By CURTIS ROCKWELL/Sports Director

BILOXI — Thirty five years ago, Mercy Cross won its first of two straight back-to-back state baseball championships.
The Crusaders went 29-4-1 under veteran head coach Sonny Pisarich, who was also the head football coach at MCHS. The squad captured the 1989 Class 1A state championship with a two game sweep over Ingomar.
‘”We had one goal in mind, and that was to win it all,” Pisarich told a reporter after the last win.
Mercy Cross was led by a dynamic duo on the pitching mound, as Howard Battle and Jeff Pickich combined for 25 of its 29 wins on the season. Battle, who went on to spend several seasons in Major League Baseball, went an amazing 16-0 on the hill with an earned run average of 1.97. He struck out 174 opposing batters in right at 96 innings of work.
Pickich went 9-2 and struck out 123 batters in 79 innings. He also ended up with an ERA of 1.77.
At the plate, Crusaders catcher Jason Parker produced an extremely strong season as he smashed a team-high 12 home runs along with 10 doubles and a team-high 51 runs batted in. He also batted .480 on the year.
Battle was a force to be reckoned with at the plate as well, as he hit a team high .495 and cracked 11 home runs with five triples and six doubles and he drove in 47 runs.
Other leading hitters for Mercy Cross in that historic season were Jeremiah Newman (.375), Matthew Dellenger (.346) and Michael Kuluz (.336) as well as Danny Watts (.310). Pickich also hit .317 offensively.

The Crusaders lost just once in the Class 1A South State playoffs, sweeping past Choctaw Central, and Nanih Waiya and holding off Natchez Cathedral in three games before running into Ingomar in the state finals.
Mercy Cross again brought out the broom and beat Ingomar 20-5 on the road and 6-3 at home before an overflow crowd at Thompson Field to take the title.
Although it marked the first state baseball championship for Mercy Cross High, Notre Dame won three state titles in 1960, 1961 and 1980. Notre Dame High became Mercy Cross, and Mercy Cross and St. John merged some years later to form St. Patrick.
Pisarich was a star player at Notre Dame in the 1960’s. Mercy Cross outscored its opponents in the playoffs 97-25 In 1989.

Ingomar finished the season at 22-3, with two of the three losses coming to Mercy Cross in the state finals.
Battle went on to play for the Toronto Blue Jays, the Philadelphia Phillies and the Atlanta Braves in the mid-1990’s. Battle was he fourth round choice of the Toronto Blue Jays during the 1990 MLB Amateur Draft. He would debut in the big-leagues with the Jays, playing in nine games when rosters were expanded in September of the 1995 season. Howard registered his first hit with a single off Boston Red Sox knuckleballer Tim Wakefield at Fenway Park in September of that 1995 season.
The Crusaders only lost three seniors off that 1989 team, and stormed back the next year behind Battle and company to win the Class 1A state title again.