Prince George Citizen

St. Thomas still undefeated
by Scott Stanfield Special to The Citizen

Frank Cox showed why he was voted top pitcher at the 2005 Canadian senior men’s fastpitch championships.

Wednesday evening at a packed Spruce City Stadium, the hard-throwing ace for the defending national champion St. Thomas Evergreen Centennials fanned 10 batters and allowed five hits in a 3-0 win over the Prince George Black Bears, host of the 2006 nationals.

It was the sixth straight win for the Ontario side — which pounded Saskatoon 9-0 Wednesday morning (see story below) — and fourth win for Cox, who has 30 strikeouts heading into this afternoon’s meeting with Charlottetown.

“That’s the national team that we played, basically,” Bears manager Nino Fabbro said. “All the starting lineup was basically national team members.”

Victoria pitcher Collin McKenzie took the loss for the Bears, who dropped to 4-2 in the preliminary round. McKenzie allowed six hits and finished the evening with three strikeouts.

Bears catcher Chad Ghostkeeper, who has been hot with the bat the entire tournament, went three-for-three at the plate.

“Frankie, he’s tough,” said Ghostkeeper, who has hit five home runs in six round robin games. “He doesn’t give ya’ much. You’ve got to try and get what you can get off him, as you could tell he got a lot of strikeouts tonight. He’s supposed to be one of Canada’s best.

“The way I see it is that we didn’t make the adjustments. We knew he’s a drop-ball pitcher. We have to make adjustments. We’re used to seeing riseball pitchers, dropball pitchers, but this one is just a lot of drops. He’s just a smart pitcher, and as hitters you’ve got to make adjustments.”

St. Thomas opened the scoring in the second inning on a line drive up the third base line by catcher Sean O’Brien, who drove in Steve Mullaley. The left fielder had reached first base after being hit by a McKenzie pitch and had then stolen second to set up the first run of the game.

In the bottom of the fifth, Cents’ third baseman Craig Crawford led with a triple after smacking one off the right field fence. He then reached home plate on Ryan Wolfe’s RBI single.

The Cents made it 3-0 after six when Dale Levey hit a solo home run over the right field fence. Mullaley and Crawford each finished with two hits.

Despite his team’s lack of scoring, Bears manager Nino Fabbro was still able to find some positives out of Wednesday’s loss, Ghostkeeper being one of them.

“He’s a tremendous ballplayer and he comes to play every game,” Fabbro said. “You can’t say enough about that kid. He’s a tremendous leader and a great ball player, great person, family man and everything. He goes up there (to the plate) with a purpose, and that’s his only purpose.

“There were a lot of positive things that I saw, the attitude of the team. I think the team is coming together, and that was important. It’s going to be important to win this thing.”

Fabbro said Korrey Gareau will take to the mound for the Bears final round-robin game today at 1 p.m. against the Jarvis Merchants of Ontario. St. Thomas and Charlottetown square off at 3 p.m.

Although Prince George is already through to the top half of this weekend’s playoff round, the local side isn’t about to roll over and take the day off today.

“We still need a win (today), we want to go out on a good note, so hopefully we’ll bounce back tomorrow and be ready to play again,” Ghostkeeper said.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 31st, 2006 at 11:58 am and is filed under Canada, Tournaments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.