Newbury Park’s Bennett a Religious Practitioner : High school baseball: Hoping it’s his calling, catcher bound for Master’s College works zealously on his game.

Jeff Bennett is a baseball-aholic.

The Newbury Park High senior catcher has never been to a high school party, but he has taken batting practice in the middle of the night, illuminated only by car headlights.

He spends his Friday and Saturday nights in a batting cage.

Geez, Jeff, do you do anything besides play baseball and go to school?

“No,” he says. “Not really. But I’m pretty happy with my life the way it is.”

Bennett’s teammates are content with him too. He is batting .363 and leading the team with five home runs and 20 runs batted in, and he is one of the best defensive catchers in the area.

“I love it,” says Shawn Adams. “It’s unbelievable. He’s finally hitting the way he can.”

Must be because of those late-night sessions.

Actually, Bennett and Adams took midnight batting practice only once. It was last summer. The two drove to the Newbury Park High batting cage and pulled the car up to the cage, using the headlights for light, although not much.

“It was pitch black,” Adams says. “You could just hear the ball.”

That’s the sort of activity that typifies Bennett, who has helped lead the Panthers (15-5, 8-1 in Marmonte League play) into first place as they play host to rival Simi Valley (14-5, 6-3) today at 3 p.m.

Bennett, 17, started getting serious about baseball in the summer before his junior year. He and former teammate David Lamb, who is now playing in the Baltimore Oriole organization, would take batting practice together every day.

Every day.

“That’s all we would do,” says Bennett, who intends to play at The Master’s next season. “He wanted to go pro and I wanted to get a scholarship and make something of myself.”

When he’s not hitting, Bennett is probably working on his catching. Watching catchers’ footwork on television. Doing aerobics to quicken his feet. Working on keeping his hands soft, avoiding jabbing at the ball. Straightening his throws, which were always strong but had been wild in the past.

The result is a power-hitting catcher who has thrown out 36% of would-be base stealers, but the means to that end are sometimes irritating to those around Bennett.

“My mom hates it,” Bennett says. “She thinks I’m obsessed. I remember one time she was yelling at me. She said I was sick. She said I need balance in my life. But I just like to hit.”

Says his mother, Janet: “I really do think he needs to put a little more time into mowing the lawns and washing the cars, but he’s never around when those things need to be done because he’s out practicing baseball. But when I think of the things that he could be out doing, I’m glad he’s playing baseball.”

What about his girlfriend of a year and half, Robin Starkey? What does she think?

“She’s very understanding,” Bennett says. “At the beginning it was rocky because she wanted more attention, but I told her, I told her, for right now, baseball has to come first. She understands that’s where I need to be right now.”

Honest?

“I don’t want to get in the way of his dream.” Starkey says.

The first half of Bennett’s dream is college baseball. A devout Christian, Bennett seems a natural for Master’s. But he also would like to play professional baseball, so much so that he actually stopped going to church for a while so he could play in a scout league on Sundays.

Earlier this week, rain washed out a batting session Bennett and Keith Smith, a projected second-round pick, were to take for a scout. And at least one person in professional baseball thinks Bennett can make it.

“I think he’s a lot better than people think,” Lamb said from Florida, where he is playing in extended spring training with the Orioles. “He’s just as good as the catchers down here. I think someone should draft him.”

If Bennett is not drafted, he will happily study political science at Master’s. His non-baseball dream--difficult to believe he has one--is to be a Secret Service agent.

“I used to play ‘Guard the President’ in the backyard,” Bennett says.

Guard the President?

“I don’t want to go into details,” he says, “or I’ll get razzed about it.”

That would be a change. Normally, his teammates kid him about his no-drinking, no-partying, no-cussing, church-going innocence.

“A lot of guys give him a hard time because he’s such a straight-up kid, the All-American boy,” Adams says, “but a lot of people respect him for that too. There’s a lot of pressure out there, but it just goes right by him.”

Bennett says the razzing isn’t too bad. Besides, no one is going to ride a kid too hard if he is 6-foot-1 and 205 pounds. Or if he is carrying the team, as Bennett did earlier in the season when the Panthers were heavy on pitching but doing little at the plate.

Against Thousand Oaks, Bennett was three for three with a pair of home runs, including a tiebreaking shot to center field in the seventh inning. Bennett’s mother, incidentally, wrote a prayer for him before the game that day.

“It said, ‘If it be God’s will, please let Jeff hit two home runs and throw out a runner at second,’ ” his mother says. “Then I showed it to him when he got home and he said, ‘I didn’t throw anyone out at second.’ ”

The Panthers might hope for similar prayer today. The team lost its first league game Wednesday against Camarillo and Bennett was hitless. A victory today against Simi Valley would give Newbury Park a three-game lead on the defending league champion with four to play.

“When you are beating Simi,” he says, “I could go 0 for 10 and be happy about it.”