West Toronto baseball team falls short at CNE tournament.
The 54th annual Lions - CNE PeeWee Baseball Tournament featured the Brampton Royals and the West Toronto Wildcats in the final. Here, Wildcats starting pitcher Gabriel Nakonechny delivers a pitch. The Royals went on to win the game 12-7 and capture the tournament title.
Photo/GRAHAM PAINE
It's been an eventful couple of weeks and a remarkable season for the West Toronto Wildcats triple-A peewee baseball team.
The team made a very good case for itself, but a championship win just wasn't in the cards Thursday night, Sept. 2, at the annual Lions-CNE peewee tournament.
The Wildcats lost in the final to the reigning provincial champions, Brampton Royals, 12-7 after a game-changing second inning rain delay.
"We had two outs when they called the delay," said head coach, Rafique Choudhury, noting his side gave up seven straight runs after the stoppage. "It was some timely hitting by them and a couple of errors by us."
The local side was looking at being the first Toronto team in nine years to win the prestigious rep crown.
It's okay, though, because the Wildcats, based out of the Parkdale-High Park area, had already won the Tier 1 city championship Sunday (Aug. 29) - knocking off Toronto Baseball Association rival North York Blues 6-5 in a series that went the distance at 3-2 - qualifying them for the provincial championships in Oakville this past weekend.
The Wildcats, made of the top 13- and 14-year-old players from York, High Park and Toronto Playground baseball organizations, were ousted from the prestigious provincial championship tournament with a 1-2 record.
"In the Ontario's, we seemed to run out of gas," said Choudhury. "We went 1-2, losing to Kitchener then beating Guelph, then having our second loss to Mississauga North.
"It was a long two weeks with the City championships and the run at the CNE. So all in all a very, very good season for West Toronto."
Brampton went on to win the provincial championship, to add to their Lions-CNE title.
"Our M.O. this year has been we're the comeback kids," said Choudhury. "We let teams get a few runs up on us and we usually comeback."
Dennis Banning's pitching was spectacular throughout the CNE tournament, earning him top pitcher honours while Julian Nofli was recognized as runner-up MVP and Michael Iannuzziello won the '100 per cent Award'.
The team closed the books on the season with an impressive 35-16 record in tournament and league play this season.