Baseball: It will be a Hart High World Series reunion for Trevor Bauer and Mike Montgomery
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The World Series that begins Tuesday in Cleveland is already going to produce a rarity. There’s two pitchers who played on the same high school baseball team in 2008, Newhall Hart.
Trevor Bauer of the Cleveland Indians and Mike Montgomery of the Chicago Cubs will have a Hart High reunion. That became possible after the Cubs defeated the Dodgers, 5-0, Saturday night.
Get ready for lots of intrigue regarding how Hart didn’t win a baseball championship in 2008.
“Aaron Hicks beat us,” Hart Coach Jim Ozella said Saturday night.
Hicks pitched Long Beach Wilson past Montgomery and Hart, 4-2, in the 2008 Southern Section quarterfinals. Hicks would go on to become a first-round draft pick and starting center fielder for the Minnesota Twins.
It has been quite a year for former Hart players. Six appeared in the major leagues this season, all of whom were coached by Ozella.
Ozella, who grew up in Illinois, is more a Cardinals fan than Cubs fan, but he is thrilled for his former players to be on World Series teams.
“It’s an unbelievable opportunity,” he said.
Montgomery was a first-round draft choice in 2009 by the Kansas City Royals. Bauer, who went 12-0 in 2008, graduated a year early from Hart and enrolled at UCLA, where he was a standout for three years and taken No. 3 overall by the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2011.
Hart’s 2008 team went 23-7. It produced a third major leaguer, catcher Trevor Brown of the San Francisco Giants. It won a CIF academic award for highest team GPA.
“A great group of guys,” Ozella said.
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