Samohi Baseball Counting on the Twins : Vikings Head Into CIF Playoffs With a Lot Riding on the Schwengels

If you were looking for good omens for the Santa Monica High School baseball team, you wouldn’t find them by glancing at the statistics compiled by its first-year coach, Eddie Frierson, when he was a relief pitcher-third baseman at UCLA.

“I was not a stellar player,” said Frierson, 27, a part-time coach at the school who earns his living as an actor. He said he gave up baseball when he was a UCLA senior in 1982 so that he could give more attention to his theater arts classes, many of which met on the same afternoons as baseball practice.

And if you were looking for good signs in the baseball beginnings of Frierson’s top junior pitchers, twin brothers Kris and Kurt Schwengel, you would have to search long and hard.

Although the Schwengels started playing baseball at age 6 on the beach, it was not a particularly auspicious beginning, Kurt said. “We started playing Little League when we were 9. Before that we only played on the beach. We were real good at catching fly balls, but we couldn’t field a ground ball.”

If Frierson (pronounced FRY-er-son) and the Schwengel twins share some unpromising days as players, they also share a vision--of their team playing for the 4-A CIF-Southern Section championship June 6 at Dodger Stadium.

The coach, his twin pitchers and the rest of the Santa Monica team can also see themselves winning at Dodger Stadium and bringing the school its second CIF championship. Santa Monica won its only CIF title in 1973.

Two weeks ago Santa Monica took a big step toward Chavez Ravine and the championship game. The Vikings edged Beverly Hills, 2-1, to clinch a tie for first place in the Ocean League.

Last week Santa Monica swept two games from Inglewood to win the league title and finished with a 13-2 league record, 20-5 overall. It was reportedly the first time in school history that one of its baseball teams won 20 games in the regular season.

In a first-round playoff game in 4-A CIF-Southern Section competition, Santa Monica will play host to Westlake at 3:15 p.m. Friday.

Santa Monica has strong reasons for thinking about a CIF championship. Frierson inherited some championship material, including seven starters and 12 lettermen from ex-coach Tony Diaz, who guided the Vikings to an 18-9-1 record and the second round of the playoffs last year.

Diaz, who was also a part-time coach, left Santa Monica last year because he wanted to teach economics full time, and the school didn’t have a position to offer him. He is now teaching at Oxnard High School and is also head baseball coach there.

Most of the Santa Monica players whom Diaz left behind are having strong years. Senior second baseman Kris DeKoff is batting .486, senior first baseman Peter McKellar .377, senior catcher Randy Bongard .366 and junior outfielder Nick Satriano .306.

McKellar leads the team in extra base hits with 5 home runs, 6 doubles and 4 triples and has batted in 19 runs. DeKoff is the top man in RBIs with 20 and has stolen 15 bases in 15 attempts. Bongard also has 19 RBIs, and Satriano leads the team in stolen bases with 22 in 24 attempts.

The Vikings are batting .338 and have stolen 88 bases in 96 atempts.

Senior pitcher David Masi threw a two-hitter in the 2-1 win over Beverly Hills, and his record is 8-1. Norman catcher Marc Bender homered off Masi in that pivotal game, but Bender’s towering drive failed to make a dent in Masi’s earned run average, of 1.71. DeKoff brought home the winning run in the game with a perfectly executed squeeze bunt.

If Masi is the ace of the pitching staff, the Schwengels are at least a pair of deuces.

Kurt, the varsity’s top relief pitcher the last two years, was 4-0 with a 1.22 ERA in 1986. This year he had a couple of bad outings early in the season and is 1-2 with a 3.05 ERA. But he has set a CIF record this year for saves in one season, nine, putting him ahead of Noah Rosen, who earned eight for Crossroads in 1984.

Kris was the top starter for the junior varsity last year and had a 6-2 record with an ERA, he said, of “1 or below.” This year he is 5-1 with a 2.48 ERA.

Diaz said he wanted Kris to play for the junior varsity last year to give him a lot of work to prepare him for the varsity this year. He said Kurt was brought up to the varsity last year because he needed a good relief pitcher.

Kris, six minutes older than Kurt, is 5-10 and 170 pounds. Kurt is 5-10 and 157. Diaz said Kris “is a littler quicker than Kurt in terms of his fastball and is physically stronger. Both have good fastballs and good high-school breaking pitches. Kris can get you out on his fastball. Kurt’s out pitch is his breaking ball.”

Diaz was a catcher and Tim Leary of the Dodgers was a pitcher for the Santa Monica High School team that won a Bay League championship in 1976, and both later played for the Santa Monica American Legion team (Post 123) that won a national championship in 1976. Diaz later played at Brigham Young.

He said that at Oxnard High he is trying to rebuild a program that hasn’t had much success of late. “When you’re up here going through the different phases of rebuilding and you read about the success of Santa Monica, it’s a little hard to swallow,” he said.

Diaz, who coached Santa Monica for three years, said the Schwengels and the other players he groomed were part of a five-year plan he had instituted for bolstering the team’s fortunes.

Asked about the team’s chances this year, he said, “Physically, they can do a lot of things.

He said that Oxnard and Santa Monica both played in a tournament this season in Mexicali, competing against two Mexican teams, and that Santa Monica won the tournament with ease. Kurt started one of the games and pitched a no-hitter.

“They (Santa Monica) are frightening,” he said. “Each guy in the one-through-nine (batting) spots can hit the ball as hard as anybody else. The guys who aren’t starting (for Frierson) definitely would start for me here.”

Frierson served as an assistant to Diaz last year with Jose Lopez, a former head coach who is assisting again this year. Frierson said he was sorry to see Diaz leave and that he stayed with the team “because I love it and I’m able to support myself as an actor.”

Santa Monica has lost only five games this year, including a defeat by Culver City that snapped a 15-game Viking winning streak and then a loss to Beverly Hills early last week before bouncing back to beat the Normans.

Frierson said his players “have a high expectancy of winning” and that when one of them makes an outstanding fielding play or hits the ball a mile, the others ask how he did it. He said the stock reply this year has been, “Because I’m that good.

“It’s not cockiness, but confidence. This team has enough confidence to win the CIF championship. In our minds, we’re No. 1.”

He said Esperanza and El Dorado are the teams that Santa Monica may have to beat to get there.

He said he and his players have “tunnel vision” about the June 6 game at Dodger Stadium.

Kurt Schwengel said Frierson is right about that. He said that last year, after getting off to a 1-4 start in the Bay League, the team was “just pushing to make the playoffs.”

The Vikings made the playoffs, losing in the second round, 8-4, to Simi Valley, which for much of the year had been ranked No. 1 in the nation. “Going into the seventh inning, we had them, 4-2, but we lost,” Kurt said.

“This year we’re pushing for June 6 all the way,” he said, and Kris added, “Nothing less.”