Class Cut Up

OXNARD — Jess Sanchez no longer has to wait for next year. He can hardly wait for next week.

Sanchez, a catalyst for the Hueneme High baseball team, blew his junior season by blowing off class. This season, he has helped the Vikings clinch at least a share of the Channel League title and secure a spot in the Southern Section Division I playoffs.

Although Sanchez entered the week batting only .284, the senior shortstop and pitcher has provided Hueneme (16-7), a traditional league doormat, with frequent jumpstarts.

“He takes over a game,” San Marcos Coach Mike Glenn said. “He hits homers, he steals bases, he shuts you down when he’s [pitching]. I think he’s making up for lost time.”

A year ago, Sanchez would ask his sixth-period teacher for a hall pass and loiter near the baseball field to watch the team practice.

With quick hands and good range, Sanchez was Hueneme’s star shortstop as a sophomore.

But even stars have to go to class, and Sanchez made Ferris Bueller seem like a perfect-attendance candidate by skipping school 48 times, by his count, in the first half of the 1995-96 school year.

The absences and a resulting 1.7 grade-point average left Sanchez ineligible and torpedoed his junior baseball season. Hueneme finished 5-18 and seventh in the Channel League.

While the Vikings muddled through such intricacies as the hit and run, Sanchez was forced to hit the books.

“The year really lagged for me when I didn’t play baseball,” Sanchez said. “I just thought about how bad it was going to be for me not to get seen by scouts or [college] coaches. I’d get a hall pass and see them practicing and think I could be out there, getting ready.”

By improving his attendance and taking summer school, Sanchez became eligible for his senior year. Though he has pressed at times at the plate and committed errors on routine plays, there’s no doubting his impact.

“It was like cutting out our heart when we knew we weren’t going to have him,” Hueneme Coach Reg Welker said. “I don’t know how you prepare for something like that; he was the best player in our program.”

Sanchez started at second base for Hueneme as a freshman and was the team’s leading hitter as a sophomore. But Welker, a veteran of 32 seasons at the school, sensed that baseball was no longer Sanchez’s top priority his junior year.

Sanchez played football in the fall and then chose to wrestle for the first time the following winter. Fatigued by continuous workouts, his willingness to attend morning classes waned.

“I could blame it on wrestling, but it wasn’t that,” Sanchez said. “It was the friends I kicked it with. I’d just go to their houses and hang.”

After playing men’s league softball last spring and American Legion baseball in Camarillo last summer, Sanchez, a player known not to succumb to outside pressure, has put the heat on himself.

“I think I’m trying to do too much at once,” he said. “I’m thinking about my batting average being so low.”

Hueneme assistant Dave Morris, the former coach at Buena and Birmingham, agrees that Sanchez is pressing.

“Last year delayed his development,” Morris said. “He’d be hitting at least 100 points higher and be twice as good otherwise. He cost himself a chance to get to some higher levels of baseball earlier on.”

Sanchez, who plans to attend a junior college, has struck out in some crucial situations and has vacillated between sloppy and spectacular at shortstop--sometimes in the same inning. But he has also caused jaws to drop with his fielding and has intimidated pitchers with his hitting in the second half of the season.

“They’ve got some holes in their lineup and you can pitch around him,” Glenn said. “You better, because if you don’t, he hurts you.”

Said Morris: “In three years, I have never seen him jammed [by an inside pitch]. His bat speed is unbelievable.”

On the mound, Sanchez combines an impressive fastball with a slider and changeup. Entering the week, he was 6-2 with 50 strikeouts in 38 1/3 innings. His three-hitter in a victory over league rival Rio Mesa was called by Welker “the most dominating performance by a pitcher on our team in the last 10 years.”

In past seasons, the Vikings were young and fragmented, but this year’s team features nine seniors and a sense of cohesion.

“We weren’t as close before, we put people in categories,” Sanchez said.

“But this year we clicked. We work with each other trying to win.”

Together again, no hall pass needed.