Prep Baseball Playoffs : Southern Section 4-A : Mater Dei Rips Los Alamitos, 10-2

The Mater Dei High School baseball team didn’t need anybody’s lucky shirt, and it probably didn’t even need the presence of illustrious alumni such as New York Yankee shortstop Bobby Meacham, to win the first round of the Southern Section 4-A playoffs Friday.

When you’re as good as Mater Dei (23-1), luck becomes almost expendable. All the Monarchs really needed Friday were their excellent infield gloves and the pitching of John Hulshof to rout Los Alamitos, 10-2.

Of course, 13 hits, including two homers by Mike Kelly, were extremely helpful to the cause. But Los Alamitos (17-10), with a .360 team batting average of its own, was also certainly capable of playing the hit parade against ordinary pitching.

But in Hulshof’s six innings, his outfield might as well have been sleeping off the effects of last night’s prom, since only four balls required their attention. Two were easy fly outs, one was a single by Brooks Peters and the last was Gary Renko’s two-run homer in the sixth. By then, it was all over, anyway.

Despite opening the second inning by being literally knocked off the mound when a shot from Renko’s bat struck him in the shin, Hulshof persevered to earn his 13th win in 14 starts, allowing six hits, striking out four and walking one.

So it turned out that Monarch Coach Bob Ickes need not have worried about his friend Mike Gibson, the Los Alamitos coach, knowing all his signs and even knowing whether one of the Monarch players cleans him room.

Gibson has been one of Mater Dei’s most faithful fans prior to this week. His son, junior outfielder Jeff Gibson, is on the Monarch varsity. Talk about a conflict of interest. So when Mike Gibson’s lucky jersey disappeared Thursday, the Los Alamitos coach had some idea of where to start looking.

He discovered the mandatory item of clothing hidden in his son’s sock drawer at 3 a.m. Friday, and thereby foiled a Monarch scheme to hang it in the Mater Dei dugout at the game. The question is: what were the Gibsons doing up at such an hour?

“Jeff was at the prom, and I couldn’t get too much sleep anyway,” Gibson admitted. In fact, it is no wonder he had a bit of pregame insomnia. The Griffins hadn’t been to the playoffs since 1979. So this year they managed a third-place finish in the Empire League--only to draw an opponent that USA Today has ranked No. in the nation, a team with hardly a flaw.

“My Dad will probably make me move out if we win,” Jeff Gibson said.

The Monarchs got their first run off losing pitcher Randy Hacker (3-5) in the second inning when Ted Flores singled and scored on Kevin O’Connor’s double. The score became 3-0 in the third as Griffin third baseman Travis Tarchione made a wild throw on a possible double play with nobody out, leaving Tony Gardea and Anthony Follico on base. Rich Albert drove in Gardea with a sacrifice, and Follico came home on John Dworzak’s single.

Bobby DeJardin scored on Gardea’s single to make the Monarch lead to 4-0 in the fourth, and a Griffin comeback became improbable after Hulshof lured Robbie Katzaroff to hit into an inning-ending double play in the top of the fifth. The Monarchs scored five runs in the fifth and the last in the sixth.

Katzaroff, however, provided a source of pride for Los Alamitos. He had two infield singles, and the second was his 51st hit of the season, breaking the county record set in 1980 by Lenny Dykstra, formerly of Garden Grove and currently of the New York Mets, for hits in one season. It also was the 27th consecutive game in which Katzaroff has hit safely.