Reightley Does Right Thing : Baseball: Pitcher will try to help Santa Margarita win its first Southern Section baseball title.

Waiting, waiting, waiting.

Finals are finished. All that’s left is to autograph the yearbook, check the fit on the cap and gown one more time, cruise the boulevard with pals while recapping prom night.

In other words, there’s nothing to occupy Ryan Reightley’s time as he tries to hurry the calendar to Saturday.

That’s when Reightley will try to pitch Santa Margarita (22-7) to its first Southern Section baseball championship. To win, the Eagles will have to go through defending champion La Quinta (26-3-1), the top-seeded team in Division III, in the final at 1 p.m. Saturday at Anaheim Stadium.

Reightley says he isn’t nervous, just eager. He understands what winning would mean to his teammates and school, making only its second appearance in the baseball playoffs.

“This is the culmination of our four years together,” Reightley said. “There is some great talent on the team, perhaps the deepest team I’ve ever played on. We felt at the beginning of the year we were good enough to win it. And now we’re here.

“For some this is the ultimate game; for others it’s just another game. I feel a combination of the two. It’s great to be able to play in it, but at the same time you don’t want to make too much of it.”

At least Reightley has some previous title-game experience to fall back on. Five years ago he helped his Little League team, the Dodgers, win the South Mission Viejo championship. And there’s his victory over Irvine in May to decide the Sea View League championship, the first league title in the school’s six-year history.

Reightley is definitely right about one thing--Santa Margarita is full of talent. There are six .300 hitters in the lineup, led by Fritz Maskery (.425), Chris Tessman (.420), and Brian Griffin (.384).

But Reightley might be the best of them all.

Reightley, who is headed to UC Davis, has been baffling batters all season with a decent fastball and hard sinker. The right-hander is 10-1 in 13 games; he has given up only 48 hits and eight earned runs in 70 innings, and his 0.80 earned-run average is second lowest in the county.

One of his finest performances was last week, when he blanked Whittier La Serna, 8-0, in the quarterfinals. The Lancers, who averaged .386 as a team, managed only three hits, and two of those didn’t leave the infield. No La Serna runner made it past second base.

“He’s the type of pitcher that, at first, you’re not going to be overly impressed with,” La Serna Coach Vern Brock said. “He’s not going to throw 90 [m.p.h.]-plus and go for a lot of strikeouts. But he’s a pitcher where most high school kids are throwers. You can tell he has a lot of confidence in his defense. He puts the ball across the plate and says, ‘Hit it.’ Mentally, he’s better than most kids you see in high school.”

Santa Margarita Coach Tip Lefebvre calls Reightley a “classic late-bloomer” whose best baseball days lie ahead.

“His sinker is very fluid and nasty,” Lefebvre said. “From the side, you don’t see it. There are guys who play all their lives, even in the majors, who don’t have the movement he has on the ball.”

Reightley credits assistant coach Jeff Robinson, former major leaguer, for helping him develop his key pitch.

“I just played around with it a little and he helped me refine it,” Reightley said. “It takes awhile to get used to.”

La Quinta--appearing in its third consecutive title game and trying (as is Fountain Valley in Division I) to become the county’s first back-to-back Southern Section baseball champion--will be his biggest challenge yet. The confrontation will have a personal side: Aztec outfielder Doug Lowry and Reightley have known each other since they were 4, and grew up playing baseball together. This time they oppose one another.

“I haven’t decided if I’m going to knock him off the plate,” Reightley said, joking. There is still time to make those decisions.

If only Saturday would get here.