Snow-Ball Effect : Long Beach’s Blair Field Is Past, Present and Future for Crespi Catcher

For most Crespi High baseball players, Tuesday’s Southern Section Division I semifinal game against Esperanza is at a neutral site.

But for Casey Snow, Blair Field in Long Beach is home. “My dad’s park,” he calls it. Soon, it will be his too.

Snow, the catcher and No. 3 batter for top-seeded Crespi, is the son of Cal State Long Beach Coach Dave Snow, who will be Casey’s coach next season.

Since Dave Snow began coaching the 49ers in 1989, Casey has spent enough time at Blair Field to know every nook and cranny. Earlier this season, he cut his hand crawling over a fence to retrieve a baseball at the newly remodeled stadium.

Last month, Snow decided he might like to play on that field. He turned down Cal State Northridge and Tennessee--teams in the NCAA regionals--to accept a scholarship to play for dad.

It was the culmination of a rather awkward “recruiting” process. Snow didn’t sign with the 49ers during the early-signing period in November because he believed he would have been uncomfortable with his father as his coach. So Snow, whose parents have been divorced since he was about 4, looked outside the family for a baseball program.

“It was weird,” Casey said, “because when I was thinking of going to other places, I was asking my dad for advice and he couldn’t really say anything because he knew Long Beach was the best place for me.”

From a recruiting perspective, Snow said, his father “tried to treat me just like anyone else” and that assistants did much of the work. Snow can’t pinpoint what changed his mind, but eventually he decided that father did, in fact, know best.

Crespi Coach Scott Muckey, an assistant under Snow at Valley College in 1982, joked that Dave “saw how (Casey) was progressing and said, ‘I can’t let this go.’ I wouldn’t be surprised if his dad ordered him to go (to Long Beach).”

Casey assures it was nothing like that. He says his father is his father first, a baseball coach only when he asks.

“He doesn’t put any pressure on me,” Casey said.

It’s not as if Dave is sitting in the stands at Crespi games and practices with a stopwatch and a video camera. He has his own team to worry about. In fact, Dave is missing the pinnacle of Casey’s high school career because he is in Tallahassee, Fla., for the NCAA East Regional, in which the 49ers are the top-seeded team.

If Long Beach wins the regional and Crespi (27-2) beats Esperanza, Dave will miss the section championship game at Anaheim Stadium because he will be in Omaha, taking care of a little thing called the College World Series.

“He’d miss my graduation too,” an understanding Casey said. “Oh, well.”

That’s the downside of having a Division I baseball coach for a father. The positive is much of Dave’s baseball knowledge has probably just rubbed off on Casey. Muckey remembers a 7-year-old Casey who couldn’t get enough baseball hanging around Valley practices.

“We saw a knucklehead that you couldn’t tire out,” Muckey said. “Dave always sent the pitchers out beyond the outfield fence and said, ‘Go hit him some ground balls.’ Guys were coming back with blisters from hitting him so many ground balls.”

More recently, Casey has been looking to his father for help with the move from shortstop, where he started for Crespi the past two seasons, to catcher, where Casey played most of his youth baseball. Muckey made the switch during American Legion play last year because of injuries to both of the team’s other catchers.

“They both showed up to the field one day and neither could catch,” Muckey said, “so we said to Casey, ‘Why don’t you catch?’ And that was the game (Jeff) Suppan struck out 20.”

Suppan, Crespi’s ace right-hander, provided Snow with a challenge. From a control standpoint, Suppan is easy to catch--he averages about 10 strikeouts for every walk--but he has an above-average fastball and a sharp curve that often breaks into the dirt, giving Snow a workout.

“It was difficult when I first started trying to catch Suppan,” Snow said. “I wasn’t really used to it. Shortstop works your hands but it’s not the same as behind the plate.”

Snow’s defensive skills are perfectly fitted for either shortstop or catcher. He has soft hands that seem to control every short hop. But his arm attracts the most attention.

A catcher’s throwing is measured in part by the time it takes to get the ball from his mitt to the glove of the middle infielder at second base. Anything less than two seconds is considered major league caliber.

Snow consistently has been timed at 1.8 seconds. He does it with a combination of a rifle arm and a lightning quick release.

“As a freshman, he was doing 1.9 out of a fielder’s glove, which is harder,” Muckey said. “I’m not surprised by any of his defensive accomplishments.”

Although there are questions about Snow’s ability to hit at the next level, he handled high school pitching with ease. A switch-hitter, Snow is batting .471 with six home runs and 40 runs batted in. He has four triples, an inside-the-park home run and 11 stolen bases, evidence that he has decent speed for a catcher.

Based mostly on his defensive skills, he might be taken late in this week’s major league draft.

“He’s at a position where defense is at a premium and his work habits are such that it’s going to be tough to keep him out (of professional baseball),” Muckey said.

But with the draft starting Thursday, Snow said he is focused on playing at Blair Field, next season for his father and, more immediately, Tuesday against the Aztecs. Crespi, which is ranked 16th in the nation by USA Today, will look to continue its dream season with its 18th straight win and a berth in the section title game.

“It’s great,” Snow said. “I’ve never had so much fun playing baseball my whole life as I am now.”