Fatur Hits for Calabasas Like the Ball Is Still on a Tee

The average high school baseball player considers three strikeouts a bad day at the plate. Brian Fatur considers it a bad season.

Fatur, a junior leadoff hitter for Calabasas High, has fanned three times in two varsity seasons and 113 plate appearances. He’s batting .463, leads the region with 36 stolen bases and is becoming more of a badly kept secret with every game.

And to think, the only thing Fatur swung when he first entered Calabasas was a golf club.

As a freshman, Fatur chose to play golf after discovering that it and baseball, his sports of choice as a youngster, were played during the same season.

Calabasas baseball co-coaches Rick Nathanson and Scott Drootin were willing to let Fatur play both.

But golf coach Bill Bellatty balked at the idea, so Fatur helped the Coyote golf team win a Frontier League title.

By the middle of his sophomore year however, Fatur was itching to swing at pitched balls.

He played with a Calabasas team in a winter league and hit a home run against Crespi in his first organized baseball game since the eighth grade.

That and other impressive performances persuaded Fatur to hit the diamond and abandon the links.

He started a majority of the Coyotes’ baseball games last season as an outfielder but with Calabasas boasting a talented batting order, he rarely was allowed to bat for himself.

“At first I really wanted to hit but I dealt with it,” said Fatur, who had little room to argue as Calabasas rolled to a 25-0 record before being beaten.

Drootin, who calls Fatur the best athlete to come through the Coyote program in the past five years, said the limited role only whetted Fatur’s appetite for baseball.

“I think it made him hungry,” Drootin said. “He was on the bench but he was observant and he realized this was what he really wanted to play.”

That desire has been glaringly evident this season, for Fatur jump-starts the Calabasas offense as soon as he steps into the batter’s box. He has driven in 20 runs and despite an admitted lack of skill at getting a jump off base, has been caught stealing only twice.

“If we didn’t put the clamps on him, he’d go on his own almost every time,” Nathanson said. “But he can score on almost any kind of a base hit so why force the issue?”

Fatur is a natural at running down fly balls, and during practices challenges Drootin to try to drop balls in the gaps on either side of him.

Aside from that playful banter, Fatur is decidedly unprovocative and modest.

“I think I’ve just been lucky,” he said. “The ball’s fallen in everywhere, I’ve beaten out a lot of grounders and gotten a lot of good calls.”

Fatur hopes to make a good impression on a Cleveland Indian scout league team next winter and to earn a college scholarship or be drafted next year.

As for golf, he doesn’t expect a repeat of last summer, when he performed well in about a dozen Junior PGA events in California.

“I was about a 10-handicap when I stopped playing [before baseball season],” Fatur said. “But if I played now I’d be spraying balls all over the place.”

He already is.

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Nearly 2 1/2 months after the end of the 1995-96 soccer season, it appears that neither of the region’s top two boys’ goal-scorers will compete at the NCAA Division I level after graduating this spring.

Coaches from high-caliber Division I programs have been reluctant to commit scholarship money to Palmdale’s Murad Dibbini, who scored 41 goals in the comparatively weak Golden League, or La Canada’s Nick Andrus, who scored 37 goals but suffered a knee injury in September of 1994.

Dibbini has narrowed his college choices to NAIA universities Kansas Wesleyan and Westmont.

“I got into club soccer too late,” said Dibbini, who has played only one season in its tougher competition. “I played on [American Youth Soccer Organization] teams since I was four years old but you’re not going to get noticed in AYSO. Club [soccer] has bigger tournaments and college scouts.”

If Dibbini chooses Kansas Wesleyan, he will likely be reunited with his brother, Mike, who graduated from Palmdale in 1994.

Mike Dibbini, a two-time Golden League player of the year, scored 88 goals in his final two seasons at Palmdale but was similarly snubbed by NCAA Division I programs and has been an All-American at Bethany Lutheran Junior College in Mankato, Minn., the past two years.

Murad said his brother will transfer to Kansas Wesleyan and he is leaning toward joining him.

“I’m not too disappointed about not playing [Division I],” said Murad, who carries a 3.95 grade-point average. “The most important thing is to get an education and if I do that and can play soccer too, I’m happy.”

As for Andrus, some college coaches say he was a step slow before the knee injury and that he benefited from playing on a talent-laden La Canada team that has won 50 consecutive matches and back-to-back Southern Section titles.

La Canada Coach Lou Bilowitz said Andrus has committed to Claremont-Mudd, an NCAA Division III school, after being offered scholarship money from several low-caliber Division I programs and chances to walk on with some higher-profile teams.

Bilowitz said Andrus, a straight-A student, hopes to play well enough with the Stags to attract scholarship attention from Division I schools noted for both academics and soccer.

“[Andrus is] the most-talented finisher I’ve ever seen on the high school level,” said Bilowitz, who in 1994-95 coached Josh Henderson, a 41-goal scorer for the Spartans who played at Duke last season.

“With so many people hung up on playing Division I at all costs I think his decision shows a lot of maturity.”