PREP WEDNESDAY : In One Player’s Opinion, Witt Already Was a Star at Servite

Let me just say this: If someone had just told us, if someone had just taken the time to say, “Kids, this guy you’ll be hitting against today is Mike Witt. He will someday pitch a perfect game in the major leagues. He knows what he’s doing when he throws a curveball. He won’t hurt you,” everything would have been fine. Our front legs would have remained attached to our bodies.

But, as is many times the case in our society, the children were the last to know, and we were made to pay the price for our ignorance. We stepped up to the plate one-legged and terrified of a 6-foot-8 Gumby topped by a menacing Afro and throwing in what seemed to be the mid- to high-1,000s.

Likewise, it would have helped immensely if someone had just told us that the Servite High School team Witt pitched for in 1978 would come to be generally considered the best in Orange County and one of the best in Southern California history.

If someone had just said, “Every starting player on this Servite team will either get a college scholarship or pro contract,” we, the baseball team from Pius X High in Downey, would have been able to take our 34-0 defeat at Servite’s hands in stride.

But who knew? They were just a bunch of guys like us who showed up one spring day to play some baseball.

They did. I, a gutty Punch-and-Judy second baseman, remember it as 34-0; others from my team said it was 31-0, 32-0, 36-0, and one even said we scored in the game.

It’s difficult to nail down an exact score because high school yearbooks usually go to print before baseball season and therefore don’t have the year’s baseball results. I’m sure it wasn’t a big deal for Servite, and we were more than willing to forget (the next morning’s school announcements mercifully made no mention of the game).

Let’s just say we were beaten. Let’s just say that my one clear image of that game is watching a Servite player--having just slugged another ball past our outfielders--struggling to make it from second to third because his fit of laughter made it difficult for him to breathe.

I’d like to think he wasn’t laughing at us, but with us . . .

Servite went on to win the Southern Section large-school championship that season, a remarkable feat in any year given the quality of baseball talent in Southern California. But 1978 was something of a watershed year for talent in the area.

Tom Brunansky played at West Covina, and his current St. Louis Cardinal teammate, Terry Pendleton, was at Channel Islands. Kevin Romine, who played for the Boston Red Sox from 1985-88, was at Fountain Valley. Troy had John Christensen, who played for the New York Mets and Seattle Mariners. Fullerton won the 3-A championship in 1978 with Mike Warren, who pitched a no-hitter for the Oakland A’s in 1983.

In the Angelus League--which Pius X and Servite belonged to at the time--there were Witt and Steve Buechele (Texas Rangers) at Servite, Bobby Meacham (New York Yankees, Rangers) at Mater Dei and Mike Gallego (Oakland A’s) at St. Paul. In fact, St. Paul handed Servite two of its three losses that season.

Servite beat Romine’s Fountain Valley team, 4-1, in the first round of the playoffs. Servite beat Brunansky’s West Covina team, 4-3, in the second. Then came a 6-0 victory over Camarillo in the quarterfinals.

In the semifinals against Edgewood, Servite was trailing before Buechele hit a grand slam that traveled more than 400 feet into the football stands at Glover Stadium. Servite won, 7-3.

In the final against Arcadia, Witt pitched a three-hitter and Servite won, 6-1. It was the first, and remains the only, Southern Section baseball championship in school history.

“A team like that comes around once in a lifetime,” said Mike McNary, Servite’s current baseball coach. Matt McCann was coach of the 1978 team. “When we bring in freshmen, the first thing we point to is that team. Of course, you have to be careful, you don’t exactly want kids to try and live up to those guys. That was a dream team.”

Servite’s starting nine, including Witt, would either get college scholarships or pro contracts. Of those, four--center fielder Randy Day, catcher Mark Pirruccello, third baseman Stewart Stempniak and left fielder Tom Smith--played on college national championship teams. Pirruccello played on the 1979 Cal State Fullerton national championship team. Day played on a University of Texas 1983 champions that also had Spike Owen, Calvin Schiraldi and Roger Clemens. Stempniak and Smith played on a UC Riverside team that won a Division II national championship in 1982.

“We definitely had some guys,” said Day, now a coach at Cal State Northridge, who also played on a state community college championship team at Orange Coast College in 1980.

Servite players said the team’s greatest strength that year was a familiarity and friendship rarely found. The heart of that team basically had played together for three years--in high school and American Legion.

“I’ll be honest. I don’t have many close friends, but I consider every guy on that team a close friend,” Witt said. “It was like playing with your brothers.”

Stempniak, now a physical therapist in Anaheim, said: “It’s pretty unusual to have that much talent on one team, and have no big egos. We played cards together, we hung out together. We still do.”

Pius X baseball had its own special brand of togetherness. Our junior varsity team forfeited the last few games of the 1977 season when the players, together, ditched a game to go to the beach. You want to talk about close-knit?

But let me just say this about the Pius X varsity baseball team. We looked better than Servite.

I mean it. Our uniforms were much nicer.

Servite wore these polyester T-shirt things with FRIARS sewn across the chest. Yawn.

We had bright yellow, some would say gold, V-neck tunics with plush flaming red turtleneck dickies underneath. When we gathered as a team, we looked like the interior of a Las Vegas showroom.

You have to understand, appearances were all we had to go on back then. Servite was a county away. Coverage of high school sports back then was minimal at best.

We knew Witt as “the tall guy with the hair” and Buechele as “the surfer dude” from Servite’s Angelus League basketball champions that season.

Buechele, who had occasion to whisper not-so-sweet nothings in my ear during games, still is the school’s all-time leading scorer. Witt averaged 15 points and 14 rebounds a game, and was named the league’s player of the year.

Witt was a skinny 6-8, 185 pounds--”My greatest strength was that I could run”--and the sight of him filling the lane on a break, with arms, legs and hair flailing away, caused more than a few of us to think twice about taking the charge.

So there was much writhing and gnashing of teeth when Witt took the mound. As he uncoiled, it appeared that he was releasing the ball several feet from your nose. The hair only added to the illusion.

“I’ve seen pictures of myself with that hair and I wonder what I was thinking,” Witt said. “It made it pretty hard to keep a cap on.

“I looked like Bernie from ‘Room 222’ ”

So intimidating and awe-inspiring was Witt that our coach didn’t even try to fool us.

“Look, maybe you can’t hit him,” he said. “But you can at least be a man and stand in the box.”

That took more than a little courage. Witt was 14-0, with a 0.54 earned-run average as a senior and was named the 4-A’s player of the year.

What’s even more amazing is that he could post those numbers when every Pius X player got a hit off him.

No one claims to have socked anything, but there were a lot of mentions of half-swing flairs and seeing-eye grounders. Of course, you take all of that in as wishful thoughts, uttered by aging wanna-be athletes trying to regain and rewrite the past.

By the way, mine was a dribbler that went through Witt’s legs, hit second base, plopped up and died in shallow center field.

SERVITE ’78 Servite’s 1978 team, and where each starter played collegiate or major league baseball.

Ed Farrell (1B): Harvard Doug Meyers (2B): Nevada-Reno Steve Buechele (SS): Texas Rangers Stewart Stempniak (3B): UC Riverside Tom Smith (LF): UC Riverside Randy Day (CF): Texas Paul Mazzarella (RF): Notre Dame Mark Pirruccello (C): CS Fullerton Mike Witt (P): California Angels