All Hoover High Star Wanted Was to Be Wanted . . . by Someone : Dishington Finds Home at Plate

Three months ago, Nate Dishington was a quarterback playing baseball.

The Hoover High senior had just spent an exhausting few months trying to coax some school, any school, into giving him a football scholarship. Finally, just before the baseball season, he jumped at an offer to play quarterback at Fresno State.

“I kept asking him if he was going to play baseball in college and he said no,” teammate Chris Butler said. “His dream was to play college football.”

The equation is significantly different today.

Dishington was selected by the St. Louis Cardinals in the second round of baseball’s amateur draft two weeks ago. Based on the signing bonuses last year’s second-round picks collected, the Cardinals are likely to offer Dishington in excess of $100,000.

Dishington, one of about 40 area seniors who will play in the annual Bernie Milligan all-star baseball game at 3:30 p.m. today at Cal State Northridge, was the first player from the area drafted, picked ahead of players with much stronger baseball credentials. He was selected before Jeff Suppan, The Times’ Valley player of the year who has committed to UCLA. Before David Lamb (Pepperdine). Before Brad Fullmer (Stanford). Before every other high school catcher in the country, actually.

“I never considered myself one of the elite,” Dishington said. “I just did my job and I got noticed. I had no idea this was going to happen.”

He’s not alone.

Although Dishington thought of himself as a football player in the fall and a baseball player in the spring, he certainly distinguished himself more throwing a football than swinging a bat.

He lived with his mother in New Mexico during his sophomore year, when he played both sports. He returned to Glendale to live with his father for his junior season, starting at quarterback and passing for 659 yards on a 1-9 team. In the spring, he batted .333 with four home runs and 20 runs batted in for a fourth-place 11-9 team.

Last fall, Dishington passed for 1,763 yards, but the Tornadoes stumbled to another 1-9 record. At 6-foot-3, 210 pounds and capable of throwing a football 60 yards, he seemingly should have received at least one offer to play Division I football. His phone didn’t ring.

“When you play on a losing team, you don’t draw much interest,” Dishington said.

But Hoover baseball Coach Bob Cooper had a friend involved in college football recruiting who knew the coaches to call and the strings to pull to find Dishington a spot at Fresno State.

So Dishington began the baseball season “on a football high from getting my scholarship,” he said. However, his football dreams were interrupted by an increasing number of scouts who wanted to talk about baseball.

Relatively unknown as a baseball player before the season, Dishington rose as a prospect when he moved from first base to catcher around midseason. Dishington was a catcher until his freshman year, when he stopped playing the position because he had bad knees and couldn’t handle all the crouching. But this year, his knees were fine so he asked Cooper to return behind the plate.

“I guess he was afraid I would go back there and make a fool of myself,” Dishington said. “But we needed some leadership back there.”

That’s where Dishington the quarterback fuses with Dishington the catcher. He takes a football mentality behind the plate. To understand, all you have to do is close your eyes and listen to him play.

“If we do something bad or good, he’ll let us know either way,” said Butler, a junior outfielder who also played football with Dishington.

So Dishington was a big, left-handed hitting, loud catcher. Nice, but so what?

How about this: Coinciding with his move behind the plate, he embarked on a blistering offensive tear. He had 19 hits in his final 28 at-bats of the season, including two playoff games. In that 10-game stretch, he hit six home runs and knocked in 25 runs, almost an RBI for every at-bat.

“He was inhuman,” Butler said. “I couldn’t believe it. He was killing the ball. Every time up, you could count on him coming through.”

He was a major part of the Tornadoes’ Pacific League championship and 19-6 overall record.

“The Lord just really blessed me the last part of the season,” said Dishington, who belongs to a Christian youth group. “I figured everything out. Everything just fell into place.”

That’s when the fun started.

Suddenly, the phone was ringing day and night. About 20 teams contacted him, Dishington said. Scouts came to practice. They kept him late, pitching extra batting practice to him to examine his swing. He went to Irvine to work out for the Detroit Tigers, to Anaheim for the Chicago White Sox, to Van Nuys for the Cleveland Indians.

Scouts would take him and his family to dinner for so-called “signability meetings,” an increasingly important part of the scouting process in which teams attempt to discover how much money a player wants before he will sign a contract.

“It was stressful because everyone wanted a piece of me at the same time,” Dishington said. “I was meeting with two scouts a night. They wanted me to take these psychoanalysis tests, which are 200-question, multiple-choice things. I must have taken 10 of those.

“Then again, you have to keep in perspective that most high school kids would kill to be in my position.”

Dishington finished the season with a .529 average, 10 home runs and 45 RBIs. The game in which he really sold himself as a high-round pick was probably the Tornadoes’ first-round Southern Section playoff victory over Royal. Dozens of scouts watched as he hit two doubles, a triple and a home run in four at-bats.

The Cardinals took Dishington with the second pick in the second round, 44th overall. St. Louis had the selection from the Dodgers as compensation for the Dodgers’ signing free agent Todd Worrell.

“I drafted him for his bat,” Cardinal scout Chuck Fick said. “He’s a specimen. Swings like his come along once every 10 years.”

Fick said Dishington reminds him of Roy Hobbs, the fictional slugger played by Robert Redford in the film, “The Natural.”

Dishington’s defense needs work, though, Fick said. If he signs, the Cardinals probably would assign Dishington to rookie-level Johnson City, Tenn., of the Appalachian League and move him to first base or the outfield, letting him catch once or twice a week until he really learns the position, Fick said.

“If you get him playing baseball every day, living it, sleeping it, eating it, drinking it, he’s a comer,” Fick said

On draft day, Dishington was sure he would sign. But in the time since, he has come down from the clouds, he said, and realized the choice is not as simple as he thought.

“It’s going to be hard to give up football because of he competitiveness,” he said. “And there is that closeness that you just don’t get in baseball.”

Technically, Dishington could play professional baseball and be eligible to play college football, but Dishington said he won’t do that.

After a lifetime of splitting his seasons, he is ready to choose one or the other.

“You can’t serve two masters,” he said. “Whatever I decide, I want to put 100% of my energy into it.”