The Pressure’s Off as Loyola Opens Baseball Playoffs Today

Pressure is sometimes in the mind of the beholder, and there was a period early in the college baseball season when Loyola Marymount outfielder Billy Bean was feeling it.

Coming off a junior year in which he hit .403 and a summer in which he led the vaunted Alaska League at .430, Bean was hitting less than .300 and wasn’t seeing any good pitches.

Loyola Coach Dave Snow produced the perfect cure: a 45-12 record and a berth in the NCAA Western Regional starting today with an 11 a.m. game against UC Santa Barbara (44-17) at UCLA. Other teams in the regional are UCLA (39-21) and Hawaii (41-22). Winner of the double-elimination tournament advances to the eight-team College World Series in Omaha.

“The winning took the pressure off,” Bean said. “This year we’ve been so much more of a team. I have no qualms about sacrifice bunting or moving the runner along instead of going for a home run. We’re going for run production, not stats.”

Crash Course in Pitching

Tim Layana came to Loyola as a promising right-hander. He immediately became the Lions’ most competitive pitcher but, for two years, remained a promising but unpolished hurler on a bad team.

Snow had the answer for that as well: a crash course in the mental approach to pitching--how to prepare for a game, how to out-think the batter, how to rise to the challenge within a team framework.

“When Coach Snow came here I realized what I had missed,” Layana said. “He takes pitching more as a mental game. Hitting is timing. Pitching is screwing up the hitter’s timing. Playing under these coaches I feel like I could go out and coach a team now.”

Layana has pitched in most of the big games this year, including the must-win final regular season game at Reno and last weekend’s playoff victory over Pepperdine for the automatic spot in the NCAA playoffs.

Pressure? “I like it. I get into those pitchers’ duels,” Layana answered. “When I get a comfortable lead I let up.”

The star seniors were the cornerstones of the Loyola program when Snow was hired two years ago. Snow’s arrival not only turned the program into a national success story but kept Bean and Layana in Lion uniforms. Both were ready--and planning--to leave.

Bean Soars to .353

Instead they helped lead the Lions to their first-ever No. 1 national ranking in the weekly polls and broke nearly every hitting and pitching record in school history.

Bean, a 6-foot, 185-pound center fielder who bats and throws left-handed, is hitting .353 with 13 doubles, 7 triples, 6 homers, 57 runs batted in and a team record 76 runs scored. He holds school career records for games, at-bats, hits, runs and runs batted in. He was drafted by the Yankees last year but decided to finish school.

Layana, a 6-2, 185-pound right-hander, is 16-2 with 12 complete games, 5 saves and 122 strikeouts in 150 innings. The victories and strikeouts are season records. He holds Loyola career records in victories, strikeouts and innings pitched. He was drafted by the Mets last spring but came back to earn co-pitcher of the year honors in the West Coast Athletic Conference with Pepperdine’s 12-game winner, Mike Fetters.

Snow said, “I feel pretty fortunate I walked into a situation with good players in the middle of the diamond. I knew they were good players. I found out very quickly they’re great people. Both are in that position where they’re identified as quality players. It would’ve been easy for them to back out as far as practice, working hard. Instead they led by example.”

Team Play Emphasized

Asked if the two are different players than when he took over, Snow said, “I think they’re different because they’re winners. They’ve always been great competitors. Now they’re great competitors who are winners.”

Upon taking over a program in which players had stressed their own statistics and upperclassmen had shunned newcomers, Snow convinced them that team play and unity would be better for their college careers--and hence, their pro chances.

“I’ve always tried to stress ‘Concentrate on winning, concentrate on the team,’ ” Snow said. “All the championship teams I’ve been on, the other things took care of themselves--the individual honors, the individual statistics.”

Bean and Layana took his philosophy to heart, adhering to the small plaque on his desk: “Think Snow.” Bean, a Santa Ana native, went to Loyola largely at the urging of his parents and said he would have transferred to Cal State Fullerton after his sophomore year. Instead, Snow, then an assistant coach at Fullerton, was hired.

‘Going Out on Top’

Bean said, “There’s such a fine line between the teams that win and the teams that don’t. You go to any campus and you’ll see (good) players. We really haven’t thought about the draft. My whole focus and concentration is on the team. Obviously I’m hoping for the best, (but) I’m happy I stayed in school. It made my course so much more easy, going out on top, being able to walk around proud.

“After my first season I was so disappointed. School was so hard. I was having a great season but it was no fun. I took no pride in what I accomplished that year because we got killed every day. I wanted to leave. When Coach Snow got hired, that was the happiest day of my life. I used to be afraid to tell teachers I was on the baseball team. Now three of us have a teacher who stopped class one day to congratulate us, and everybody cheered.”

Bean’s personal test came early this season when he found pitchers remembered last season’s .403 average. He was being walked at a rate of more than once per game and found himself pressing, swinging at bad pitches out of frustration. “They were putting me on any time there was an open base,” he said. His average dipped into the .270s.

“Everyone was gunning for me. They wouldn’t let me play the game. It was really the first time I’ve slumped in about two years, and I put so much pressure on myself in situations that didn’t merit it. Coach Snow talked to me. From there I loosened up and started to feel like my old self. Now I’m hitting the ball as well as last year.”

Another Slugger Helped

Two things helped: The coaches convinced him that as a pro he would need to learn to handle the hard times, and sophomore cleanup hitter Chris Donnels began to crush the ball. Donnels set team records for home runs (18) and RBIs (81) and was named WCAC player of the year. In the wake of his onslaught, pitchers stopped giving Bean so many free passes.

“Coach said if I could work through that I’d help the team win. Donnels will get that next year,” Bean said. “The people who learn to deal with it are the ones who have success. I didn’t get five at-bats in a game until about three-fourths through the season. But I’ve been trading hits for walks. I set a record for runs, so I wasn’t hurting the team.”

Layana won three games as a freshman and seven as a sophomore but said that near the end of his second year he was so frustrated he announced, “I’m gone. I’m transferring.” But Snow turned the team’s attitude around and taught Layana the change-up that has become his most effective pitch.

“I just wanted to play college baseball. I didn’t know what to expect,” Layana said. “We were so used to being nothing it kind of took (Snow) a year. . . . We started believing. We started winning and forgot how to lose.”

‘Five-Pitch Fastball’

Layana, who can throw hard but is not overpowering, said that under Snow he has “become a much smarter pitcher with a plan of attack.” He can throw hard to different spots, giving him “a five-pitch fastball.” He has developed a slider. And the hard stuff sets up his change-up, or “dead fish.”

“My first two years the change wasn’t part of our vocabulary,” Layana said. “Now the team saying is, ‘When in doubt, use the trout.’ I love it when I throw a change-up and the batter’s so far out in front he loses the bat.”

Layana figures to face Santa Barbara ace Mike Tresemer (9-1) today. Loyola is 2-0 this season against both Santa Barbara and UCLA, but the Lions haven’t seen Tresemer yet. Bean knows whom he likes.

“Tim’s a 16-game winner who’s going to be first-team All-American. If we ever have something working against us, Tim just stops it,” he said.

Win or lose, Bean said, “We couldn’t ask for a better way to end our college careers.”

Snow confidently makes this forecast: “On a given day you write Billy Bean’s name in the lineup. You know you’ll get nothing less than his best effort. The same is true of Tim. He wants the ball in any situation. He can be counted upon.

“Winning--these two guys have thrived on it. It’s great to see ‘em having such fun.”