Baseball is a complicated game that seems easy, the way El Toro coach Mike Gonzales breaks it down.

He often explained El Toro's success this season in this simple way: “Good pitching, good defense and timely hitting.”

Even with only three seniors in the starting lineup, El Toro went 3 for 3 often enough to win the championship of the Sea View League and was the only Orange County team to play in, and win, a CIF championship baseball game.

For guiding his high school alma mater to the top, Gonzales is the Register's baseball coach of the year for the 2008 season.

El Toro went 11-4 in the Sea View League to win the league title by one game over Foothill and Trabuco Hills, which tied for second. In the CIF-Southern Section Division II playoffs, El Toro beat four league champions, including division top seed Redlands East Valley in the Division II final, 7-0, for the first CIF-SS baseball championship in school history.

Gonzales, El Toro class of '86, deferred the credit to El Toro's players and assistant coaches, Robert Frith, Tyler Powell and Mike Wood.

“A lot of what we were able to accomplish,” he said, “was because of the unselfishness of our players and our coaching staff. Our coaches did a phenomenal job preparing the kids, not just physically but mentally, as well.”

El Toro finished 25-7 this season, his eighth as head coach. He was a junior varsity head coach at Capistrano Valley before returning to El Toro to replace Tom McCaffrey before the 2001 season. Among the teams El Toro beat in this season's playoffs was Cypress, coached by John Weber, a teammate of Gonzales' at Santa Ana College in the late 1980s.

Gonzales learned a lot about those three important basic elements of baseball during his playing and assistant coaching days. And the Chargers showed they learned about them, too, especially during the playoffs in which they outscored the opposition, 43-12, in five victories.
 

Contact the writer: sfryer@ocregister.com