SPORTS NOTEBOOK / PAUL McLEOD : His Pitches Have Slowed--But He Hasn’t--After 46 Years of Play : Softball: Nagging arm trouble and a less-than-stellar year have left Joe Erwin thinking about hanging up his mitt for the last time. But no one’s counting on it.

Sometime tonight Joe Erwin will probably step off the pitching rubber at Sims Park in Bellflower for the last time. After 46 years in fast-pitch softball, the big-hearted, hard-throwing pitcher is thinking about calling it quits.

In a sport where men half his age are considered past their prime, Erwin, 65, can still get the heartiest hitters out. But his right arm hasn’t been recuperating as fast between games as he wants it to, and lightweight alloy bats and livelier softballs have made the job of a pitcher more difficult.

“I’ll just have to wait and see how my arm feels next year,” Erwin said. “It’s not really been a whole lot of fun this year. Physically it’s been tough.”

Despite minor arm troubles in the past, Erwin has been a steady performer over the years.

“He’s still pretty darn good,” said Mark Beckendorf, manager of the Stagger-Inn team and Erwin’s teammate for 18 years. “There are umpires his age who can’t believe it when he pitches.”

In his younger days Erwin was just another flame-throwing right-hander.

“It was my bread-and-butter pitch, just to stand up there and strike out everyone I faced,” he said.

But several years ago Erwin noticed he wasn’t recording as many strikeouts as he used to.

“Now he’s throwing a lot of changeups and off-speed stuff rather than throw it by them,” Beckendorf said. “He’s strictly finesse, but he still gets 20-year-old guys out.”

Erwin joined the Navy in 1943 when he was in the ninth grade. When World War II ended, he settled in Bellflower, took a job selling cars and earned a high school degree through an extension program at Compton High. Later, he owned a T-shirt screening business in Fullerton.

As a pitcher, Erwin got to the Triple-A level of semiprofessional fast-pitch softball in the post-World War II era when fast-pitch was one of Southern California’s greatest pastimes. For the past 18 years he’s played with the same group in the Bellflower city leagues.

“We’ve grown old together,” Beckendorf, 49, said of the players, many of whom are young enough to be Erwin’s sons. “When we first started together, most of the players were in their late 20s.”

Erwin got a thrill four years ago when his son, Ray, sent him to the White Sox fantasy baseball camp. Joe received a baseball card with his picture on it. The only difference: The big right-hander threw overhand for the picture.

How serious is Erwin about hanging up his spikes? He and his wife, Joan, recently moved to Phelan, a town in the high desert near Wrightwood. He commutes to Bellflower to play one night a week and says he wants to take his first vacation in nearly 20 years after he steps off the mound tonight. But leave the diamond altogether?

“I’ve heard that story for a long time,” said Joan, a retired schoolteacher. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

Five years ago a sharp chest pain knocked Chuck Hansen off his bicycle at a Bellflower intersection en route to his aerospace job 16 miles away in El Segundo. He suffered cardiac arrest.

Despite open-heart surgery and other procedures to open blocked arteries, Hansen refused to give up riding bicycles. Today he’s one of about 130 riders in the SCOR Cardiac Cyclists Club, a Whittier organization of former heart patients or people at high risk of suffering coronary ailments.

SCOR (Specialized Coronary Outpatient Rehabilitation) was founded in 1974 by physical therapist Randy Ice, who wanted to expand conditioning levels of heart patients. Club members, ranging in age from 28 to 85, pay membership fees of $12 a year and meet the third Monday of each month. On Saturdays the group assembles for rides all over Southern California.

Ice believes that peer pressure, in the form of group events, helps former coronary patients maintain conditioning levels.

“It’s easy to take people who have had a heart attack, chest pain or some other form of coronary disease and tell them to exercise,” Ice said. “They do it then because there’s a fear, a mortality factor. But after a while the fear fades. It doesn’t work as a long-term motivator. I was looking for a way to change that would be exciting, dynamically challenging and goal-setting.”

Over the years SCOR riders have set several fitness milestones, most notably a transcontinental relay ride as part of the 1992 Race Across America. Hansen was one of eight riders who took part, averaging 397 miles a day in more than seven days of cycling.

On Saturdays, 100-mile rides are common. Hansen gets in another 100 each Monday, sometimes leaving his Bellflower home for the shores of Laguna Beach.

Ice contends that SCOR provides a social outlet for many patients who have not fully recovered from the emotional strain of heart problems. For that reason the club emphasizes distance riding more than speed.

“They need to go somewhere, have some fun and ride along with somebody to talk to,” Ice said. “This helps restore their faith in themselves.”

For many members, cycling has changed their lives in other ways. Hansen, for example, retired from his aerospace job and now owns a bicycle shop in Bellflower.

Cal State Long Beach athletic officials are sprucing things up a bit. The sports teams will have new uniform colors and a new mascot, and the main gymnasium will be sporting a new name and a fresh coat of paint.

The department also has received permission from the student government to call the school Long Beach State in all of its sports publications. Several national publications and the Big West Conference have listed the university as Long Beach State, a holdover from the days when the school was known as Long Beach State College.

University sports teams will be shedding brown and gold uniforms for black, gold and white. Acting Athletic Director Dave O’Brien said the color change will save money in the long run. “You can’t get brown in any consistency when you are buying uniforms,” he said. “By going to black it gives you a readily available color.”

The 49er mascot will be replaced by a beach ball, which will provide more marketing opportunities, O’Brien said.

The 2,000-seat gym, where 49er teams were 54-3 in all sports last year, will be named The Gold Mine and receive a fresh coat of paint in the new colors. A new pyramid-shaped logo, representing a $15-million athletic facility that has yet to be built, will appear on the west wall. A new trophy shelf is expected to be completed by November and the gym will also receive new signs to direct spectators to their seats.

One of the first things O’Brien noticed when he was appointed interim athletic director last September was how dull the university’s gymnasium appeared. “Anyone who has been in our gym knows it hasn’t been painted for at least seven years,” he said.

O’Brien said the changes would cost “just a few thousand dollars” but was unable to provide more specific figures. He said he approved the refurbishing--without a specific budget--in an effort to provide an emotional lift for the student body during a severe budget crisis.