Prep Wednesday : Kennedy High’s Franco Lives to Hit : He Packs His Bat to Class and Back Home for the Night

Kennedy High School’s Ernie Franco doesn’t mind sitting on the bench for most of seven innings, getting only three or four at-bats as the designated hitter. It means he gets to hit.

He doesn’t mind catching seven innings either, because he knows he gets to hit too.

He likes going to practice; he knows he gets to work on his hitting.

After practice, as all the other bats are put in a sack and locked away for the night, Franco’s goes home with him . . . so he can hit at the batting cages.

As long as Ernie Franco gets to take his swings, he’s happy.

“He stays out there for as long as he can and takes batting practice,” said his coach, Chris Pascal. “He loves to swing the bat. Sometimes I’ll be coaching third, and I’ll hear someone mumbling in the dugout. It will be Ernie, talking to himself about hitting.”

While most other students tote a book bag to class each morning, Franco has a bag with his bat in it too.

“It’s my strong point,” Franco said about hitting. “Whenever I have time, I’m always hitting. I like having my bat with me. It’s like part of me.”

Franco is hitting .368 with five home runs and 30 runs batted in. He’s hitting .433 in Garden Grove League games for first-place Kennedy (18-4 overall and 9-1 in league play) with four regular-season games remaining.

As strong as his numbers are, they are still short of the goals he set for himself and wrote inside the bill of his cap at the start of the season. Franco wants to hit .400 with 10 home runs and 40 RBIs.

“I may fall a little short of my goals,” said Franco, a senior. “But as long as the team does well, then it will be OK.”

Franco’s 30 RBIs this season give him a Kennedy career record of 57. His five home runs leave him one short of the school’s single-season record of six set by Alan Bannister in 1969.

But is he satisfied?

“He comes to me the other day and asks me what he’s doing wrong,” Pascal said. “He puts that kind of pressure on himself. He is really pressing, maybe too much, to do well at the plate every time.”

Franco, a left-handed hitter who is 6-feet-2 and 225 pounds, played mostly as the designated hitter as a sophomore, his first season on the varsity. He hit only about .200 that first season.

The summer before his junior season, he injured his left knee in a summer-league baseball game and was bothered by the injury throughout football season. He was a lineman.

The sore knee forced him into the role of the designated hitter at the start of his junior season.

Two weeks into the season, he got mononucleosis and missed three weeks. When he came back, he was limited to playing only as the designated hitter because he was still weak from the illness.

Franco excelled, hitting .400 in league games and .340 overall. He was voted the Garden Grove League’s first-team designated hitter.

Franco started as a lineman in all of Kennedy’s football games last fall and has remained injury free this season in baseball. He started the season as the designated hitter, but when catcher Scott Wood injured his knee in practice three weeks ago, Franco became the starting catcher.

“He works very hard on his defense too,” Pascal said. “He’s out there practicing on blocking pitches in the dirt. I demand a lot out of my catcher. They have to call all the pitches. Catching takes something away from a player’s hitting because it takes so much concentration, but Ernie has been able to adjust pretty well.”

Because he knows it means he will get a chance to hit.