CLU Has Becker Feeling Safe at Home

John Becker finally joined a program for people like himself.

“I knew I was going to be with guys who have been bounced around, who haven’t had the breaks,” Becker said. “I knew I’d be with people just like me.”

It sounds like a 12-step program, but Becker is talking about joining the Cal Lutheran baseball team after a tumultuous college career that had him traversing the state and wearing three other baseball uniforms before he found the perfect fit.

Welcome to Cal Lutheran, the last outpost.

“That’s basically what this is,” Becker said. “There are a lot of quality guys here who could be Division I or Division II. Basically, you just end up here.”

Becker is among the best in the latest crop of baseball players who annually fall through the cracks until landing at the Thousand Oaks campus, helping Cal Lutheran become one of the nation’s top Division III programs.

Becker (6 feet 2, 190 pounds) has brought a powerful swing and a sharp eye. Before Tuesday night’s game at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, he had a .343 average with a team-leading seven home runs and 25 runs batted in. He had a .688 slugging percentage. Last season, Becker hit .368 with 14 home runs and 44 RBIs, earning third-team All-American honors.

“He’s turned into a pretty good find,” Coach Marty Slimak said with a touch of understatement.

But it’s Becker who has benefited more. After being an All-City first baseman at Valley High in Sacramento, Becker’s baseball career began to take a series of sharp turns, sometimes careening into ditches.

After graduating in 1990, Becker played at Sacramento State. Well, he practiced there, anyway.

During fall practice he was the fifth first baseman on the depth chart, buried behind two seniors, a returning sophomore and a junior transfer.

The prospect of a couple of years on the bench combined with a class schedule he hated and a campus full of strangers made Becker steadily less enthusiastic about the college baseball experience.

And this was in the first few months.

One day in October 1990, after he skipped his classes and baseball practice to lay in bed for the second day in a row, he got a call from one of the Sacramento State coaches.

“I just said, ‘Coach, I’m burned out. I quit,’ ” Becker said. “I basically took the easy way out, put my tail between my legs and ran.”

Becker spent the next spring taking classes and working in a mail room for the state government.

But that quickly soured too. Once the major league season started and Becker began watching games on TV, he realized he needed to be on a field, not in a mail room, so he enrolled at Cosumnes River College in Sacramento.

He picked up where he left off in high school, starting at first base in 1992 and hitting .350 with 43 RBIs, earning All-Bay Valley Conference honors for the Chiefs, who won the conference title.

He did well enough that when he approached coaches from San Diego State about transferring, they welcomed him.

One problem, though: NCAA rules say a player who goes from a four-year school to a two-year school and back to a four-year school must have an Associate of Arts degree to be immediately eligible.

Becker was one unit short.

He said he knew it might be a problem, “but I rolled the dice,” and went to San Diego anyway.

But because he would have had to sit out the 1993 season at San Diego State, and because he had another year of junior college eligibility, Aztec Coach Jim Dietz told Becker he should go back to Cosumnes River and play at San Diego State in 1994. Becker said his impression was that a scholarship would be waiting for him.

“I started off all right (at Cosumnes River), then the calls stopped coming from San Diego,” Becker said.

The Aztecs no longer needed Becker after recruiting Travis Lee, who became a freshman All-American last season when he batted .339 and stole 34 bases.

Becker’s production at Cosumnes fell as quickly as his stock with the Aztecs. He hit .200. While his average went down, his anger rose.

“I would come home and look up on the wall and there would be a picture or something that would infuriate me,” Becker said. “I was angry. Every day I was angry. Things weren’t going right.”

A witness to that year was Greg Koch, a pitcher at Cosumnes River and a friend of Becker’s since childhood.

“It really threw him for a loop,” Koch said. “He was disappointed about not being able to play (at San Diego State). And he had to come back and face everyone (at Cosumnes River).

“If you’re a baseball player, it feels kind of demeaning. It’s like if you’re in double A and they send you back to single A.”

During that horrible season, though, Becker and some of his teammates were recruited by Cal Lutheran. Or, more accurately, Becker’s teammates were recruited by Cal Lutheran.

“(Becker) didn’t have that great of a year there,” Slimak said “We weren’t even recruiting him.”

But Slimak finally realized what he might have, and Cal Lutheran came up with enough financial aid to get him into school.

Since then, Becker has been in a nonstop groove. He started 32 of Cal Lutheran’s 36 games last spring, getting better toward the end of the year.

His season culminated with a five-game performance at the NCAA Division III West Regional that was so dominating he was named the tournament’s most valuable player, even though Cal Lutheran lost to UC San Diego.

Becker was eight for 20 with four home runs and 11 RBIs in the Regional. He said the circuitous route he had taken to the Regional made him appreciate being there, and might have put a little more oomph behind his swing.

“All I wanted was to be in the Regional,” he said. “People I knew, that I didn’t really like, I saw them going through and it made me jealous. All I wanted to was be in the situation to be there, and I finally was. But I was really heartbroken that we didn’t go to the World Series.”

That’s why Becker, who always finds luck in something, wears his West Regional T-shirt under his uniform at games to remind him of this year’s goal: getting back to the postseason and taking the next step.

Cal Lutheran began Tuesday 17-9, ranked ninth in the latest Division III poll. Two teams from the West will go to the postseason, and one of them is likely to be third-ranked La Verne, which swept Cal Lutheran in a three-game Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference series early in the season.

The Kingsmen have made their case for the second spot by sweeping a doubleheader at UC San Diego.

Remaining key games are the Tritons’ visit to Cal Lutheran April 24 and a three-game series April 28-29 against Pomona-Pitzer, which is tied with Cal Lutheran for second in the SCIAC.

Such games are often the talk over Cheerios at the three-bedroom apartment shared by Becker, five of his senior teammates and one former teammate.

Becker’s roommates--outfielders Ray Arvisu, Jeff Marks and Chad Miyata, designated hitter Kirk Fellows and pitcher Kevin Koschik--also came to Cal Lutheran from junior colleges. And they all probably had Division I aspirations shot down at some point.

And they all look at this season as a last chance.

“We all want to be there so bad, you can see it eating at us,” Becker said. “We are paying a lot of money, a lot of loans, to be here. We’re basically paying to play.”

It’s been worth it for Becker, who crossed the state several times in search of a first base bag he could call home.

“After all the bouncing around I ended up here,” he said. “And everything’s worked perfectly.”