Catcher Slayton No Longer Royal’s Secret Weapon

While Royal High shortstop Dave Landaker played his way into the hearts of professional baseball scouts, teammate Shane Slayton sat on his haunches in relative obscurity behind home plate.

Slayton, a senior catcher, was neither surprised nor miffed that Landaker garnered most of the scouts’ attention--he knew the bird dogs sometimes needed seeing-eye dogs.

Slayton hoped their interest some day would be piqued. Finally, it has.

Last season, Slayton batted .362 with four home runs and a team-leading 28 runs batted in. He batted .317 with nine doubles and 27 RBIs for Westlake-Royal in American Legion play last summer.

“(Landaker) might get most of the attention, but that’s fine with me,” Slayton said. “My main concern is that we win some ballgames.”

As the scouts chart Landaker’s every move, they are becoming distracted by Slayton’s ability to flatten the seams on a baseball.

“They come to practice to watch Dave hit and they see that Shane can hit the ball real well, so they stick around,” Royal Coach Dan Maye said.

Slayton is batting .510 (25 for 49) this season with four home runs, eight doubles, and a region-leading 30 RBIs. In Royal’s 9-2 win over Channel Islands on Friday, Slayton was three for four and drove in four runs.

That type of production has become habit for Slayton in Marmonte League play. In helping Royal (13-4) ascend to the top of the standings with a 7-1 record, Slayton has batted .542 (13 for 24) and has driven in 22 runs--an average of nearly three RBIs a game.

“The scouts are trying to keep their interest in him low key, so no other scouts know about him,” Maye said. “But Shane isn’t something you can hide very long.”

That’s because few shadows can hold Slayton (6-foot, 200 pounds), who hovers over home plate, waving his bat like a fly swatter. Slayton is perhaps the league’s most intimidating presence since the 1990 graduation of Thousand Oaks’ Lance Martin, a linebacker-turned-outfielder who was 6-1, 225 pounds.

Yet perhaps most important is Slayton’s leadership.

Slayton, a catcher on the junior varsity as a sophomore, played first base last season and moved back to catcher this season because Steve Talafuse graduated.

Slayton is strong-armed even when not throwing to second base.

Aggressive and vocal, Slayton screams at his pitchers when their pitches arrive high in the strike zone.

He demands they get the ball down--or face the consequences in the parking lot.

“That’s just the way I am,” Slayton said. “All the pitchers know it and they can pretty much take it.”

Just as Slayton has been able to take the scouts’ lack of interest until lately. There have, after all, been similar instances in recent seasons.

In 1990, scouts flocked to Westlake to gander at Mike Lieberthal. Before Lieberthal was selected third overall by the Philadelphia Phillies in the amateur draft, scouts had recorded the names of several Warriors, such as Rob Neal.

Last season, scouts converged daily on Rio Mesa to evaluate Dmitri Young--the fourth pick overall in the draft by the St. Louis Cardinals--but not before players such as Mike Mitchell and Jon McMullen had been given some much-deserved attention.

“Now that they’ve seen Shane, they act like he is some big secret,” Maye said. “They say, ‘Hey, has anybody talked to you about your catcher?’

“Well, I think pretty much all of them have seen him play, so there’s no hiding him now.”