Matt Cassel will replace Tom Brady who was injured in last Sunday’s game.

Matt Cassel will replace Tom Brady who was injured in last Sunday’s game.

FOXBOROUGH, Mass. (AP) — The day after Matt Cassel dropped a fly ball in a high school game, his teammates thought they’d tease him.

So they posted a picture of his miscue on his locker.

“I’ve never seen so many guys scramble out of that locker room in a hurry when he went in there and saw that,” said Tom Meusborn, the coach of that Los Angeles area team. “He was going to track the guy down and probably body slam him. He had fun with it.”

Cassel can take a joke. But he hates making mistakes, whether it’s on the baseball or football field.

Sunday the Patriots’ new quarterback will shake off what remains of seven years of cobwebs and deal with any butterflies in his first start since high school — against the rival Jets and Brett Favre.

His task? Just replacing three-time NFL champion, two-time Super Bowl MVP and one-time regular season MVP Tom Brady.

“I’m not trying to be Tom Brady. I’m just trying to be Matt Cassel,” he said. “I don’t know where that’s going to take us.”

For a change, it will take him to the field.

He threw just 33 passes at Southern California, where he had the misfortune of backing up Heisman Trophy winners Carson Palmer and Matt Leinart. But the Patriots saw enough in him to pick Cassel in the seventh and final round of the 2005 draft.

New team, same predicament — backing up an outstanding, durable quarterback. Cassel had thrown just 39 passes in three years for the Patriots. Then he went 13-for-18 for 152 yards last Sunday in a 17-10 win over Kansas City after Brady suffered a season-ending left knee injury.

“How many guys have not been a starter in college and made it to the NFL and stuck with it this long?” said Meusborn, who put Cassel in right field at Chatsworth High School because of his powerful right arm. “It’s an unusual story, but Matt’s a different type of guy that could persevere through that and stay focused and be a team player and accept his role and not necessarily like it.”

Cassel’s athletic prowess started long ago, but he wasn’t the only talented member of his household.

He played in the 1994 Little League World Series when he was 12 years old, less than a year after an earthquake struck his home town of Northridge, another Los Angeles suburb.

Jack, his older brother, pitches for the Houston Astros. Justin, his younger brother, pitches in the Chicago White Sox system. And Matt was drafted as a pitcher in the 36th round by the Oakland Athletics.