the area to work-out during the offseason.
He said it’s not unusual to visit several of the top schools during a preseason practice session and see a couple of big-leaguers in attendance, getting some work in before they report for spring training. The high-schoolers see that and soak it all in.
“I feel like the high school coaches here in this area are very good,” Bielski said. “Some schools have, like I do, some very good former professionals on their staff, whether they were big-leaguers or minor-leaguers.”
Crespo Jr. agrees that a lot of the same programs will who up time and again in each of the different national rankings because they’ve developed a consistency to the way they approach the everyday aspects of the game. “You can tell that these teams get prepared very well during practice, and that goes to the credit of the coaches down here,” he said. “They take practice very seriously and that’s where the work gets done; it’s not all just talent.”
Perhaps it’s fair to say it’s a combination of the talent, the coaching and the culture. Palmer pointed out that even though his surname might not indicate it, both of his parents are Cuban. His father grew up loving the game of baseball and put a ball in Richie’s hand at very young age; the youngster fell in love with it immediately. Palmer is convinced that many other young boys coming of age in the Latin or Caribbean cultures experienced the same thing and the game is, quite naturally, in their blood.
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ANYONE WHO HAS SPENT ANY AMOUNT OF TIME IN SOUTH FLORIDA, let alone lived there, knows that the extracurricular options for high school kids are boundless. The tropical climate makes a trip to the beach tempting on just about any day of the year – an occasional thunderstorm or hurricane be damned – and a lot of young men who might have been captivated by baseball in grade-school and middle-school might find something else to do as they get older.
But for the young men at these six Miami-Dade and Broward high schools the lure of the game keeps them coming back, which is especially true for the kids who are identified early as potential prospects. The Elite Squad’s Palmer noted that he and his staff can usually identify the contenders by the time a kid is 15 or 16 years old, and the kids usually knows it himself by then.
The top guys at Archbishop McCarthy, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Westminster Christian, Gulliver Prep, North Broward Prep and Christopher Columbus have climbed the ladder. They’ve soaked up the baseball culture in South Florida, embraced it and are now eager to show exactly what they have.
“Every year, you can guarantee there are going to be good players,” Palmer said. “It’s pretty consistent that every year you can bet there some very good teams down here and there’s a lot of them (from the Miami area) in every division that have a chance to go out and win a state title. It’s really a lot of fun.”
Archbishop McCarthy was named the Perfect Game High School National Champion in 2011, the first year PG did national high school rankings. A year later, American Heritage High School in the Broward County city of Plantation won the PG HS National Championship. Schools from California (Harvard-Westlake), Louisiana (Barbe) and Georgia (Parkview) have finished atop the rankings the last three years. Could South Florida find its footing again in 2016.
“Every year at this time it’s a wonderful thing and you’re hoping the best for your team,” Crespo Jr. said. “This year we’ve got a great group of kids that aren’t only great players but a very nice bunch of young men. I know that they’re talented enough to get the job done but it’s that team chemistry at the end of the day that gets you over the hump.
“It’s the same way I explain it to my team: ‘Talent wins games but teams win championships,’ and these coaches down here are creating teams, they’re creating a culture that when you get in there you know what you’re getting into.”