| Lafitte is "Mr. Baseball" to Converse Wildcats' versatile player will sign with LSUS Pilots after shooting for Class B state championship. April 26, 2005 By Brian McCallum (4/26/2005) |
Lafitte is "Mr. Baseball" to Converse Wildcats' versatile player will sign with LSUS Pilots after shooting for Class B state championship. April 26, 2005 By Brian McCallum
bmccallum@gannett.com
Picture J.V. Lafitte lining up at defensive end, opening and closing his fist, fingers wrapped in white tape, staring at the quarterback with one hand down and waiting for the snap of the football. Standing 6-foot-2 at 240 pounds, his coach describes him as moving "like a cat."
Now forget it.
J.V. Lafitte doesn't play football. Has never played organized football, and there's no reason to think he ever will, even if he does look the part.
In Converse, where he is the top player for the Wildcats baseball team and has been for years, he is known to the children who follow the high school baseball team as "the pitcher" or "the baseball player."
And that's what he is.
"Just the mention of his name. He's baseball to the little guys around here," Converse head coach Chris Cangelose says. "Even the Little Leaguers, right now, they want to be J.V. Lafitte, throwing hard. I don't know how to explain it. I guess he was a Little League icon."
Today, Lafitte is Converse's best hope for a state championship. A senior with four all-state awards already, Lafitte has been baseball in the small town north of Zwolle for some time. His team made the Class B quarterfinals when he was a freshman and a junior, and this is his last chance to make the state tournament in Alexandria.
This season, he was batting .615 a week ago with 30 runs batted in and four homers.
There is nothing odd about that. Playing on the varsity since seventh grade, he has never hit under .350.
"He has really been one of my best players even in seventh grade. He had the leadership qualities then," Cangelose says. "He was hitting .422 (for his career) through his junior year, and I'm sure it'll go up quite a bit, because he's pushing .600 right now."
Lafitte got a uniform as a seventh grader and started at second base. He became the team's catcher as an eighth-grader, and that appears to be his best position, though he excels at many if not most of them. He is the team's No. 1 pitcher with a 1.13 ERA and 7-0 record.
He excels because, as Cangelose says, he "eats, sleeps and lives baseball."
"When I was a kid, we used to always go to the park to play on Sundays," Lafitte says. "I realized I was halfway good, so I worked at it."
Cangelose has been the team's coach for eight years, and Lafitte became his team manager as a fifth grader, even throwing batting practice from Little League distance.
"Things we were doing on a high school level, he was doing in fifth or sixth grade," Cangelose says. "Like double plays. I'd put him out there in the infield, and he was turning double plays. He was holding his own with high school guys."
Now, the fifth- and sixth-graders line up to see the senior who will likely sign a college scholarship to play for LSUS.
"It's really like that with the kids," Lafitte says. "It's nice that that's how everybody knows me. It doesn't make me nervous or anything; it just makes me feel good that people come out there to watch."
Recruiters have come to watch, too.
Cangelose says LSUS baseball coach Rocke Musgraves came to Converse to recruit his star as a pitcher throwing in the upper 80s and "touching the 90s," and he left not knowing where to play him.
He'll have the Class B baseball playoffs to make up his mind. Converse plays its first-round game on Thursday or Friday against a wild card team to be announced today.
Lafitte wants that to be the first of five postseason games. Last year ended after three in an ninth-inning loss to Choudrant.
"We've played well; we just haven't gotten the lucky breaks," he says. "We'll probably end up playing Choudrant again in the quarterfinals. It'll just be who gets the breaks."
Cangelose believes he and Converse High got the breaks by getting Lafitte. Though he lives just outside Mansfield, he goes to Converse because his mother teaches there. He got used to riding to school with her as a youngster because it was convenient, and he wouldn't go back now, even for the football he once wasn't really qualified to play.
"Ever since I started school until my freshman year, I was the runt of the class," Lafitte says. "Everybody was a head taller than me."
Now, he has the size for any sport, and so much more.
"He jokes around about transferring to Mansfield to play football. He's definitely big enough to play, and he's strong as an ox," Cangelose says. "He's got a 4.0 and is ranked number one in his class. He's just the all-American kid, got the prettiest girlfriend in school, drives a brand new truck, gets along with everyone. Everything's going for him. It's like he's perfect."
Lafitte and his Wildcats have three weeks to put the perfect finish on his high school career.
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