SECTION 3-A BASEBALL FINAL / PREVIEW : Finalists Seeking One Last Surprise

Let the commissioner’s office commission, the administrators administer and the finger-pointers point fingers. There remains a core group whose sole focus is having a ball at USD’s Cunningham Field at 3:30 today.

That’s when ninth-seeded Monte Vista and 15th-seeded Mira Mesa will meet for the San Diego Section 3-A baseball championship. Ever since a brawl following Monte Vista’s 9-7 semifinal victory over Patrick Henry Saturday, Monte Vista Coach Rob Phillips has been dogged with questions about the fight and its aftermath.

“I’m real proud of how my guys showed restraint,” Phillips said. “Now we just want to play ball.”

As does Mira Mesa, after speculation whether the game would be played.

“It would have been a letdown,” Mira Mesa Coach Mike Prosser said. “No one wants to win by default.”

Phillips is ready to answer questions about his team. This is, after all, a club that started out like a house afire (12-3), was reduced to ashes in the Grossmont League (3-5), where it finished fourth, then went all the way to the final after managing the first playoff victory in the 29-year history of the school. Along the way, Monte Vista disposed of top-seeded Poway, 7-6.

Surprised? Admit it. But then you were probably just as surprised to see Mira Mesa advance this far. The Marauders’ season was eerily similar to Monte Vista’s: a 15-2 start, 7-5 and third place in City Eastern League play, then a surge in the playoffs, including a 5-0 shutout of defending champion Mt. Carmel.

Mira Mesa was also rattled by the ankle injury to junior pitcher Mike Bovee, who missed six weeks and pitched 49 innings, one more than Marc Nielsen (8-2), today’s starter. Bovee may be in uniform today.

“We’re really two very similar teams,” Phillips said.

Phillips and Prosser, in their third year of coaching at their schools, said their appearances in the championship game are shocking for the most part.

“We lose some games, and we fall off the face of the earth as far as everyone is concerned,” Prosser said.

Said Phillips: “I don’t know what the odds are that we’d get to the finals. But certainly everyone except the coaches and the kids thought we had the potential.”

Mira Mesa (21-7) has been led in the playoffs by Nielsen, a junior with a 2.33 ERA, a 2-0 record and a .333 batting average.

“He does everything but drive the bus,” Prosser said.

Phillip Henry is batting .450 in playoffs; catcher Drew Arnold has a .324 postseason average.

For Monte Vista (20-11), junior Robbie Stone has pitched 83 innings and struck out 88. He is 2-0 in playoffs and hasn’t given up a earned run in 9 2/3 innings. Shortstop Ernie Reyes has hit a home run and two triples, and catcher Vern Mullis is batting .460.

When these teams met in the final of the Warhawk tournament in the beginning of the season, Mira Mesa won, 7-4, in nine innings. At the time, Phillips said he didn’t know when or where but that they might play again.

“I told them we might meet them again sometime at the end of the season, and then it might really count,” he said. “I didn’t think we’d meet in the finals.”

Neither did anyone else.