Anyone who has run a sports department knows the importance of clerks. Better to lose a beat writer than your ace agate clerk. Who may be all of 19 years old.

You can put out a section with a wire baseball story. You can find a dozen competent people eager to cover baseball.

But you may blow deadline if your clerks call in sick … and it will take you weeks to replace even one of them, and another month to get them up to speed.

As this series of mini-bios trudges on, I will come back to other clerks in the history of The Sun sports department, 1976-2008. But in most cases because they were wild or wacky. Or both.

Lisa Wrobel wasn’t wild. She wasn’t wacky. She was all business, and she represents an archetype of oft-overlooked but never undervalued cadre of sports journalists.

Lisa Wrobel couldn’t have been more than 17 when I hired her. Heck, she might have been 16.

How I knew about her, I no longer can recall. It seems odd to think that I might have called Big Bear High School, where she was a student, searching for promising kid journalists. It was a small school and too far from the office for it to make sense.

Maybe she was part of some prep newspaper competition of the sort we sometimes served as judges for … and at which we sometimes found a talented kid.

Anyway, she was in our newsroom in and around 1985 and 1986. In sports, specifically. Performing the unglamorous but critical work of beating wire agate into shape for publication … answering phones, taking prep agate — and turning some of those calls into short stories.

For maybe six bucks an hour, 30 hours per week.

It always was the agateers, as we called them, who served as the first and best ring of defense to the full-timers who were putting out the rest of the section. Every call they successfully handled was one less 10-15 minute gap out of a full-timer’s shift.

Lisa was one of the best.

She was a sports fan, and that was a good start. Specifically, a Dodgers fan. She loved them. She played softball herself, catcher, at Big Bear. At least until we got our hooks into her. She knew the rules and never turned in one of those nonsensical stories with botched jargon and “shortstop” as two words.

Thinking about Lisa Wrobel, two concepts come to mind:

–When co-worker Jim Long went into diabetic shock in the newsroom one Monday night, and the two full-timers putting out the paper literally carried him to the parking lot … we left Lisa in charge. We knew she knew what to do, and how to put off whatever crisis might result.

–She commuted from Big Bear Lake to the office of The Sun, in San Bernardino, every single day. That entailed a 45-mile drive in each direction. Meaning her six-hour, 5-11 p.m. shift really was an eight-hour day, by the time the drive up and down “the hill” was factored in.

Oh, and her Volkswagen beetle (I think it was) was less than dependable. Sometimes it didn’t make it over the hump (at 8,000 feet) going the back way to Big Bear (on Highway 38). And she would have to get her mother to come pick her up at, like, midnight. Meanwhile, she was still a student, too.

Personally, she was quiet and unassuming. Not very tall, and a bit stout. She was clever, and she had a sense of humor, but you had to be listening to hear it, and sports departments usually operate at a dull roar. Mostly, I think of her as having been loyal and utterly dependable.

Eventually, I think Lisa did the math and realized she was barely making any money. I believe she liked working for us, and would have continued, but it didn’t make economic sense. Plus, there was that balky VW.

I did a google search for her name just now, and among the handful of entries that came up was one from 2003 showing a Lisa Wrobel as a lieutenant with the California Highway Patrol. It wouldn’t surprise me if that were her; she liked working for organizations, and she was good about procedures.

I hope she did well, and I suspect she did. And I bet she still goes to Dodgers games with her family, as she so often did on Sundays when she worked for us. Even though the Dodgers haven’t won anything since she was a kid.

I just want to make sure we all remember how crucial to the success of “great editors” those kids making minimum wage were. People like Lisa Wrobel, who commuted 90 miles every day to make $6-7 an hour — and make sure we got the section out on time.