Varitek, Lake Brantley rally for baseball crown
Long before becoming a two-time World Series winner with the Boston Red Sox, Jason Varitek ended his high school baseball career with a walk-off hit in the Florida High School Athletic Association state finals.
Lake Brantley rallied from a four-run deficit in the seventh inning on this date in 1990 for a 10-9 win against Hillsborough County’s Brandon High at the old spring training home of the Kansas City Royals in Davenport.
The Patriots, who closed the season with a 30-4 record and ranked No. 1 nationally by USA Today, batted through the lineup in their last at-bat and scored the game’s final three runs while facing two outs.
“The only thing I can say is it seemed destined for [Lake Brantley] to win,” Brandon coach Robert Campbell told the Tampa Bay Times afterward.
Senior catcher Jerrey Thurston tied the score on a two-run double to left field. Varitek, who primarily played third base as a high school senior, singled through the middle of the AstroTurf infield to plate Terry Brown for the winning run.
“That stadium was going nuts,” recalls then-coach Mike Smith. “We had some superstars on that team. It was really quite a family.”
The win marked the area’s first baseball state championship since Boone won the large-class title in 1981. Lake Brantley fielded 14 seniors, five juniors and one sophomore during the 1990 season.
Thurston was drafted in the third round by the San Diego Padres later that summer. He spent 12 seasons in the minor leagues, five of which were at the Triple A level.
Brad Rigby, who went 13-0 as a junior pitcher during the state-championship season before playing at Georgia Tech, spent three seasons in the majors after being chosen in the second round of the 1994 draft by the Oakland Athletics.
Greg Thomas led the 1990 Patriots in batting average and later reached the Triple-A ranks with the Cleveland Indians as a third-round pick out of Vanderbilt in 1993.
Varitek continued to impress as a catcher at Georgia Tech and was selected No. 21 overall by the Minnesota Twins in 1993 and No. 14 by the Seattle Mariners in 1994. He debuted with the Red Sox three years later and helped the franchise earn World Series titles in 2004 and 2007.
“Those guys were always the leader of leaders,” says Smith, who coached Lake Brantley to two more state titles in 1997 and 2008. “We had some great teams at Brantley. We had six teams that went to the final four, but nobody ever filled those kids’ shoes. That 1990 team was an exceptional group.”