Werdel Witmeyer Has Sanchez Vicario on Run : Tennis: She scores upset of top-seeded player at La Costa.

The line calls were, at best, enigmatic. Then there was the puzzling matter of Arantxa Sanchez Vicario’s ever-changing mobility.

Yet, Marianne Werdel Witmeyer let her powerful baseline game solve all the problems as she scored a 6-3, 2-6, 6-2 third-round victory over the top-seeded Spaniard on Thursday in the $430,000 Toshiba Tennis Classic at La Costa.

Sanchez Vicario, the world’s No. 2-ranked player, rarely loses to anyone outside the top 20. Unless, that is, she is playing Werdel Witmeyer. Ranked No. 25 and seeded 11th, Werdel Witmeyer showed that her straight-set victory over Sanchez Vicario in the Lipton Championships last March at Key Biscayne, Fla., was no fluke.

“You go out there and you feel like you’ve come up a notch,” said Werdel Witmeyer, 27, who lives in nearby Oceanside. “And the rest of the players say: ‘This one can be dangerous.’ ”

That’s how the others feel about Werdel Witmeyer’s ground strokes. She yielded only five points in the first four games of the match and broke Sanchez Vicario’s serve three consecutive times.

Sanchez Vicario, suffering from a pulled hamstring in her right leg, needed an injury timeout and the attention of a trainer in the second set. After the leg was wrapped, she seemed to chase down more shots, and Werdel Witmeyer lost a bit of focus.

“She was limping one point and then she was running down balls only the Bionic Woman could get,” said Werdel Witmeyer, who will play Sandrine Testud of France in today’s quarterfinals.

“It definitely gets distracting, but it doesn’t mean she was doing it on purpose.”

Sanchez Vicario said: “It was bothering me in my first match against [Patricia] Hy. But [Werdel Witmeyer] played very good and she’s very dangerous. I don’t feel I got used to the change, from grass to clay to hard court, and it took me a while to get into the match.

“She was hitting the ball good. I don’t think I played as good as I could.”

For Werdel Witmeyer, it was a rare opportunity to play in front of her husband, her parents, coach Woody Blocher and friends. Her best Grand Slam result came this year at the Australian Open, where she beat Gabriela Sabatini in the first round and lost to Sanchez Vicario in the semifinals.

After beating Sabatini, she called her husband, Ron Witmeyer, in the United States and woke him up at 5 a.m. But Ron, who spent six years in the Oakland A’s system, understood. He was the one who talked his wife out of quitting the game five years ago when she dropped out of the top 100.

“It was the first time my mom [Corinne] has watched a match of mine in about four years,” Werdel Witmeyer said. “And it’s the first time my dad [Tom] has sat in one place.”

It was only the second time this year that Sanchez Vicario has lost before the quarterfinals--the other time being against Werdel Witmeyer. She held the No. 1 spot briefly last winter and has been the runner-up in every Grand Slam tournament this year, losing to Mary Pierce in the Australian Open and to Steffi Graf in the French Open and at Wimbledon.

Which is why Werdel Witmeyer’s victory was so significant.

“This is her fifth win against a top 10 player in the last year,” Blocher said. “She can beat these girls and they’re great players. Arantxa, to me, is an unbelievable player. It’s like playing [Michael] Chang. Every time you think the point is over, the ball comes right back.”

Pierce, who has lost only five games in two matches, defeated No. 15 Joannette Kruger, 6-2, 6-0. Among the others reaching the quarterfinals were ninth-seeded Lisa Raymond, No. 16 Gigi Fernandez, Rachel McQuillan of Australia and Asa Carlsson of Sweden. Raymond, who beat 18-year-old qualifier Lindsay Lee, 6-4, 6-2, will play Fernandez, and Carlsson will face second-seeded Conchita Martinez.