Summit Prep baseball shooting for spot in CCS playoffs

The team’s catcher was showing off between innings in capping warm-ups by winging throws to second base from his knees. The leadoff hitter, as his team batted around twice in a 15-run first inning, was taking time between at-bats to sit with his girlfriend in the first-base grandstands. One player even, after retrieving an out-of-play foul ball, tossed the ball to a fan who asked if he could have it.

A relaxed atmosphere indeed.

Then, during catcher Geoff Toth’s final at-bat of the day, Summit Prep showed how lightning quick it can throw the switch. With the game already in hand, Toth came to the plate with the bases loaded sitting on a three-hit day. And when Priory’s relief pitcher grooved a letter-high fastball, Toth woke everyone up by crushing a booming, bases-clearing double over the center fielder’s head.

“The last two at-bats I had, I was just trying to hit it as far as I can,” Toth said. “It was kind of a perfect pitch. So, why not try to hit it a mile.”

The explosive swing capped a 4-for-4, five-RBI day for Prep’s No. 3 hitter. More importantly, it demonstrated the Husky — who this season waltzed to their second Private School Athletic League North Division crown in three years, posting an 11-0 league record while outscoring opponents 134-22 — have the ability to identify a key baseball situation and up their game accordingly.

“We’re doing our job when we’re at the plate,” Toth said. “We’re just trying to score as many runs as possible.”

Prep knows how steep the competition outside its little pond of the PSAL can get in a hurry. In 2015 the Husky advanced to the Central Coast Section Division II playoffs as the No. 16 seed in the 16-team tourney and was summarily dismissed by top-seed Hillsdale 11-0.

This year Prep dropped its first three games of the year in non-league play, losing 6-1 to a San Mateo Bearcats team now middling in the ‘B’-league Peninsula Athletic League Ocean Division standings, and got smashed 11-1 by a Lincoln-SF team currently one game out of the cellar in the Mount Hamilton League.

“Once we get to the playoffs it’s going to be a lot harder,” Toth said. “Especially in CCS. We got destroyed two years ago.”

But even in having wrapped up the PSAL North title last week, Prep isn’t guaranteed a CCS berth. With only one overall PSAL team promised a CCS spot, the Husky still have to contend with the PSAL championship game, slated for May 11, against the PSAL South champ, a title still being contested between first-place More-San Jose and second-place Pinewood-Los Altos Hills.

So, Prep’s second-year manager Randall Landgrebe isn’t letting his Husky rest on the laurels of its dominant PSAL North showing. His response to Tuesday’s shortened three-inning, mercy-rule win?

“We’ll practice hard [Wednesday] night,” Landgrebe said. “We’ll take it easy on the pitchers, but the rest of them will feel like they’ve played a five-inning game.”

If Landgrebe has an old-school approach to coaching, it is because he comes from “Field of Dreams” territory. Having relocated to the Bay Area two years ago from Iowa, Landgrebe was wowed by the expansive view of rolling sequoias lining the Woodside Priory outfield.

“This is the way baseball fields look in Iowa,” Landgrebe said.

Even with the Husky responding to the three-game losing streak at the outset of the year with a current 12-game winning streak, things haven’t gone according to plan for Landgrebe’s team.

“A lot of [the success] is a mix of senior leadership and underclassmen that respond to teaching,” Landgrebe said. “It took a while for that to gel because we had a plan in place, but a couple key guys got hurt.”

The biggest loss was senior right-hander Noah Suissa — one of the team’s ace pitchers, who is committed to play Division III baseball in Wisconsin next season — who hasn’t pitched since April 19 due to a nagging back injury.

Prep has certainly made up for the loss at the plate though. The Husky are batting .357 and have posted an .893 OPS as a team. An underclassman is pacing the team, with sophomore Garrett Kelly hitting for a .512 average. Seniors Harrison Bost (.462), Matthew Alvarado (.432) and sophomore Elijah Suissa (.417) are all hitting over the .400 mark.

And when the bats go, the defense responds. With few defensive chances Tuesday — Kelly and Bost teamed on the mound to total three strikeouts — the Husky, who needed record just nine outs in the game, also recorded two double plays. And the one to close out the win was golden.

With Priory’s Sam Putney, who was 2 for 2 on the day, on first base, cleanup hitter Max Leiter hit a hot shot in the hole between first and second. Elijah Suissa ranged to his left to start an impressive 4-6-3 twin killing though, gathering the grounder and making a 180-degree turn on the run, throwing against his momentum to second for Alvarado, the shortstop, who received the strike in stride and impressed with a laser-beam throw to first base to record the double play by a whisker.

“We’re pretty solid,” Elijah Suissa said. “Pretty much up the middle we’re as smooth as it gets.”

With six seniors on roster, most of whom are fourth-year varsity seniors, the Husky recognize another golden opportunity to make some noise in the CCS playoffs. The consensus is this year’s squad is better, and certainly more experienced, than the CCS team of 2015. And, more so, Prep is looking to write a closing chapter befitting of those fourth-year seniors’ varsity careers.

“I think it’s changed in a good way,” Alvarado said. “But it’s bittersweet because we’re all going to go to college soon. But I think we’ve built a good program here.”