St. Thomas Aquinas winds up third in baseball

Source: The Star

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PHOTOS BY Rich Sugg | The Kansas City Star

Brandon Huske (above) is congratulated by his SM West teammates after scoring in the Kansas 6A title game. SM West’s DJ Balazs (below) lunged for Lawrence’s Landon Mosley.

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Third-place games are notoriously difficult to play in for a myriad of reasons, not the least of which being that they typically follow games in which a team’s state championship dreams have just been crushed.

That was the situation that the St. Thomas Aquinas baseball team found itself in last weekend. However, the Saints showed some fight in an 11-3 victory over Kapaun-Mt. Carmel last Saturday in the third-place game of the Kansas 5A state tournament at Falley Field in Topeka.

After Aquinas dropped a 5-1 decision to eventual champion Topeka Seaman in the semifinals earlier in the day, the Saints trailed Kapaun-Mt. Carmel 3-0 entering the bottom of the fourth inning. But that’s when the Saints exploded, scoring three runs in each of the next two innings and five runs in the sixth to put the game out of reach.

Senior Kevin Sweeney got the win for Aquinas, which ended its season with a 17-6 record.

The win marked the second year in a row Aquinas placed third in 5A. The Saints also lost in the semifinals to Topeka Seaman last year, before beating Shawnee Heights 3-1 in the third-place game.

submitted by TEREZ A. PAYLOR - 2009-06-04 21:07:02