The Colleges : Gattis Ripe for a Coaching Offer After Barely Missing Several Jobs

Jim Gattis had a promising future as a baseball player cut short by a fastball that hit him in the face.

Now he is hopeful that rumors circulating within the baseball fraternity do not KO his career as a college coach.

Gattis, 35, is being strongly considered for the head coaching position at Cal State Northridge. Bob Hiegert, CSUN’s athletic director, said this week that the former Pepperdine assistant “will be one of the finalists.”

But Gattis, a former standout third baseman at North Hollywood High and Valley College, has been in the same situation before--a couple of times this month, in fact.

He was a strong candidate to replace Dave Gorrie at Pepperdine, which ultimately chose Andy Lopez of Cal State Dominguez Hills. Before that, Gattis was considered a front-runner for the top job at Cal State Long Beach, which ended up hiring Dave Snow away from Loyola Marymount.

Gattis long had been considered a possibility to take over for Coach John Gonzalves at Long Beach--even before Gonzalves officially had retired. In April, the Anaheim Bulletin reported that a prominent booster had “placed $100,000 at the disposal of the 49er baseball program” provided the school “find another coach.” The story went on to speculate that Gattis would be the “best bet” to get the job.

The report stemmed from a meeting between Gattis, Orange County businessman Richard Knopf, Long Beach Athletic Director Corey Johnson and 49er athletic foundation president Joe Saucedo that took place in January--almost three months before Gonzalves announced he was quitting.

Johnson and Saucedo say they met with Knopf because he had expressed interest in donating to the Long Beach baseball scholarship fund. Knopf, a longtime supporter of youth baseball in Orange County, was accompanied by Gattis.

Saucedo told The Times that it became apparent to him during the meeting that Knopf planned to make a donation only if Gattis was the coach.

“I didn’t like his approach. In my opinion, he was trying to buy his way in and I didn’t like it,” Saucedo said of Knopf. “He was trying to buy that young guy a job.”

Knopf, in a letter to The Times, denied that he ever made an offer to donate $100,000. He said he attended the breakfast meeting “to convey my high regard of Jim Gattis as a person and coach.”

Gattis says he and Knopf never suggested that a donation was contingent on Gattis’ hiring.

When the job did open up, Gattis expressed concern that he would be “eliminated from consideration . . . because of rumors.”

He says now that he is not sure what impact, if any, rumors of under-the-table offers had on his pitch to become the coach at Long Beach. Gattis said Thursday that the meeting was “an unfortunate occurrence for everyone.” He can only hope the same rumors don’t have an impact on his chances at Northridge.

“Northridge seems adamant about hiring the best candidate,” Gattis said. “I don’t think rumors and stories will affect any of the candidates. It shouldn’t.”

Hiegert, who won 609 games as baseball coach at Northridge from 1967-84, said Gattis has many of the qualities he is looking for in a coach.

“He has been successful at both the college and professional levels,” Hiegert said, “and he is familiar with the area. He also seems very willing to put in the kind of time it takes to make sure a program succeeds.

“I know he has been a solid candidate for other coaching spots in Southern California. I would suspect he’ll be a solid candidate for ours.”

Gattis, who lives in Woodland Hills, was a first-round draft choice of the Atlanta Braves out of Valley College. Instead of signing, he went to UC Santa Barbara. He was beaned by a fastball during his junior season, however, and after recovering from a fractured skull, never regained his form. He briefly played in the minor leagues before becoming a coach.

Pepperdine won or shared the West Coast Athletic Conference championship each of the four years Gattis was third base coach.

Before coaching at Pepperdine, Gattis managed in the minor leagues for six seasons. He was manager of the Class-A Utica Blue Sox of the New York-Penn League from 1981-83. It was his 1983 Blue Sox club that was the subject of the book “Good Enough to Dream” by Roger Kahn, who served as owner and president of the team that year.

Gattis is described in the book as looking like “a movie version of a grown-up Huckleberry Finn.” Kahn also wrote that when his coach’s “blue eyes raged and his mouth set and his jaw jutted, Jim Gattis was a sadistic drill sergeant.”

“That book,” Gattis said this week. “Now that might hurt my chances.”

Gattis is admittedly an intense coach, but he was made to appear “a little nuts” in the book.

