Calcante Talks a Good Game Too : Outspoken CSUN Softball Star Wasn’t Always a Hit With Matadors

Beth Calcante would like to become a firefighter, but the way friends and acquaintances tell it, she might be best suited as a downtown cabbie.

Calcante not only will tell you where to go, they say, but how to get there. If further agitated, she will suggest what to do with yourself once you have arrived. With a trace of a New York accent no less.

Which is not to say Calcante is unpopular.

It is to say that when they first met, her roommate couldn’t stand her.

It also is to say that her coach, who has booted her from the team once and benched her twice, describes Calcante as “stubborn,” “moody” and “outspoken.”

It also is to say that her father Jim, her biggest fan, says of her coach: “He’s probably treated her better than I would have if I was coaching her.”

Gary Torgeson, coach of the Cal State Northridge softball team, is a disciplinarian. But he is sensible enough to realize that if a ballplayer is talented enough to boggle his senses, then more power to her.

“With Beth, sometimes it pays to be deaf and blind,” Torgeson says. “It’s like that saying, ‘You can’t build a fire with a wet log.’

“She definitely is not a wet log. Beth is all fire and spunk. My job isn’t to stifle that, it’s to control it.”

Even if it takes a few years.

Calcante, a Newbury Park High graduate, has been worth the effort. She is batting a team-high .366 and has whacked a school-record 12 home runs for second-ranked Northridge, which will open regional playoff action against Fresno State at 1 p.m. Saturday at Matador Field.

Talented, ultra-competitive and hard-nosed, Calcante embodies the spirit of the suddenly powerful Matadors.

Forget the slap-and-run attack Northridge’s Division II champions were known for in the 1980s.

These Matadors are bashers--their 38 home runs this season is an NCAA record--and play the game fast, loose and aggressive.

Calcante leads the team in a dozen hitting categories but her influence doesn’t stop there. Calcante’s insatiable desire to improve her own game seems to have rubbed off on her teammates.

And now only occasionally does she grate the nerves of those around her.

“There still are some tough times, but she has grown up a lot,” Torgeson says of his left fielder. And maybe I ignore some things too.”

Calcante, a junior in her third season as a starter, has never had a traditional relationship with Torgeson. Though he would prefer she toe the line, she first needs to know why the line is there.

“If I don’t understand something, I’ll ask about it,” Calcante says. “That’s what really bothered him. I questioned his strategies. He would tell us to do something and I’d ask, ‘Why are we doing this?’ I wasn’t trying to get him mad at me, but that’s what usually happened. He didn’t like it at all.”

Calcante’s spontaneous inquiries are no more popular in her classrooms.

“My teacher will say something and I’ll say, ‘I don’t understand.’ And the teacher will say, ‘Well, why don’t you raise your hand?’ But seriously, there’s about 70 people in my class and if I waited for my teacher to see me, I’m probably going to forget the question,” she says.

Calcante’s incessant chirping around the diamond placed a bull’s-eye on her back before she ever played a college game. Torgeson’s first move was to test her resolve.

One time, Calcante and teammate Tamara Ivie showed up late to a fall workout, both limping with hamstring injuries. Spotting the freshmen hobbling slowly toward the field, Torgeson yelled for them to hurry.

Ivie jogged the rest of the way. Calcante maintained her snail’s pace. She claimed she could not walk any faster. Torgeson believed she would not walk any faster. He accused her of feigning the severity of her misery to skip conditioning drills.

Furious, Calcante responded with an expletive-laden tirade.

So Torgeson kicked her off the team. Calcante retorted, in so many words, that he couldn’t kick her off since she was quitting.

“She used a few choice words,” Torgeson says. “I learned early on that you don’t yell at Beth. If you do, she’ll tell you where to go.”

His voice is one of experience since she has given him pointed directions several times.

Another incident took place during the San Diego State tournament early last season.

Calcante and a teammate became embroiled in a disagreement with a Northridge assistant during a game and both were benched. Torgeson stood by his coach and ended up in a screaming match with Calcante, her father, her teammate and the teammate’s mother.

