Chapman Keeps Up in Baseball

He was a baseball coach with a 15-game winner. Not a pitcher; that was his team.

His Bad News Panthers played 51 games and lost 36 of them. They played .294 as a team and they batted .240 as a team. They lost seven games in a row and they lost 14 games in a row. They lost, 15-0, to Cal Lutheran and they lost, 10-0, to Azusa Pacific. They finished last in their league and lost all but six players to graduation and general attrition.

Anyone sizing up the situation knew Mike Weathers had only three options. He could:

a) Retire.

b) See if Augie Garrido needed another assistant at Cal State Fullerton.

c) Find a job with better growth potential for 1992--say, presidential campaign manager for Larry Agran or season-ticket salesman for the Angels.

Weathers, however, went for none of the above.

Instead, he went off the deep end.

Instead, he went for:

d) Take the Chapman University baseball program and move it from Division II to Division I.

As home remedies go, this is somewhat revolutionary. When one has a headache, one generally takes two aspirin. One does not place one’s head in a vise and order tickets to a Michael Bolton concert.

But Weathers was already committed--to Division I, that is, a decision he somehow sold to Chapman administrators in 1990 without any visible signs of coercion or mind-altering substances. Once the OK was given, the machinery was set in motion. There would be no turning back, 15-36 or not, and for Weathers, that meant no braking on the road into the abyss.

Sixteen games into the 1992 collegiate baseball season, the Panthers have landed.

The view from the abyss?

Nobody told them there’d be days like this.

Before Saturday, Chapman was 11-4, including victories over sixth-ranked Cal State Long Beach and 11th-ranked Cal State Northridge.

Before Saturday, Chapman had won seven in a row, including victories over seventh-ranked Cal State Fullerton and 1991 College World Series participant Fresno State.

Chapman lost Saturday, 5-4, on a ninth-inning home run by fellow step-up-to-Division I traveler Grand Canyon University, but to Weathers, all that signaled was a chance to catch his breath.

“This game was uncharacteristic of us,” Weathers said. “We’ve had a good run and during the streak, we pulled out games the way (Grand Canyon) did today . . . We’d hit the right home run, we’d hit the right double with the bases loaded. That kind of hit, we didn’t get today.”

You win seven, you lose one. Weathers will take it. He might not be able to fully explain it, but he’ll take it.

“People have asked me, ‘Did you expect this?’ ” Weathers said, “and I tell them, ‘No. No way.’ We thought we’d be pretty good this year, but nothing like this. This was going to be a two-year plan. We were building for ’93.

“We got there a year early.”

And none too soon. Because of the Panthers’ quick start, the eyebrows that arched over Weathers’ Division I push are now at half-mast. “If we’d have gone in the other direction and started 3-12, people would be pointing fingers,” Weathers said. “Now, everybody’s off our back.”

Which is good, because Weathers entered this season with a single game plan: Travel light. Excess baggage will not be tolerated, which explains the 22 new names on the Chapman roster.

“We were 15-36,” Weathers said. “Of course, I wanted to see some new guys. I knew we were going to have a problem if they all came back.”

So Weathers purged and splurged, gorging himself on community college players with the first-time lure of a Chapman education coupled with Division I exposure. Once, Weathers and his staff used to recruit by trotting out the names of Tim Flannery, Randy Jones, Gary Lucas and Don August--old Panthers who graduated to the pros. Now, he could recruit with different names. USC, UCLA, Pepperdine, California--new Panther opponents on the home schedule.

Weathers wound up with the 1991 Orange County Community College All-Stars. From State champion Cypress College, he enlisted outfielder Kevin Cook and first baseman Thomas Puppe. From Golden West, he picked up an all-state center fielder, Jason White. From Saddleback, he brought in another outfielder, Buster Nietzke, whose two-year stay at the school produced more base hits than legendary alum Tim Wallach.

Of the nine names on Weathers’ lineup card Saturday, only one, shortstop Cliff Anderson, was a holdover from 1991. “And he’s like having another totally new player,” Weathers said. “Last year, he batted less than .200 and made 20-plus errors. Then he went the Alaska summer league in Anchorage and completely turned his game around.” This year, Anderson has 12 RBIs in 16 games and is hitting .333.

“We were getting to the point at Chapman where we were losing recruits because we played a Division II schedule,” Weathers said. “Moving up changed that immediately. We play at the same Hart Park. We take the same van rides. But the kids hear ‘D-I’ and that means they get to play the best schools.

“It’s worked out better than we could have hoped.”

Too well, perhaps. Chapman’s first two seasons in Division I will be spent as an independent, although Weathers continues to court the West Coast Conference hard. “I don’t know if our good start helps us or hurts us,” Weathers said, with a grin. “Maybe they’re scared. Maybe they don’t want us now.”

That’s the real move Chapman baseball has made. From there-goes-a-gimme to there-goes-the-neighborhood.