No Compromise, No Apology : College World Series, Big Leagues Motivate Intense CSUN Outfielder Shockey

Sometimes when it is late and the still of the night is broken by only the rhythmic clap of his running shoes against the ground, Greg Shockey allows himself a smile.

Most people, he surmises, are either asleep or out socializing.

Shockey is in training.

“It gives me a charge,” he says. “While everybody else is out partying, I’m out there getting better.”

It is mid-morning on a spring day and Shockey is sitting in bleachers that overlook the home of the Cal State Northridge baseball team.

For four seasons he has roamed the outfield here, occasionally leaving smudges on its cement wall or kicking up divots in the grass while in pursuit of the ball. He also has left his mark in the school record book as Northridge’s all-time leader in hits, runs, doubles and runs batted in.

Yet, in terms of attaining career goals, Shockey is zero for two. For all of his intense training, he has not played in the College World Series, nor has he been drafted by a professional team.

These are facts of Shockey’s life. But they also serve as his motivation as the Matadors prepare to play Arizona State on Friday in the first round of the NCAA Midwest Regional in Wichita, Kan.

Shockey keeps a daily journal of his thoughts and recollections. The actual writings are private, but he will paraphrase.

May 26, 1991: Needing two wins to advance to the College World Series, Northridge defeats Fresno State, 6-2, in the first game. Afterward, Shockey has a soft drink and eats a hot dog. They both taste terrible. An omen of stomach turning to come. The Matadors lead the second game, 5-4, heading into the bottom of the ninth. They lose, 6-5.

“That game was ours for the taking,” Shockey says. “How quickly things transpired, though, in that last inning. . . . Even with the bases loaded I remember thinking, ‘This is not a problem. We’re going to get this thing done.’

“But we didn’t, and it was one of those things you can’t let yourself forget. That memory is with me like the wallet in my back pocket. And it’s going to stay with me until we erase it this year.”

First week of June, 1991: There are more than 1,600 selections in baseball’s amateur draft. Shockey, who says he won’t quit playing until “someone rips the uniform off me,” is not among them.

Phone calls from sympathetic family members and friends begin streaming in. Shockey, taking fishing gear and food, disappears for three days.

“I wanted to be lost,” he says. “I put every effort I had into being highly successful, playing in the College World Series, winning a national championship, getting drafted and then leaving. And for a while it looked like it was all going to happen. I had a great regional. I was going to get my turn.”

Shockey hit .474 in the regional. What if, Shockey wondered as he camped by a lake near his family’s Orange County home, he had hit .500?

“A lot of guys get drafted right out of the College World Series,” Shockey says. “I kept thinking, ‘You went 0 for three in that last game; struck out, flew out and lined out. Maybe all you needed to do was get one more hit right there.”

Later, scouts list the reasons he was passed over. There was talk he wanted too much money, and that a past injury to his left shoulder had weakened his throwing arm. And Shockey hears a more familiar theme: In terms of baseball tools--speed, arm strength, hitting and power--there are many better prospects.

Northridge Coach Bill Kernen agrees with the scouting reports. He says Shockey has an average arm, and below-average speed and power for a professional outfielder. Hitting, Kernen says, is Shockey’s best skill. But, he adds, “he’s no Robin Ventura, hitting .480 with a 50-game hit streak.”

Which is not to say that Kernen counts Shockey out when it comes to a professional career.

“He’s not Will Clark and he never will be,” Kernen says. “But there are a lot of guys who have great ability who don’t have his motor. His advantage is going to come when he gets into the daily grind of pro ball.

“They’re not going to care about flash. All they’re going to see is a guy who plays his butt off every night and who’s going to do whatever it takes to help his team win.”

Some players go out of their way to talk to scouts. Not Shockey.

“I think I should be out on the field doing my job and they should be in the stands doing theirs,” he says. “I took care of my part. Hell, I had 27 RBIs in the last month and a week of last season. I hit .366. I thought I had something coming.”

And he still feels that way, which explains why his commitment to baseball is an all-day affair. Evidence of his workout regimen pervades the off-campus apartment he shares with Donald Goines, a walk-on Northridge football player.

On both sides of the apartment’s entrance are signs of Shockey’s work. To the right is a chart he uses for exercises that strengthen his vision and concentration. To the left is a newspaper clipping of a game in which he led Northridge to a 3-1 win over UC Irvine. Scrawled in black marker on the article: “Who’s it gonna be today?” Farther down the same wall sits a weight-training machine.

Screwed into the ceiling near the corner of the living room are two hooks. They are not for hanging plants.

Shockey drapes a blanket from them, turns up the stereo to the U-2 song “One,” takes out a 34-inch, 31-ounce straight metal rod and has Goines soft-toss him a dozen golf Wiffle Balls. Shockey drives them into the blanket--and occasionally off the walls--hoping to perfect his swing.

Goines says Shockey uses the eye chart each night and reports that his roommate also is routinely seen jumping rope in the apartment’s parking complex.

“Some people probably think he’s crazy,” Goines says, “but he does whatever he thinks will make him a better player.”

