Final Out Put Signature on CSUN Season : College baseball: Matadors’ campaign was a disaster, from opening sweep at Cal Poly SLO to elimination at Fresno State.

The youngster held out a baseball and pen to Cal State Northridge first baseman Jason Shanahan, who seemed a little surprised, if not shellshocked.

Five minutes earlier, Shanahan had been thrown out at the plate in an 8-7 loss to Fresno State for the final, ignominious out of the season. Shanahan was still picking dirt from between his teeth when he fielded the request for his John Hancock. In Fresno, no less.

Shanahan palmed the ball, paused as he smiled and shook his head, then signed his name. Maybe he should have added as a postscript, Wait Till Next Year.

“The wounded dog is finally dead,” pitcher Keven Kempton said. “Man, I’ve sat in my room for hours trying to figure out what went wrong.”

In 1991, Northridge ended its first season at the NCAA Division I level with a loss in the championship game of the West Regional at Fresno State. Three years later, the Matadors capped their most frustrating season under Coach Bill Kernen in the same ballpark.

Other than the site, the circumstances were completely different. Northridge finished 25-30 this season, posting its first losing record in Kernen’s six years as coach. Under Kernen, the Matadors went to the NCAA playoffs three times in as many years at the Division I level.

“I’m looking at this as having an opportunity to learn from failure,” Kernen said. “Can you really appreciate winning until you’re lost?”

The Matadors opened the season ranked 27th in Collegiate Baseball’s preseason poll and had a pair of returning pitchers--right-handers Keven Kempton and Marco Contreras, who combined to win 18 games as juniors. What’s more, another starting pitcher, John Najar, pitched as well as anybody during the off-season.

Northridge opened the spring with a three-game series on the road against Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, a solid Division II team. It was the beginning of SLO death. . . . The Matadors lost all three games--and soon lost Kempton and Najar to arm injuries.

By season’s end, five of nine pitchers on the opening-day roster were disabled.

Because of injury and attrition, only 14 of the 23 players who opened the season were still available to play in the season finale.

Not surprisingly, Northridge lost six of its last seven games with the skeleton crew, though the Matadors weren’t eliminated from the weak Western Athletic Conference West Division race until the season’s penultimate game.

Trouble appeared on other fronts. In January, after the Northridge earthquake rocked the campus, the team was forced to practice in a public park and a handful of games scheduled for Matador Field were played on the road.

The cinder-block outfield wall at Matador Field, abhorred by coaches and players alike, was damaged in the temblor. There was talk of replacing it with a more forgiving chain-link fence.

Instead, it was rebuilt. The replacement blocks are gray, the old ones black. Only Al Davis would like the incongruent color scheme.

Cracked Kernen: “The Berlin Wall came down easier than that damn thing.”

All in all, just another brick in the wall. From calamity to comedy, 1994 had it all. No matter was too picayune. These poor guys even violated the school dress code.

Team caps, which long had featured a capital N as the logo, were deep-sixed. School administrators sought consistency in athletic apparel for marketing reasons. Softball team caps feature a Matador caricature and his flowing red cape, for instance.

Ole! The baseball team did a sidestep. Said one player: “Nobody wearing knee sox goes on my head.”

The compromise wasn’t any better. Instead, players wore hats with CAL STATE NORTHRIDGE emblazoned in capital letters across the front.

“Bookstore hats,” players grumbled.

Call Kernen the Mad Hatter. By midseason, the coach figured out that Northridge’s struggles were as attributable to a poor work ethic as to mediocre talent.

Perturbed by a handful of players who were skipping class, arriving late for practices and playing selfishly, he nearly pulled the plug.

Before a March 30 game with Cal Lutheran, Kernen trashed the clubhouse and refused to allow his players to wear their uniform tops. The team played in their black undershirts. Most of the starters were benched, forcing pitchers to play afield.

“We had guys who refused to be trained,” Kernen said. “They never signed up for (the program). We were never a team.”

During the Cal Lutheran fiasco, players hoisted the American flag over the clubhouse to half-mast, which later drew criticism from athletic department officials.

Kernen was so miffed at his players’ often lethargic manner that he rescued his old cap, the one with the capital N, from the mothballs because he didn’t want to wear the same chapeau as his players.

Kernen, whose three-year contract runs through 1996, is chasing hard-hat types to help turn the program around next spring.

“Our problems all go back to the central issue,” he said. “I didn’t do a good job of recruiting over the last couple of years. I didn’t get enough good kids in terms of talent and character.”

As a result, he has been pounding the recruiting trail. He no longer will rely on the evaluations and recommendations of others.

So Kernen is recruiting “animals.” But they need to be the right kind.

The coach “X’d out” one prospect when Kernen saw the player heave his equipment all over the field during a game.

“We’ve got guys who can do that already,” Kernen cracked.

This is a program whose lifeblood has been overachievers who refused to be outworked by other teams.

Sure, Kernen would love to unearth some unknown like Chan Ho Park, but he’d rather make Matador Field a gung-ho park.

Of course, that still takes talent.

“Willie Shoemaker won 8,833 races,” Kernen said. “And he never once carried the horse across the finish line.”

When Kernen was an assistant at Cal State Fullerton, he used to keep a note taped to his mirror. It read: Recruiting is like shaving. Do it every day or you look like a bum.

“This year I definitely looked homeless,” he said.

The note is back on his mirror.

Northridge already has signed four players to letters of intent and has made offers to several others.

Expect some changes next season, including a larger roster in addition to plenty of new faces. Kernen plans to sit down with players over the next few days to discuss their respective futures. Some doubtlessly will be elsewhere next year.

Among those who won’t return, of course, are seniors Joey Arnold, Keyaan Cook and Contreras. To some degree, their final season of eligibility was sacrificed so that Kernen could right the ship.

“I can’t lie and say I wasn’t disappointed,” Contreras said. “But I don’t question the way (Kernen) went about it. He had to do what he had to do and I respect him enough not to question it.”

Said Kempton, who will be a senior in 1995: “Kernen was right where he needed to be (in taking action). He put his reputation on the line and we let him down. He took a lot of heat and we didn’t back him up.”

Kempton, recovering from reconstructive elbow surgery, already has his own catch phrase for next season: “Alive in ’95.”

He might just as easily have chosen: “No More Like ’94.”

“We need to get cocky again,” Kempton said. “We need to get the feeling back. We can’t let this happen again.”