Recalls Calcante: “I had every word in the book to tell him.”

Meanwhile, the game went on.

The previous week, Calcante ignited her coach’s wrath with her animated and vocal response to his request for a bunt. In a close game against highly regarded Texas A&M;, Torgeson asked for a sacrifice with a runner at first and none out.

Calcante, who saw the signal as she was about to toe in at the batter’s box, was incredulous. “You want me to bunt?” she asked, loud enough for everyone to hear.

“Not anymore,” Torgeson replied.

Calcante popped up.

Ivie, the next batter, responded similarly when she received the bunt sign.

She looked at the coach and mouthed the word, “Bunt?”

“Forget it,” Torgeson said. “Just hit away.”

Ivie also popped up. Northridge lost, 4-3. “We had a nice little session in right field after that one,” Torgeson recalls, laughing. “It’s funny now, but it wasn’t then.”

This season, Calcante shares the team lead with 13 sacrifices--all of them put down without a word. Last summer, she worked with Torgeson as a recreation supervisor and also dated his son John.

Calcante credits Torgeson with helping her regain confidence in her throwing after she had an off-season operation to remove a cyst under her right arm.

She said she was unable to cut loose with a throw until Torgeson suggested she grip the ball with two fingers and snap her wrist when releasing the ball.

Calcante leads by example--but in a positive way.

Her most recent bunt, in the fifth inning against Utah, helped Northridge to a 1-0 victory. Torgeson didn’t even order it.

Cleared to swing away with runners at first and second, Calcante dropped a roller in front of the plate. With its infield playing deep, Utah had little chance of recording an out anywhere but first. The Utes tried anyway, and a throw to third for an attempted force play went wild. Terri Pearson, Northridge’s lead runner, scored.

Pearson says she was only mildly surprised by Calcante’s bunt, noting, “Beth has a great sense of strategy that way, and she was willing to give herself up to make the best play.”

Pearson was among several players who disliked Calcante two years ago. Now she shares an apartment with her.

“Each year, she gets a little better,” Pearson says. “I think living with her has made me a better player. She’s always so positive about the way I’m playing, she has made me a lot more confident.

Pearson, the Matadors’ leadoff hitter, had a .194 batting average in her career before this season but is batting .255 with a .353 on-base percentage and has scored a team-high 33 runs. More often than not, a hit by her roommate drives her home.

Calcante has a school-record 51 runs batted in--almost double the total of her closest teammate. With runners in scoring position, Calcante is batting .500. “I remember teasing (Calcante), telling her that she was going to make me forget how to slide,” Pearson says. “I think I played my first 20 games and never had to slide.”

Hitting always has been Calcante’s forte, although she is considered solid and versatile on defense, having played every position but pitcher, first base and right field at Northridge.

The youngest daughter of a former sandlot baseball and softball player from Brooklyn, Calcante says she has always been “Daddy’s little boy.”

At Newbury Park High, Calcante played softball, basketball, tennis and soccer. She was a good enough soccer player to attract a scholarship offer from the University of San Francisco. Instead, she accepted a partial scholarship from Northridge.

Calcante credits her father with “teaching me everything” about sports. He says involving Beth in athletics was the idea of his wife Jane.

“Beth could have been involved in dance or anything else and it wouldn’t have made a difference,” Jim says. “I just went along with the shuffle.”

Now he and Jane are regulars at any game within driving distance. Beth visually searches for them before hitting, scanning the bleachers for what she says is a quick “confidence boost.”

Jim Calcante once stood side by side with his daughter, arguing with Torgeson at San Diego State on her behalf. Now he supports them both.

“They understand each other,” he says. “It just took them a while. He knows the things she says in the heat of the moment are like the things he says in the heat of the moment.

“He’d like to take them back. She’d like to take them back.”

They do, after all, share a goal: The one place they would like to go is Oklahoma City, site of college softball’s World Series.