Shockey chooses to train fervently because “when it’s all over, no matter how the cards stack up, I can sit back and know I did my part the whole way through. Very few people are out there doing exactly what they want to do. I am, and it’s wonderful.”

Shockey’s training is as much mental as physical. The walls around his bed are covered with newspaper clippings and posters--most of them relating to athletics.

“There is stuff up there I can’t even explain because it’s so personal and so deep that it ticks me off and I couldn’t tell anybody,” Shockey says. “The funny thing is, if someone went in there and looked, they’d say, ‘Why don’t you just put mirrors all over? What an egotistical jerk.’ But people have no idea what drives me.”

Among Shockey’s favorite athletes is former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson, whom he describes as “a serious victim of society.”

“People said, ‘He’s a short man. This other guy will take him out.’ But he just kept winning and winning and winning,” Shockey says. “It was like no one wanted to give this guy his due.”

Shockey has won awards too. He was selected to last year’s all-regional team, and as a sophomore, in Northridge’s final season in the Division II California Collegiate Athletic Assn., Shockey was second-team all-conference.

“I’m just not one of the guys people mention when it comes to All-American,” he says.

Coaches, however, know his value. The same season Shockey was second-team All-CCAA, he received one vote for conference player of the year. It came from John Herbold, a former scout and longtime coach at Cal State Los Angeles.

In a three-game, season-ending series against Herbold’s club, Shockey led a Northridge sweep by getting several key hits. He also made a diving catch while plowing into the outfield wall and scored an important run by decking Herbold’s catcher to dislodge the ball on a play at the plate.

Shockey ran into Herbold a few weeks later at the Division II World Series in Montgomery, Ala., and the coach offered a few spare passes to Shockey’s family.

“He said, ‘You are a catalyst that every club cannot do without,’ ” Shockey recalls. “He said it in passing and I was like, ‘Did I hear that right?’ Every once in a while there is someone who takes notice of what I do.”

Conversely, Shockey’s drive and constant intensity sometimes wear down his teammates and coaches.

“He’s so competitive that sometimes he’s tough to live with,” Kernen says.

For instance, Shockey has been known to blame the person feeding the pitching machine if he fails to hit a ball crisply in practice.

“His personality sometimes rubs people the wrong way, but a lot of guys even on the team just don’t know him,” says teammate Kenny Kendrena, one of Shockey’s closest friends on the team. “He takes what he does very seriously and sometimes he gets in a mode where he’s going to be right and you just can’t tell him different.”

For the most part, however, Shockey is teased rather than ridiculed.

Northridge outfielder Greg Shepard pokes fun at Shockey by making up a story about him as an infant.

“We have this running joke,” Shockey says. “Shepard says that when my dad used to look in the crib and say, ‘Say Daddy,’ I’d answer, ‘I’m the guy.’ ”

Last summer, a few months after the draft, Shockey was offered a chance to sign a professional contract as a free agent. He declined.

Though he would have been sent to a high-level Class-A league, the money wasn’t good enough, and neither was the thought that he would be selling himself short.

“I deserve to be drafted,” Shockey says.

And Kernen, for one, understands that desire.

“Basically, he wants some team to want him enough to use a pick to get him,” Kernen says. “He feels like he’s earned that, and he’s right. It’s the same reason he came here. Other people were talking to him about walking on or coming on a partial and we said, ‘Here’s a (full) scholarship.’

“He doesn’t want to be a walk-on in the pros, either.”

Shockey’s brother Scott, a first baseman, was drafted out of Pepperdine four years ago and now plays for the Oakland A’s triple-A affiliate. There always have been comparisons between the two.

“When my brother has done something to be successful and he’s stepped up there and done it, I sit back and say, ‘I accept the challenge,’ ” Shockey says. “We’ve always been competitive. We get into rag sessions, back and forth, about the numbers he had at Pepperdine and comparing them to the ones I’ve put up here.”

For one, Scott Shockey never played in the College World Series.

“When I look back, I feel fortunate to come back here and break some records and leave my mark,” Greg Shockey says. “There were things I needed to get done. This isn’t the easiest program to make it through for four years. My brother left Pepperdine with a tan. He had a great time.

“Here it’s been like the real world. It’s been about mental baseball and how to survive. We don’t have any perks here and that’s just going to make me that much tougher later on.”

Indeed, it is Shockey’s contention that the Northridge baseball team is much like himself.

“Greg Shockey doesn’t get any respect, nor does this program,” he says. “But that’s a big part of my motivational drive. In the end, I know I’m going to be a big-league baseball player.”

And then, he is convinced, he will join the likes of the players whose pictures adorn his bedroom walls. Don Mattingly. George Brett. Kevin Maas. Will Clark.

“Those guys have gone out and achieved what they wanted to achieve,” Shockey says. “And the best part about it for me is that I can rationalize it. They’re human beings. They’re just like me. That could be me.”

Which is why he sleeps with a smile.

“Every night before I go to bed I kneel and say my prayers,” Shockey says. “I say, ‘Our Lady Queen of Victory, pray for us,’ and ‘Our Lady Queen of Peace, pray for us,’ then I look up at the stuff on my walls and I just can’t wait to wake up.”