Colts all-star really shines
Slugger aids lupus cause while earning honors
Calhoun High School senior Jake Thomas led the Nassau County all-star team to a 12-8 victory over Suffolk County in the seventh annual Grand Slam Challenge last Friday at Farmingdale State College.
The game featured the top high school seniors from around Long Island, and it was sponsored by the Ryan T. Caulfield Foundation, a nonprofit organization that raises money for medical research on the autoimmune disease lupus.
After Ryan Sliwak of Wantagh led off the bottom of the first inning with a triple, Thomas, 17, drove in the first run of the game on a fielder’s choice. Thomas, a left-hitting catcher, showed off his fast hands and feet in the fifth inning when he turned on a high, inside fastball, hit it to the wall in right-center and motored into third with a stand-up triple. He added a stolen base in the eighth inning. Thomas breaks the mold of the traditional catcher with his base-running ability: In his career at Calhoun he was 29 for 30 in stolen base attempts.
This spring, Thomas led the Colts to a one-loss regular-season record before they were swept in the playoff semifinals by Carey, the eventual Long Island champions. Thomas was second in the county with seven home runs. He has received a scholarship to play baseball at Binghamton University, where he will begin studying management in the fall.
Thomas was named Most Outstanding Catcher and Most Valuable Player for Nassau County at the postgame ceremony at the Grand Slam Challenge. The win was only the second for Nassau in the game’s seven-year history. “It’s nice to get one back and get our reputation back up in Nassau,” Thomas said after the game.
It seemed appropriate that a catcher should be the MVP of the game, since the RTC Foundation was set up in honor of Ryan Caulfield, a former catcher for Bethpage High School. Caulfield won the 1994 Diamond Award, which is given to the best all-around player in the county. He still holds the Nassau County record for RBIs in a season with 58. Caulfield died in February 2000, at age 23, after a five-year battle with lupus.
