Left on Deck : After Giving Up Football, Landress Goes Bust Banking on Baseball

Oblivious to the rain dribbling upon his close-cropped chestnut hair, a stoic Jim Landress swung a baseball bat slowly and evenly, as if the weight of the game was balancing on his sturdy shoulders.

The score was 3-2, the American Legion game was in its final inning, and his Central Valley team was down to its final strike.

The Valley South pitcher coiled and unleashed a low fastball, a pitch Landress could handle.

Sean Lavery swung and missed.

Once again, Landress was left on deck, waiting his turn.

Just a year ago, Landress was considered an athletic prodigy, the starting quarterback and stalwart center fielder for Granada Hills High, hyped by the media, destined for greatness.

Baseball scouts had been hounding Landress and his father, Steve, the coach at Cleveland High, since he was a freshman at Notre Dame.

Steve’s son was strong, swift, self-effacing.

Still is. Yet now the scouts don’t come around. All the predestination was premature.

Landress was not among the more than 1,500 players selected in this month’s major league draft. And Landress--despite an acceptable Scholastic Assessment Test score--did not receive an NCAA Division I scholarship offer.

Among scouts, there were rumors of a chronically sore knee and of steroid use, which Landress denies.

More damaging, though, was reality, which strikes so many sureshots for stardom: In athletics, the talent supply far exceeds the demand.

“If I get a chance, I think I can play at the next level,” Landress said, his eyes tracing the dugout ceiling. “But somebody’s got to give me a chance.”

Marty Siegel, a Cleveland High and Central Valley assistant, said: “He is as good a ballplayer as anyone in the Valley, at any position. I’ve been here 25 years, and he’s as good as any I’ve seen. He does everything you could ask--all kinds of extra-base hits, great arm, runs well. And yet the scouts say he had a bad year.”

By the numbers, Landress had a good year. He batted .365, drove in 31 runs, scored 25 and smacked three home runs. He made the All-City Section team for the second consecutive season, and was selected most valuable player of his league. In Legion ball, he is batting .640. In the Bernie Milligan All-Star game Saturday he singled home the winning run, beating out a dinker to short on his purportedly gimpy knees.

Landress, 6 feet 1, 175 pounds, quit football after his junior year at Granada Hills to concentrate on baseball--this despite overtures from recruiters representing Colorado and Oklahoma State.

“I really thought baseball would be my ticket,” Landress said. “Football, I was good, but I didn’t like it as much as I did baseball.”

“I don’t know if he could have moved on to college in football,” said Tom Harp, then football coach at Granada Hills, “but he certainly had all the tools.”

Landress crammed all his tools into the batter’s box, but he failed to hammer out his 1994 output, which included a .443 average and 10 doubles.

“He just showed no improvement,” said Bob Hughes, a Milwaukee Brewer scout. “He peaked.”

Hughes noted that Landress appeared to lose foot speed between his junior and senior years--possibly an indirect consequence of his football decision.

Said Landress’ father, who coaches him in Legion: “The sad thing is, if he had played football, he wouldn’t have gone water skiing in September, and it was then that he shattered his kneecap.”

The knee has healed. The ego is still bruised.

Landress said that his father fretted more about the draft omission than he did. His words betray his nonchalance, however: “I played with all the guys who got drafted from around here, Darrell Dent, Jon Tucker. I thought I would get drafted in the later rounds. I know I can play with any of them, but. . . . “

According to more than one scout, a rumor circulated associating Landress with steroid use, an allegation of which Landress said he was unaware.

“I would be huge then,” said Landress, whose weight did not fluctuate between his sophomore and senior years. “No, I would never do that. Never.”

Many scouts say they disregard such speculation, a claim that may be difficult in practice. In an earlier era, scouts had time to dine with a prospect and his family, carefully constructing an analysis of his personality as well as his proficiency, a situation in which the amiable Landress would thrive. Today’s breakneck pace renders such scrutiny a rarity. Judgments often are rendered from one viewing, one encounter, one rumor. And Landress lacks one overwhelming skill to wow a talent critic: he is adroit at everything, spectacular at nothing.

“Unfortunately, that’s the nature of the beast,” Hughes said. “Sometimes the kid just doesn’t show enough potential in an area to go to the next level.”

Though Landress does not regret renouncing football, he winces when recalling his sub-par performance at baseball’s critical Area Code games, when he admittedly cracked under the gaze of 600 scouts’ eyes, in an atmosphere he dubbed a “meat market.”

His father only regrets that Jim, who will graduate next week from Granada Hills with a 2.5 grade-point average, solved the SAT riddle belatedly.

“If he had passed the SAT his junior year, he might have gotten a four-year scholarship,” Steve Landress said. “Some guys can do it in the classroom. Jim is a genius on the athletic field.”

His next home field will likely be at Pierce or Moorpark colleges, where he would pursue both football and baseball.

“I would like to say I played in the minor leagues, that I played college ball, maybe coached a bit,” Landress said. “This game has been good to me so far.”

As it has to Mike Schultz, a 10th-grade teammate on Central Valley. Built like a stick of Carefree with a demeanor to match, Schultz is the hotshot du jour. He leads Legion with an 0.31 earned-run average over 23 innings.

“I was talking to a scout from the Mets,” said Siegel, who coaches Schultz at Cleveland. “I mentioned Schultz. And he told me, ‘Oh, we all know about him.’ Already.”

As Landress trudged off from the game Thursday, his turn at-bat yet another could-have-been, Schultz swaggered out of the dugout. Accustomed to scouts eyeing him, just as they once eyed Landress, Schultz barely acknowledged the attention. His future? “I plan on going to the pros.”

But do the pros plan on having him? As Jim Landress knows, the on-deck circle is overcrowded.