He’s a Handyman With a Bat and a Ball : Colleges: Jason Wayt can do it all for the El Camino baseball team. He is the Warriors’ best pitcher and one of their top hitters.

Playing catch on the sidelines an hour and a half before a recent game he was scheduled to start, El Camino pitcher Jason Wayt began tossing wicked knuckleballs at his unsuspecting teammate. With a big, curious grin on his face, Wayt said, “Hey, maybe I ought to try throwing these in a game.”

The frazzled teammate gave a look, halfway between a frown and a grin, probably because he didn’t know whether Wayt was joking.

Wayt, one of the Warriors’ bright spots in an otherwise dreary season, is already the squad’s Jack-of-all-trades, so tossing a few knuckleballs into his repertoire wouldn’t be so revolutionary.

A 6-foot-4, 215-pound left-hander, Wayt is El Camino’s best pitcher and is among the team’s best hitters. Usually, such double-duty playing ends at the high school level; in college, coaches usually prefer a player to concentrate on one or the other.

But considering Wayt’s 3.30 earned-run average and .308 batting average, El Camino Coach Nick Van Lue is not too eager to make his ace choose.

“He’ll probably have to make a choice eventually,” Van Lue said. “But for now, we’re happy to have him doing both.”

It’s maybe a 10-minute drive from El Segundo High, where Wayt was a standout double-duty player for Coach John Stevenson, to El Camino College. But Wayt, never one to take the easy route, went from El Segundo to El Camino by way of Fresno.

After graduating from El Segundo in 1990, Wayt headed north to Fresno State with a Division I scholarship and some Division I aspirations.

What he found was a team with 19 pitchers and a coaching staff that didn’t encourage its pitchers to bat. “With 19 pitchers, there really wasn’t much room for me,” Wayt said. “I had a chance to hit in the beginning, but that didn’t last. I would be sitting there (in the dugout) watching and think, ‘I could do that.’ ”

He acknowledges that some of his problems were his fault--”I didn’t put much effort into it. I sort of got caught up in the whole college thing,” he said--but it was enough to make him dread the thought of another year at Fresno.

“I felt it would have been another wasted year,” he said.

Stevenson made a call on Wayt’s behalf to Van Lue, who was preparing for his first year at El Camino. One thing led to another, and Wayt became a Warrior.

“I fit in much better here,” Wayt said. “Coach Van Lue is a great guy. I’m lucky he and Coach Stevenson were friends. It’s the best move I ever made.”

Last year as a freshman for Fresno, Wayt threw a total of 11 innings. He accomplished that in one game for El Camino, an extra-inning affair against Mt. San Antonio College in which Wayt refused to come out.

Wayt, in fact, leads the South Coast Conference in innings pitched.

“I’ll say one thing about Jason: He has incredible stamina,” Van Lue said.

While the Warriors have struggled to a 7-13-1 record (6-6-1 in the SCC), Wayt has established himself among the league’s best pitchers. His ERA is in the top five in the conference among pitchers with 30 or more innings, as is his 60 strikeouts. His 4-3 record has been marred by a lack of help from his offense.

Of course, Wayt must accept some of the blame for the offense’s lack of production because he is also the Warriors’ designated hitter, even when he gets pulled from the mound.

Wayt said he alternates between two mentalities in his roles as a pitcher and a batter.

“On the mound, I try to stay as mellow as possible,” he said. “But at the plate, it’s better to be aggressive. I try to keep them separate. That way, if I strike out at the plate, I don’t take it to the mound with me and let it affect me. The only thing it does is make me try harder.”

Wayt appears to be a better prospect as a pitcher than a hitter. He has the natural advantages of being left-handed and 6-4, plus a repertoire of pitches that includes a slider and change-up.

He also has solid mechanics and a knack for staying near the plate: His ratio of strikeouts to walks is 2:1.

Since he used a year of eligibility at Fresno, this will be his only year at El Camino, a two-year school. Assuming he doesn’t get drafted, he will have two more years of college eligibility remaining. He hopes to be drafted in June, but he is being recruited by several four-year colleges--Lewis and Clark, St. Mary’s, the University of Washington and North Carolina-Ashville, any of which would be OK with Wayt because he wants to go somewhere he can “go fishing.”

Wayt knows this might be the last year he gets to both pitch and bat. Whether he’s in the minor leagues or at another Division I school next year, chances are he’s going to have to choose.

It is only with extreme reluctance that he contemplated the prospect. “I guess I’d have to choose pitching,” he said. “It would probably take me further.

“But I can’t say I’d like to give up either.”