San Mateo High School grad Jack Warren is Caltech’s new hit king

The left-handed hitting senior became Caltech’s single-season hit king in 2023, totaling 61 hits on the year for the NCAA Division III program, shattering the former record of 46.

“It’s super meaningful,” Warren said. “It’s something, I broke it, and then towards the end of the season — even if I didn’t break it I still would be incredibly happy with the season I had — but, yeah, it means a lot to me.”

Warren has plenty to be happy with, batting .384 with five home runs and team-leading 33 RBIs. He set the single-season program record not only for hits, but for doubles with 19. He was one of five Beavers to earn Academic All-District Baseball Team honors, and is a nominee for Academic All-American honors, to be announced later this week.

While he has two years of athletic eligibility remaining, Warren graduates Friday, June 16 from Caltech. He said he isn’t sure if he has played his last collegiate baseball game, as he could potentially return by enrolling in a master’s program. At present, he is returning to his Foster City home and taking a software engineering job at Oracle, where he interned last summer.

“This year, being a senior, I was kind of looking at it more from the bigger picture, and really just trying to enjoy this year,” Warren said. “Hits and doubles and homers are fun, but at the end of the day, you’ve just got to enjoy it.”

Caltech is by no means a baseball powerhouse. The Beavers famously endured nine straight winless seasons from 2004-12. Since then, the most games the team has won in a single season is eight, matching that total this season despite finishing on an eight-game losing streak.

“It’s a slow build,” Whitehead said. “And it’s not like, if we don’t have the right ballplayers, we go get 12 or 15 more. It’s — I locate the six to eight guys that are going to be really good fits and really try to bring them along.”

When Whitehead scouted Warren at San Mateo, the skillset was apparent.

The four-year varsity standout played on the Bearcats’ last league-championship team, when they won the Peninsula Athletic League Lake Division title during his freshman year of 2016 — a team that featured five future collegiate players.

“I had him up on varsity as a freshman,” Bearcats manager Neal Goldstein said. “We went to [the Central Coast Section playoffs] that year and you couldn’t tell if he was a freshman or a senior, he was that confident at the plate.”

As a varsity senior, his performance fell off a tick from an extraordinary junior season, going from hitting .375 with three home runs in 2018 to hitting .292 with no homers in ’19. But Warren continued to excel in the classroom, where he posted a 4.5 GPA, Goldstein said.

“He was one of the first list of guys that I got that had a tremendous academic profile,” Whitehead said. “And obviously, we’re looking at guys and how they’re able to play baseball, and he could pitch and he could hit.”

Warren’s record-breaking 2023 campaign featured something of a Mark McGwire-Sammy Sosa dynamic between he and senior Will Dembski, an Iowa native who stayed neck-and-neck with Warren in the hit column all season. Dembski finished with a team-leading .404 batting average, and totaled 59 hits, now ranking second all-time among single-season leaders at Caltech.

“Between him and Will, we figured someone would break it,” Whitehead said. “And then when both of them had 35 … when we were still in the 20s, games, one of them’s going to do it. So, it was fun to watch that take shape. And our schedule is really tough in conference, and I don’t think Jack slowed down at all throughout it.”

Warren said Dembski garnered quite a reputation around the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, earning the nickname “Mike Trout” for his resemblance both physically and, in the Division III ranks at least, performance wise to the Los Angeles Angels superstar. Warren said he is content with his nickname “J-Dub” that evolved into “J Doubles” as he closed in on the single-season doubles mark.

“I thank [Dembski] a lot because having a guy like that behind me, you definitely get a lot of opportunities,” Warren said.

Warren broke the Caltech hits record April 21, a notable day for the team in that it was the Beavers’ final win of the season. In the 10-2 victory over Whittier, Warren went 4 for 5 with three doubles, tying the program mark with a double in the third inning, then breaking it with a line drive to left-center field in the sixth.

“Every game we were competitive in or that we won, Jack played a role in,” Whitehead said.

Now, at the very least, Warren stands to map out of all-star career with the Oracle company softball team. But the senior — who only played two full collegiate seasons due to the pandemic — intends to stay sharp, he said, just as he did last summer; he didn’t play collegiate league baseball, but merely worked out on his own at GamePrep Baseball Academy’s facilities in San Carlos.

“I kind of felt if I just focused on individual things,” Warren said of his 2022 summer. “I felt like that would be more beneficial to me than playing in games.”

Warren certainly did something right. The results are now historic numbers in the Caltech record books.