Van Dortrecht Leads Titans Straight to Playoffs : Softball: Pitcher has 28-10 record, 211 strikeouts and the best ERA in the Big West Conference entering Friday’s NCAA regionals.

Ann Van Dortrecht can’t explain why her pitches start straight and then seem to take a hop, skip and a jump as they reach the batter’s box.

About all the Cal State Fullerton sophomore knows is how she grips the ball and flicks her wrist upon release.

She leaves all the physics to those aeronautical engineers known as pitching coaches.

“It’s centrifugal force or something, that’s what they tell me,” Van Dortrecht says. “I never think about it. I just trust what the coaches say and throw it.”

Like a superstitious batter during a hot streak, when something works and you’re not sure why, you don’t question it. You just keep doing it.

“I always think my pitches stay straight, but people have told me there’s a hop to them, so I believe it,” Van Dortrecht says. “I can’t really tell they hop. I just use the split-fingered grip, flip my wrist and they go up somehow.”

That’s the same direction the Titans (44-21) have gone with Van Dortrecht in the pitcher’s circle.

The right-hander has a 28-10 record with a Big West Conference-leading 0.44 earned-run average and 211 strikeouts going into Friday night’s NCAA regionals. The Titans, ranked fifth nationally, will play host to fourth-ranked Cal State Long Beach in a best-of-three series with the winner advancing to the College World Series.

Titan Coach Judi Garman doubted she would have a World Series-caliber pitcher this season.

The staff suffered two setbacks in the past year. The first came when Kristen Jacobs, a Fullerton College standout who had signed with the Titans, decided to return home to Oregon last summer, and the second when 1989 ace Anjie Bryant was declared academically ineligible.

Garman didn’t know if Van Dortrecht, who went 19-8 with an 0.90 ERA and 136 strikeouts as the team’s No. 2 pitcher last season, was good enough to inherit the stopper role, especially when she closed the 1989 season with a sore arm. But Van Dortrecht has stepped in nicely.

“Without Ann, we’d be in a world of hurt,” Garman said. “She sure has saved us this year.”

“When school started, I gave the ball to Ann and said, ‘The ball’s in your hands. How well we do depends on how well you do.’ I told her to be more assertive, take a leadership role and do a good job. She has.”

Garman, however, says Van Dortrecht can do even better. Her pitches are effective and her control has improved over last season, but there’s one missing ingredient: A killer instinct.

“To become a great pitcher, she needs to develop more mental toughness,” Garman said. “She has had success, but she lacks the mental toughness to be consistently good. She has had some mental lapses that have gotten us in trouble, but with killer instinct, she can block out those distractions.”

As a freshman, Van Dortrecht said, she was afraid of most hitters.

“I walked a lot of batters because I tried to work around them instead of going straight at them,” Van Dortrecht said. “But this year, I’m not intimidated by many people at all. I feel I can go right at them with my pitches.”

For four years at Santa Maria High School, Van Dortrecht went at hundreds of batters. She pitched all but five of the Saints’ games in four seasons and led her team to the Southern Section playoffs four times. The Saints made it to the third round every season Van Dortrecht pitched.

Garman recruited Van Dortrecht, but by June of her senior year, the pitcher had not scored the required 700 on the Scholastic Aptitude Test to gain freshman eligibility under the NCAA’s Proposition 48.

Van Dortrecht took the test again--the morning after her school’s all-night graduation party at Disneyland--but the results were not available until August.

Garman couldn’t wait that long for a commitment and ran out of scholarships. Van Dortrecht had other offers from Arizona State and Nebraska but didn’t want to leave California to attend college.

So she waited and hoped. In early August, she got back her SAT scores: She had surpassed 700. Her father, Ben, called Garman to see if she was still interested.

As luck would have it, Julie Jones, a high school pitcher from Yuma, Ariz., who had signed with the Titans, decided to attend an Arizona community college instead, leaving Garman with an available scholarship.

“I was in a car and on my way up there with the paper work as fast as I could,” Garman said.

Jones is now pitching at the University of Arizona and Van Dortrecht is the Titans’ ace.

“I was really lucky that girl decided not to come here,” Van Dortrecht said. “It all worked out rather well. She stayed in her home state and I stayed in mine.”