A HILL CLIMB : Cal Lutheran Reaches GSAC Summit Under Second-Year Coach

At first glance, there has been nothing outstanding about the Cal Lutheran baseball program in decades. Actually, you could keep glancing back at the team’s history until your head rotates off your neck and you still won’t find anything spectacular.

In the 1960s, the Kingsmen Trio had nearly as many hits as the Cal Lutheran Kingsmen Nine. And as far as the pitching staff, well, can you say, “It’s outta here”? Early departures from the mound to the showers were so common that the pitchers would have been wise to keep a bar of soap behind the hill instead of a rosin bag.

Ron Stillwell rescued the team in the ‘70s and posted mostly winning records, but nothing earth shattering. Al Schoenberger took over in 1980 and resigned in 1987 with a respectable 211-163 mark, although the team never won the NAIA District 3 championship.

But suddenly--and you might want to hold onto your Kingsmen seat cushion here--Cal Lutheran has emerged as a legitimate local baseball force.

The team from the little NAIA District 3 thumped perennial NCAA Division I power Pepperdine early in the season--something it had not accomplished in 15 years--and a few weeks later began a 10-2 tear that has left the Kingsmen atop the Golden State Athletic Conference standings. Their record of 18-9 overall, 9-2 in conference, marks their best start in five years.

The reasons for the turnaround from an unspectacular decade and a downright dreary 20-23 record in 1988 are few. Two, as a matter of fact. And both reasons involve a hill.

The first hill is second-year head Coach Rich Hill. The other hill is the mound of dirt from which the action of a game is initiated, a dirt mound that for many years might just as well have had a gravestone on it as a Cal Lutheran pitcher.

Hill, 26, took the reins from Schoenberger, who said that he had tired of battling the obstacles at Cal Lutheran, ones that included only 2 1/2 scholarships a year and constant financial problems. Before the 1986 season, the fence in the outfield, which was already unusually close to home plate, became worn out.

It was replaced with a new fence that was planted even closer to the plate, turning the Kingsmen playing field into a sort of a miniature golf course, sans windmill. The explanation? The athletic department allotted very little money to buy a new fence. Using basic geometry, Schoenberger soon discovered that the maximum length of fence that he had been able to purchase only stretched from foul line to foul line if it was moved much closer to home plate.

“No one asked why it was moved in,” Schoenberger recalled. “We lost 15 feet in right field. I took a tape measure out there and it’s 297 feet in right. That’s an easy fly ball in any other college park.”

When he left, Schoenberger said he had grown weary of, “trying to push a grapefruit through a doughnut hole.” A second factor, to be sure, was that he also had grown weary of watching opposing batters push a baseball over the right-field fence.

Enter Hill, a Cal Lutheran alum who played for Schoenberger in 1983 and 1984 and went on to a brief career in pro ball, playing for the Class-A Savannah Cardinals for a season before being told by his manager that he was the team’s “spare tire.”

He returned to Thousand Oaks and earned a master’s degree in education in 1985. He also became a part-time assistant coach with the baseball team.

When Schoenberger departed, Hill was a quick pick by Athletic Director Bob Doering. He came in hard. No profanity, he told his players. No tobacco-chewing, sunglass-wearing or comfortable beach chairs in the dugout. No criticism of teammates. No dressing in the dugout. No daydreaming during practice.

No this, no that. Problem was, no wins, either.

But this year, the new rules have been accepted and a new spirit has taken over. A squad that hoped and prayed each year that the better teams in its conference would get get beaten or injured so that the Kingsmen might have a chance at the championship now finds itself being that better team.

Senior pitcher Kevin O’Neill said the change is striking.

“Last season we kept losing and all we could think about was that maybe the other teams in our conference were losing, too,” he said. “But they didn’t. Now, we’re the best team in the conference, and that’s a new feeling. We are the team to beat. That’s pretty new around here.”

Hill said that it was just a matter of transferring confidence and enthusiasm from him and his assistants to the players. The transfer took a year.

“The big change is just the mental attitude that the guys have now,” Hill said. “The coaching staff is very enthusiastic. We have the idea that every time our team steps onto the field they’ve got to make it a dogfight. We want our players to carry that same aggressiveness.

“This is my first recruiting class, and we found the guys we wanted in high schools and at junior colleges. We didn’t come in here with a five-year plan. We came in with a one-year plan to turn this thing around. We needed junior college players who could help us right away.”

What kind of player did Hill look for? The wild kind.

“Our interest was only the guys who want to go out and get dirty,” Hill said. “Guys who will get hit by a pitch, take one for the team. Take a dose. We wanted guys who wanted to play ball that way, guys who would be into the game every pitch, guys who would be willing to go to war against people.

“But, it’s also nice to have some talent.”

And he has plenty.

Jay Anderson, a senior and the pitching ace, is 5-1 with a 3.33 earned-run average. O’Neill is 4-1 and Dean Martinez has a 1-1 record with two saves and a 1.55 ERA.

Schoenberger, now a scout for the Texas Rangers, has noticed the talent.

“They’ve got more depth on the pitching staff than any team I had,” he said. “We used to have one guy and improvise the rest of the time.”

Offensively, Anthony Espitia, a senior catcher, is batting .355 and leads the team with 33 hits, 28 runs batted in and seven home runs.

Together, the wild bunch has turned Cal Lutheran into a winner.

“The kids have found out that winning is a lot of fun,” Hill said. “There’s nothing worse than playing for a bad, losing baseball team. And there’s nothing better than playing on a team that believes it will win every game, a team that takes the field knowing it can play with anyone.”