Eddie Kazak's Birthday

In case you missed this little tidbit in the news. Detroit Tigers to stay in Lakeland!, Oh Yeah, and today is that famous Tiger, Eddie Kazak's Birthday.

Twenty five players showed up including Sergio Ayala who played his first game with us this morning. Additionally we had two distinguished guests as JD Davis and Dick Sessink dropped by to lend their support.

Donnie Witmer managed the visitors today and they started strong. The team of Constantine, Witmer, Duff, Giordano, DeRidder, Coffman, Chrest, Marino, Mohan, Wells, Moots, Ayala, and Gibson batted nine batters in the first and scored their five runs rather quickly. Chris Constantine led off with a double to start the rally. Unfortunately that about covers the offensive highlights for the visitors as they only managed to get nine hits the remainder of the game. They scored a single run in the third and fourth innings while registering goose eggs the other six innings. Defensively, Donnie's vertical lay out grab of Bob Reagan's liner was the play of the day and robbed Bob of a sure triple as the ball was hit sharply in the gap.

Jeff Simon led the home team of Laffoon, Jacobs, Butler, Reagan, Zelazny, Lopez, Simon, Thompson, Merritt, Farisas(sic), and Baker to another victory. They started slow and were shut out in the first and thoughts of Tuesdays poor performance started creeping into everyone's mind. Fortunately the bats game alive after that and they managed to tally three or four runs in every inning except the fifth. Bob Reagan's homer and triples by Zelazny and Farissas (sic) were the big blows for the home team. Great defense up the middle by Reagan and Farissas (sic)resulted in three double plays that held the visitors in check throughout the game.

With Ron Thompson pitching, solid defense and good hitting top to bottom the Home team prevailed with a final score of Visitors 7 and Home team 21. There was another power outage today as there were only five extra base hits between both teams.

Key Performances

Chuck Duff     3 for 3

Larry Chrest    3 for 3

Jose Rivera         4 for 5

Frank Jacobs      3 for 4 with a double

Ron Butler           4 for 5

Bob Zelazny        5 for 5 with a triple

Ron Thompson    3 for 4

Angel Farissas     3 for 4 with a triple