For Gillespie, It’s Catch as Catch Can : Often-Reluctant Receiver to Start as Freshman at CSUN

When Eric Gillespie was playing Little League baseball as a 10-year-old, a relative somehow caught him on film wearing full catcher’s gear. Tools of the trade? A trade of the tools for his infielder’s glove quickly was made.

A few horrific, fleeting moments behind the plate were enough. Not so remarkably, Gillespie pulled up lame after his first inning at catcher. Rather, he pulled up with a lame excuse.

Find another volunteer, he said.

“I hated it,” Gillespie said. “I faked an injury to get out of there. I said the ball hit my finger or something.”

Eight years later, the fickle finger of fate has again singled out Gillespie. He is back behind the plate, and in an NCAA Division I program. In addition, he will start as a freshman as Cal State Northridge opens the 1994 baseball season today at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

When the photograph was taken, the gear looked as if it was manufactured for a much larger player. Somewhere, wrapped in all that armor, was Gillespie.

“He looks very serious,” his father Richard said, describing the photo. “All the equipment looks too big. Even the glove looks too big.”

Gillespie was practically bribed to get back in catcher’s gear. As a sophomore third baseman at Millikan High in Long Beach, he was asked by his coach to consider trying out behind the plate. Might get some at-bats that way, the coach said. Otherwise, no guarantees.

Said Gillespie: “No way.”

Consequently, Gillespie hardly played. The following year, the coach repeated the question and Gillespie made the transition. Despite Gillespie’s unfamiliarity at the position, Millikan won a Southern Section 5-A Division title during his junior year.

That Gillespie proved to be a quick study should surprise nobody. Gillespie (5-foot-10, 190 pounds) stands apart from most of his teammates in several respects.

Gillespie, whose high school grade-point average was 3.8, was offered an academic scholarship to Washington State. He is taking pre-med classes.

“He’s not a genius,” his father said, “he just works very hard.”

Gillespie, who as a senior batted .390 and drove in 20 runs, is probably the only player at Northridge with Mozart cassettes in his car. His mother forced him to begin taking piano lessons at age 6. Now, he can’t get enough of it. On a given day, Gillespie can be found banging out tunes on the piano in the student union building.

“I get lost in the piano sometimes,” he said. “I like performing for people. I wish I had more time for it.”

When Gillespie was in high school, he played in the Millikan jazz ensemble and had a couple of paying gigs with a band he helped throw together. Nothing glamorous, really. The band played at a local rib joint and for a group of senior citizens over Christmas break.

Of course, Gillespie, 18, is very much the whippersnapper on the Matador roster. In fact, he is the team’s lone freshman. Since Gillespie had nobody with whom to compare notes, Mike Sims volunteered as his mentor.

For the past few weeks, Gillespie has been the apprentice, Sims the taskmaster. Sims, an Alemany High graduate who started 227 of 232 Matador games at catcher over the past four seasons before he was drafted by the Florida Marlins in June, has been spending hours each day with the freshman.

“Everything in his head, he wants to put in mine,” Gillespie said.

Sims means everything. Four years back, Sims recalls waking up in the middle of the night in a fit of panic, a cold sweat. He had just experienced his first baseball-related nightmare, which centered on a particularly hellish blocking drill to which Gillespie also has been subjected. In the dream, baseballs are rocketed by a pitching machine into the dirt at home, beating the catcher into a purple pulp.

“Ever have that dream?” Sims asked recently.

“Uh, no,” Gillespie said, a strange look crossing his face.

“You will,” Sims countered.

A few days later, Gillespie did.

Their situation is comparable, but not identical. In some respects, Sims says he had it made. When Sims was a freshman, the NCAA allowed considerably more practice time--the hours have since been reduced. Sims said the off-season schedule gave him a year’s worth of experience in a few short weeks.

What’s more, Northridge was playing at the Division II level at the time, and as Gillespie soon will learn, there’s a world of difference between Cal State Stanislaus and Cal State Fullerton.

“I had it easy,” Sims said. “Compared to him.”

Comparisons? Sims said Gillespie stands head and shoulders above most players his age. That is, his smarts and arm should make the challenge easier.

“He’s got a better arm than I do,” Sims said. “I know he takes a better hack than me.”

Gillespie, in fact, will be given a chance to hack and chop with the team’s best. In a pair of scrimmages the past two weekends, Gillespie, who bats left-handed, has been inserted in the sixth and fifth slots in the lineup.

“He’s gonna have to grow up pretty fast,” Northridge Coach Bill Kernen said. “It’s on-the-job training.”

Unlike many Division I coaches, Kernen lets his catchers call their own game. Throw in the fact that pitching is expected to be the strength of the team and Gillespie becomes a focal point.

How the Matador pitchers react to a catcher with peach-fuzz on his face remains a question mark. When Sims was a freshman, pitcher Val Lopez used to shake off his signs routinely.

“Sometimes, he’d shake me off, shake me off, shake me off, then we’d go all the way back around to what I first called,” Sims said. “He wanted to show me he was in charge.”

Gillespie isn’t sure how the staff will react if there is a difference of opinion on pitch selection. He will be expected to learn each pitcher’s strengths and weaknesses as well as their personalities. Preferably, by yesterday.

“Hopefully, I’ll call what he wants to throw and he’ll throw what I want to call,” Gillespie said. “I’ve been thinking a lot about that. It’s not my job for them to like me, I guess.”

It’s all part of the immersion process. Sink or swim. Sims said his head was spinning so much as a freshman that he used to tape notes on opposing batters to his left wrist.

“I don’t expect (Gillespie) to be perfect,” Kernen said. “There’s going to have to be some patience.

“But the thing I learned (from Sims) is that it can be done.”

Gillespie was discovered by accident. Last spring, Northridge assistant P.C. Shaw drove to El Segundo to watch Millikan face Simi Valley in a tournament game. Shaw was scouting another player when Gillespie caught his eye,

The only other school to pursue Gillespie athletically was Chapman, which is moving to Division III. The decision on which school to attend wasn’t difficult. Ever since, Gillespie has been caught up in a cyclone of activity.

And to think that two years ago he wouldn’t have been, well, caught dead behind the plate. Now he’s starting as a freshman for a team ranked 27th in the nation.

Enough to make Gillespie dizzy.

“If I started thinking about all this,” Gillespie said with a smile, “it might start bothering me.”

* MATADOR PREVIEW C12