Mistakes Mar Hart Title Effort : Normally Reliable Toledo Commits 3 Errors at Third Base

Hart High third baseman Dave Toledo removed the dusty cap from his head and stashed it in his duffel bag, never really noticing that the bill was covered in the reddish dirt that lines the warning track and areas fronting the dugouts at Dodger Stadium.

Once upon a time the dirt, which actually comes from crushed brick, also was used on the basepaths. It was removed several years ago, however, because it tended to make major league ground balls carom around like a golf ball on asphalt.

And like wet clay, the dirt sticks to nearly everything, which is more than could be said about the ball and the gloves Hart players wore.

In Saturday’s game against Cerritos, in fact, the normally sure-handed senior and his teammates fielded like a collective brick wall in a 4-1 loss in the Southern Section 4-A Division final.

“One after another, (the mistakes) got into my head,” Toledo said, tapping an index finger to his temple. “After a while, I thought, ‘Hell, don’t even hit me the ball any more.’ ”

In a fateful fourth inning, it seemed like the ground balls never stopped coming his way.

Toledo, who committed only five errors in Hart’s previous 29 games, twice kicked the ball in the fourth, leading to a pair of unearned runs against junior left-hander Andrew Lorraine (9-5).

After three scoreless innings, Cerritos’ Steve Hayes opened the fourth with a bloop double to left. Toledo and Hart shortstop Robby Davis tracked the fly ball near the foul line, but it was jarred from Davis’ glove when the two became entangled trying to make the grab.

“I was calling, but we couldn’t hear anything,” Toledo said. “He had it in his glove, but it snow-coned and fell out.”

Snow-coned, for the uninitiated, means only about half of the ball was in the glove’s webbing. Immediately thereafter, Hart went into a deep, deep, defensive freeze.

With two out, Tony Cuoto drilled a ground ball at Toledo. The ball ricocheted off the third baseman’s chest, and, in his haste to nail Cuoto at first, he chucked the ball near the photographers’ well for an error. Hayes scored to give Cerritos a 1-0 lead and Cuoto moved to second on the overthrow.

Doug Nelson followed with a similar shot at Toledo, who fielded the chopper cleanly but threw a torpedo in the dirt past Ray Gardocki at first. Hayes waltzed in from second to give Cerritos a 2-0 lead.

Toledo booted another ground ball in the sixth, just before Lorraine gave Hart its fourth error of the game on an errant pickoff throw to first.

Lorraine said that he felt sorrow, not anger, for Toledo, who spent several minutes after the game standing alone at the far end of the Hart locker room.

“He’s saved me a hundred times,” Lorraine said. “I can’t narrow it down to things like that. It was a lot of things. We had no luck at all today, and one little thing just seemed to keep turning into a big inning.”

In the fifth, Cerritos scored two earned runs off Lorraine to take a 4-0 lead. With a modicum of execution, however, only one run might have crossed the plate. With runners on first and second with one out and one run in, Mark Mattingly sent a made-to-order, double-play ground ball to Davis.

Davis failed to glove the ball cleanly, however, and Hart settled for a force at second. One pitch later, Curt Knabe stole home to give Cerritos (27-7) a 4-0 lead.

“It was like our defense was trying to do way too many things,” Toledo said of the Indians, who after 5 1/2 innings had as many errors (four) as base hits. “Too many things--instead of doing things right.”

Toledo tried to square his account with Lorraine in the bottom of the fifth--when the Indians (23-7) scored their lone run--by contributing a double off the left-field fence. But it would not prove to be a storybook night: Toledo took a called strike three in the seventh for the game’s final out.

“It’s too bad all that had to happen to that kid,” Hart Coach Bud Murray said. “You can’t judge him on what happened tonight. He had a great year.”

For the record, Toledo finished with a .380 batting average and 27 RBIs, but you can bet he would trade a hit or two for a routine defensive play Saturday. Toledo said that he wished he could erase the night from his memory, but he knows it won’t soon go away.

“I wasn’t nervous, and it wasn’t really that hard to see,” he said. “It was like I went blank or something.”

Or like he hit a brick wall.