Hialeah Falls In Sunshine Classic Championship

Spring brings about more than good weather and a week off of school.

It also hosts one of the most vaunted tournaments in high school baseball, the Hall of Fame Classics.

In the final installment of this tournament series, it came down to a tense seventh inning that ultimately saw Charlotte Christian winning 2-1 over the Hialeah Thoroughbreds, who battled it out Thursday in the championship at Pompano Beach’s Four Fields Stadium.

The HOF is a series of tournaments, with some of the best teams in the country competing to test their might against America’s best amateurs.

One of the more known tournaments in the HOF, and the last to have finished, is the Sunshine Classics, which was bulked up with some of South Florida’s heavier competition. The Sunshine Classic is a three-day tournament with 14 teams going head to head to take home a HOF trophy alongside national recognition of their level of game.

The tournaments are owned by the lauded high school coach Rich Hofman, who has won more than 1,000 high school baseball games as a coach and several awards for his coaching abilities, and has coached MLB All-Star Alex Rodriguez.

Hofman created the series to better expose the talent in high school teams and to also help parents and their kids reach the next level of baseball. Thursday’s Sunshine Classic championship game did not disappoint the standards of the tournaments and showcased top tier teams at their best.

But, in the end, it was the Charlotte Knights who grasped the victory from the Thoroughbreds (2-1) after a tough seventh inning.

“You never want to lose game, but I can’t hang my head or my players head down,” Manager Johnathan Hernandez said after the game. “We battled all the way through. I’m extremely proud of the way that my team battled throughout the whole game. I mean, it was a 2-1 game.”

The game was close, but most of the action was in the first three innings, where both teams scored early.

The grueling effort from both pitchers made sure that the game would not budge from its score for the remaining innings and induced escalating pressure from both teams to produce more runs. But the bats stayed quiet and the mound stayed hot.

Hialeah pitcher Nestor Cortes put in a great performance on the mound. The left-handed senior pitcher has come a long way from playing outfield to becoming the Thoroughbreds ace in the hole.

“Nestor pitched a phenomenal game with 14 strikeouts,” said Hernandez. “Win or lose in any type of game, those are still impressive numbers.”

Hernandez saw the potential that Cortes wielded when the lefty first came into the school as an outfielder. The Hialeah manager made a good call when he decided to move Cortes to become a pitcher.

The Thoroughbreds’ ace has definitely developed his arm since then, having a few choices in his pitching arsenal and a mean breaking ball that caught batters off guard and more than one striking out looking. His skills were duly noted by the tournament officials, including Hofman himself, and was given the best pitching award in the game.

But, despite Cortes’ pitching efforts throughout the game, the Knights early lead was the consummation of the game. Albeit they were behind in the first two innings, it was their activity in the third inning that brought in their only two runs.

“I’m real proud on how our team competed,” Manager Greg Simmons said about his Knights. “Even though in the first inning the wheels began to wobble a little bit, but we were expecting that. We knew that they would come out fast. After that we settled in, and when our pitcher came in, I told him look take a deep breath and get back to where your at. That kept him on balance.”

Simmons team stayed tight in the trenches, coming back from their deficit and having their starting pitcher, Xander Gum, hold down Hialeah’s offense for the game. Charlotte’s biggest aid to controlling this win was their well-knit defense that pulled some impressive plays and were error free.
The third inning that defined the game for Charlotte would have become more inimical for the Thoroughbreds too, if Charlotte’s runners didn’t get caught up in the same play and both get tagged out. The tag outs originally were suppose to be an RBI single off the bat of Garrett Bradbury, but when the infield managed to get runner Matt Simmons in a rundown for an out, and then throw to first to put out Bradbury, who was rounding first and then decided to dive back, the inning was cut short for the Knights.

Hialeah also missed out on their opportunity to tie or win the game in the sixth and seventh inning.

Although their tenacity and loud dugout never died down, the sixth inning proved to be disastrous for the Thoroughbreds. Again, it was a miscommunication with runners that made Hialeah’s coveted runs vanish before they could occur. Hialeah had Kevin Betancourt on third and succeeded in a steal on second, but it backfired when the runner stepped off the base for a moment and was tagged out.

Ultimately, these two teams showcased a game that could not be seen in a lesser level of competition. This will be Charlotte’s second title that they are taking home and will defend their title again next year.

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