Pony League Success May Start Trend for Hart High

If inheriting Pony League World Series champions is a formula for success, Hart High may soon be a force to reckon with in baseball.

Four of the five players who were instrumental in leading the William S. Hart Pony League All-Star team to the world championship this week in Washington, Pa., will enroll at Hart High this fall. Overall, 8 of the team’s 15 players will go to Hart.

The last California high school to inherit Pony League champions was Simi Valley, which took players from the 1983 Santa Susana team. Shaun Murphy, Dave Milstien, Scott Sharts, Von Herron and Todd Sullivan last year helped make Simi Valley one of the area’s top high school baseball teams.

Will Hart do the same with Jason Malone, Lance Migita, Darin Tsukashima and Chris Vasquez? Dan Tsukashima, an assistant coach with the Hart Pony League team, wouldn’t be surprised.

“I think that’s a good possibility,” Tsukashima said. “However, one of the key players not going to Hart is Robbie Davis.”

Davis, a pitcher who will attend Saugus, is one of five players that Tsukashima said “made this team jell.”

“You go back to any of the write-ups on this team in the newspapers and it’s those five players that keep coming up.”

But four other Hart Pony Leaguers--Jay Sanford, Chad Miyata, David Loberg and Walter White--are also expected to help the Hart High team, even if they didn’t grab the headlines that Malone, Darin Tsukashima, Migita and Vasquez did this summer.

Malone, a catcher and pitcher, and Darin Tsukashima, a third baseman, were starters on the Hart High team as freshmen.

Former Hart High Coach Frank Sanchez expects the Pony League infusion to do wonders for the high school team. Sanchez, who recently resigned to become an assistant coach at USC, thinks Hart could be a powerhouse very soon.

“I think it’s going to be next year,” said Sanchez, whose Hart team defeated Simi Valley, 8-2, in a nonleague game last season. “In the last five years, we’ve won four championships and been to Dodger Stadium once. It’s traditionally a great baseball school.

“We started five sophomores last year. Those guys are returning and with the young guys coming in, it will be an exciting challenge. This is just a further indication how valuable a good youth system is. Kids come up with good skills and good attitudes.”

Sanchez’s successor at Hart has yet to be named. The leading candidates, reportedly, are Glendale coach Bud Murray and Sylmar’s John Klitsner.

Dan Tsukashima, who has been an assistant with the Hart organization since 1980, remembers seeing the Santa Susana team while he was coaching the Hart Bronco League team.

“I’ve known those guys very well, guys like Murphy and Sullivan,” Dan Tsukashima said. “I watched those guys come through the Pony League. They beat the heck out of us. They just ripped through our Pony League team.”

History is on the Hart Pony League team’s side. In 1980, as 7- and 8-year-olds, they won a district tournament in the Pinto League. In 1982, the Hart team won the Mustang League World Series. In 1984, it won the Bronco World Series.