Toros’ Unlikely Guru : Team Gets Mental, Physical Boost From Its Purest Fan

Standing in front of the dugout at Cal State Dominguez Hills, Bill Puett tugged at a baseball cap on his head and shuffled his feet in the brick dust. He was there to see a Toro baseball game, but first he wanted to talk to the team. From a hip pocket he withdrew a crumpled piece of notebook paper and, beckoning curious players around him, read aloud:

We once played a team called the Chapman,

Who thought that they played like the Batman,

They really were Robin,

And came away sobbin’,

The Toros had kicked where they sat, man.

The holder of a Ph.D., Puett sees the athletic field as an extension of the classroom, so what he termed “a silly poem” was a sort of test. He had written it, like others before, as inspiration for a team that was 10 games below .500 and woefully in need of some motivation.

Puett developed an unorthodox visual and conditioning program while a part-time faculty member here five years ago, and since then he has worked with professional baseball players and other world-class athletes. But it’s here on the windy knoll where the Toro baseball field overlooks the oil refineries of Carson and the picturesque Palos Verdes Peninsula, that he likes to work most.

“The Division II level is the purest form of baseball,” he explained. “There is no big-time pressure, just a little pureness to it. I have an attachment to Dominguez Hills.”

He is easily the purest baseball fan the university has, although he’s not the type to yell and holler. There are few Dominguez Hills players who haven’t felt Puett’s warm squeeze on the nape of the neck, listened to comforting words of wisdom or received his customary goodby hug.

“He has the ability to make a guy feel good,” said Toro Coach George Wing. “He really cares about you.”

Most of Puett’s ideas in the areas of conditioning are so new that they have not yet been accepted in the so-called normal channels of athletic performance workouts. But at Dominguez Hills, Athletic Director Dan Guerrero, a former All-American baseball player at UCLA, was one of the first to recognize their value. For that, says Puett, he will be forever grateful.

“They made me part of the woodwork, and I appreciate that,” he said.

Puett’s conditioning programs can be described as brilliant and exotic, helpful and avant-garde. Puett has the allure of brilliance and eccentricity. His portfolio is diverse. He has researched childhood development, written about bonding between mother and child and helped found a toddler think tank and child-care center at Dominguez Hills. In Puett’s latest research, artists reach new creative heights by convincing themselves to think like a child.

One of his favorite projects was to develop a nutritional program devoid of fast-food trappings.

It is also one that he follows religiously. Employees at Dominguez Hills still talk about the time he showed up at a party and, forgoing the dip and chips, ate a bag of garlic pills.

Said his wife, Kathy: “Bill’s idea of splurging is (low-fat frozen yogurt).”

Puett is more at home wearing a flannel shirt with a backpack slung over his shoulder than he is in more traditional professorial garb. His gaunt, earthy image belies a subtle superiority.

“He’s the brightest guy I’ve ever met,” said Guerrero.

But not with his finances. Supporters gasp when Puett hands out free advice. Said Wing: “It’s almost to a fault, in a sense, that he’s opposed to making money off of (his work).”

Puett’s work with athletics has taken two distinct paths. In vision training, he asserts that eyes can be trained to see better through concentration. He also developed and patented Ultimate Performance, a conditioning program “to help realize the potential of both amateur and professional athletes” through unorthodox aerobic and anaerobic workouts. He considers a game of Ping-Pong, for example, a better training device than hours of heavy weight lifting.

“The average baseball player will never need more than a pair of 10-pound dumbbells,” he said.

Such ideas undercut the conventional, tough 1980s approach to conditioning, but Puett’s supporters say his work is on the cutting edge of biotechnology.

Some of his philosophies include:

* Training a batter, for instance, to pick up a pitched ball about seven feet after it leaves the pitcher’s hand--not at the instant it is released, which is the popular theory. Puett worked with former Dodger Terry Whitfield the year that Whitfield came within one hit of tying the club record for pinch hits in a season.

* Players who play better at night see less in the day. They should wave a 150-watt light bulb in front of their closed eyes for five to 10 minutes a day to make them less sensitive to light.

* Diet plays a prime role in building muscle tissue. Puett recommends a low-protein, high-complex carbohyrate diet. Supplements made from green Australian mussels, garlic and alfalfa are helpful. He also prefers holistic medicine.

* Swimming and power weight lifting are worthless to most athletes because they promote development of “slow” muscles. Puett calls his program Bar Plyometrics, workouts consisting of jumping, hopping and reaction drills keyed to the individual athlete.

Some of the best athletes in the world are Ping-Pong players, asserts Puett, because they have trained their eyes to focus on a small object traveling at high speed, and react to it in a split second. Table tennis is a staple of Bar Plyometrics.

Puett’s big claim to fame could be Bob Boone. Once known as one of major league baseball’s strong men, Boone gave up power lifting five years ago after he met Puett. According to Puett, Boone, then 36, was coming of a season with the California Angels where he batted just .202 and “received physical therapy everyday.” Through vision training, Boone steadily raised his average to last year’s career-high .295.

Boone has used Puett’s Bar Plyometrics to drop about 15 pounds and get out of the training room, where Puett said Boone was taking four hours of ice therapy each game. Boone has caught more games than any other major league catcher and, barring injury, could go on for years.

“I have changed Bob’s program many times in the last four years,” Puett said. “He continues to improve because of these changes.”

About his success with Bar Plyometrics, Boone told The Times: “The idea is to extend the career by raising the performance level with power-oriented exercises rather than the usual strength and endurance exercises.”

Puett’s theories are not well-known, but he says he thinks they will catch on someday.

“If you were a general manager of a baseball team and you had a valuable product like a pitcher and you could see what this had done for other players like Boone, wouldn’t you want to see what this program is about?” he asked.

Wing had his players use Puett’s conditioning drills in the fall but let them slide when spring practice got under way in January. Five players eventually developed sore arms.

“Looking back at it now, that hurt us,” he said. “Next year we’ll be more direct with the players and see that they continue his workouts.”

Puett has been working with pitcher Rick Davis, who is expected to be picked high in June’s major league draft. Before the recent Chapman College-Dominguez Hills game, Puett got Davis and three others into a game of “hot potato” with a baseball. The idea was to build vision and coordination while keeping the ball off the ground with foot, hand or glove.

“This is a game that the old-timers played, and I recommend it,” said Puett.

Davis, by all accounts, is deep into Puett’s philosophies. They held a private consultation in the dugout during the Chapman game, which Dominguez Hills won, 3-2.

“Is this fun?,” Puett reflected. “It is a hobby. Certainly on the college level, it is an avocation.”

When the game was over, Puett gave Wing a big hug.

“Listen,” admonished Wing to Puett. “Some guy asks you to help him, charge him. You can give it to us for free, but you (get an offer from the pros), you get a lawyer and make some money.”

Puett grinned and said little.

“Don’t tell me, ‘Someday,’ ” continued Wing. “You do it.”

But Puett probably wasn’t listening. He slipped the backpack over his shoulders and walked to the parking lot next to the Olympic Velodrome, where Kathy would pick him up for the trip home to Vista. The lot had emptied, but Puett was still full of ideas. Soon he was offering his workout program to an amateur softball player with an injured rotor cuff.

Then, with a hug, he was off, pondering, no doubt, what more he could do for the guy.