“The whole thing was glamorized. He souped it up a bit,” Gattis said of Kahn. “My wife was on a train recently and she got to talking to an attorney. She mentioned I was a baseball coach and he said he had just read a really good baseball book about a team in the New York-Penn League. She said, ‘That’s where my husband coached.’ He asked what my name was and when she told him he looked at her like she had married some kind of monster.”

In one particularly memorable passage, Kahn describes Gattis as he went over signs with his team at the start of the season.

As Gattis animatedly went through the motions of touching his cap, tugging his ear, etc., he quizzed his players on what the signs meant. One player, outfielder Daryl Pitts, just couldn’t catch on. He was questioned three times and went 0 for 3 on guesses.

Finally, a Gattis had exhausted his patience. Instead of complicated signals, he told the team, he would use voice signs. He demonstrated by cupping his hands around his mouth and bellowing, “Swing! Steal! Take! Bunt!

“Did everybody get those OK?”

That part of the book, Gattis says, was right on target.

“Poor Daryl,” Gattis said. “He didn’t know the signs 80 games later.”

Camp Raider: The Los Angeles Raiders won’t be training at Northridge this year, but don’t get the impression that the issue is dead. Chances are that the move from their Oxnard summer camp will be made as soon as next season.

“I think there is a pretty good chance of that,” said Hiegert, CSUN’s athletic director.

The Raiders, Hiegert said, were satisfied with the facilities at Northridge and its freeway-close location.

“It was important to them that we were halfway between the Cowboys and the Rams for scrimmage purposes,” Hiegert said. “That, and there is a real trend to moving to a college setting for camp.”

Of the 26 NFL teams, 22 train at college facilities, including four of the five that conduct their camps in California. The Cowboys train at Cal Lutheran; the Rams at Cal State Fullerton; the 49ers at Sierra College in Rocklin, Calif.; and the Chargers at UC San Diego in La Jolla.

Bright outlook: Al Weil of Hart High was coach of the winning team in the second Daily News All-Star softball game Saturday at Northridge, but he probably wasn’t the happiest coach in attendance.

That distinction would have gone to CSUN softball Coach Gary Torgeson, who was in the stands.

The reasons for Torgeson’s cheery outlook were the performances of pitchers Heather Lindstrom and Christy Alves, who combined on a three-hitter to lead the East to a 3-0 victory. Both players earlier had signed letters of intent with Northridge.

Lindstrom, who was 20-2 for Crescenta Valley during the regular season, pitched five innings, struck out five, surrendered three hits and allowed only one batter to reach second base. Alves, 15-3 for Burroughs, struck out six in four perfect innings.

“They were both just outstanding,” Torgeson said. “Christy pitches with power and Heather moves it around. They compliment each other perfectly.”

Award candidate: Debbie Dickmann, Northridge’s sophomore All-American pitcher, is one of seven players nominated for the Broderick Award as the top player in collegiate softball. Also nominated were Jill Justin of Northern Illinois, Lisa Longaker of UCLA, Pam McCreesh of Trenton State, Liz Mizera of Texas A&M;, Karen Sanchelli of South Carolina and Michele Smith of Oklahoma State.

Dickmann, who won 23 games last season, is the only Division II player on the ballot. The award will be voted on by softball coaches across the country.

Scholar-athlete: Lori Zackula, a four-year member of the Cal Lutheran track team, was honored as a scholar-athlete by the National Assn. of Intercollegiate Athletics. Zackula, a middle-distance runner and a member of the cross-country team, was an English major who graduated this spring with a 3.72 grade-point average.

Stocking the shelves: Lance Gibson, a 6-2, 185-pound pitcher from El Camino Real High, and Don Keathley, a 6-1, 200-pound catcher from Moorpark College, are the latest baseball players to sign letters of intent with Northridge. Assistant coach Mark Morton is handling the recruiting chores for the team in the absence of a head coach. . . . In addition to signing Lindstrom and Alves, the CSUN softball team has received commitments from Shannon Fitzgerald, a third baseman from Fallbrook High in San Diego County ; Leilani Artis, an outfielder from Crescenta Valley; Jennifer Miller, a utility player from Logan High in Hayward, Calif.; Jeanne Mixon, an outfielder from Crescenta Valley; Patti Pearson, a catcher from Fallbrook High; and Char Schmitt, a catcher from Golden West College and Arizona State.