In a Class by Itself : Division I Transfers, Hill’s Earnest Recruiting Turn Cal Lutheran Into a Division III Juggernaut

If you’re the kind of person who gets an emotional lift from watching a speeding jeep plow into a pack of terrified kangaroos but can’t afford the air fare to Australia, no worries, mate. You can view the same type of one-sided, overwhelming confrontation just up the street in Thousand Oaks. Such events occur on a regular, scheduled basis. Admission is free.

They are called Cal Lutheran baseball games.

In a sport termed a game of inches , Cal Lutheran is winning by hundreds of miles. The beatings have been so severe, so horribly lopsided, that even the losing coaches have been forced to smile, although the smile is of the variety normally associated with a guy who has just crushed his thumb with a carpenter’s hammer but does not want to alarm his little children standing nearby.

“It was men against boys,” said John D’Auria, the baseball coach at Caltech, a school that has produced scores of rocket scientists but seldom a decent shortstop.

D’Auria was not just blowing rosin. In three games against Cal Lutheran, his Caltech scientists-to-be absorbed losses by scores of 20-0, 10-1 and 19-0. In all three games, Cal Lutheran had emptied its bench by the fifth inning.

“We were playing against their bench guys and it was still a rout,” D’Auria said. “Cal Lutheran’s second team, I believe, could beat any team in our conference.”

Ah, the conference. The SCIAC is what it is, the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. NCAA Division III, and member schools have, for the most part, frighteningly high academic standards and offer no athletic scholarships.

Cal Lutheran, long a member of the slightly more prestigious and scholarship-awarding NAIA (National Assn. of Intercollegiate Athletics) District 3, applied for admission to the SCIAC and was admitted in 1991 in all sports.

“This was the route we wanted to take,” Cal Lutheran Athletic Director Bob Doering said. “We wanted a non-scholarship environment.”

Against this non-scholarship, small-time competition, Cal Lutheran racked up a 21-0 record before dropping its first game Saturday, a 5-3 loss to UC San Diego in the Sunshine Classic. Sufficiently aroused, the Kingsmen came back to whip UC San Diego, 9-4, in the championship game later in the day.

Through 23 games, Cal Lutheran has outscored opponents by a combined score of 240-44.

The Kingsmen are ranked No. 2 in the nation in Division III, behind defending champion Southern Maine, which has played just one game this year. UC San Diego is ranked sixth. A postseason berth in the Division III tournament is all but a lock for Cal Lutheran, and the team has as its goal winning the World Series in Battle Creek, Mich., in June.

Along the way, Cal Lutheran is leaving baseball teams dazed and confused.

Among the victims, in addition to Caltech, have been tiny Christ College of Irvine, little-known Albertson College of Idaho, Occidental College in Los Angeles, Westmont College in Santa Barbara, Claremont-Mudd University, Biola University and Washington’s Puget Sound University, a place dubbed Rain Tech.

And although Caltech, an SCIAC member along with Cal Lutheran, might be an exceptional school in a baseball sense (five of the team’s starters never played high school baseball), the horrendous beatings handed down by Cal Lutheran have not been isolated.

The Kingsmen opened the season by sweeping Christ College, 11-2, 10-0. One week earlier, Christ College had opened its season by pinning a 5-2 defeat on Cal State Northridge, a nationally ranked Division I team.

The Kingsmen went against a decent Claremont-Mudd team, another SCIAC member, in February and emerged with 9-2, 20-3 and 11-2 victories. Against SCIAC rival Occidental, the Cal Lutheran steamroller came to work again. Scores: 13-0, 10-1 and 12-2.

And from the pick-on-someone-your-own-size school of thought, we bring you this: Against Division I San Diego State (enrollment of more than 14,000), Cal Lutheran (enrollment 1,720) won in humiliating fashion, 9-1, Feb. 18.

In the Sunshine Classic, Cal Lutheran went up against a strong Central Washington team in the first game of the tournament and promptly turned that team upside-down, scoring eight runs in the first inning en route to a 15-1 rout that must have left tournament organizers wondering what they were thinking about when they invited the Kingsmen to participate.

“They beat the hell out of us and I imagine they’ll beat the hell out of anyone they want to,” Caltech’s D’Auria said.

Who are these guys?

* Eddie Lample. A standout defensive catcher who earned a full scholarship to Division I power Cal State Fullerton, Lample tired of platooning and enrolled at Cal Lutheran last year. He is batting .339 and his arm has kept the few runners who do reach first base against the Kingsmen standing close enough to the bag to be considered a part of it. He hopes to play pro ball.

* Eric Johnson. A left fielder who played on scholarship at Northridge for two years after a terrific senior season at Chatsworth High. He said he left CSUN because the program was in disarray. He is batting .405 for the Kingsmen. Biggest problem: gathering cobwebs in the outfield as the Cal Lutheran pitchers mow down batters. “In four games, no one hit a ball to me,” he said. “Not one.”

* Darrell McMillin. Star outfielder at Ventura High and Ventura College, he turned down offers to play at Division I schools Pepperdine and UC Santa Barbara and enrolled at Cal Lutheran. Currently batting .388 with 29 runs batted in and 13 home runs.

And others. Plenty of others.

Mike Suarez had a scholarship at Arizona. He is now a Cal Lutheran infielder batting .321.

Dan Smith gave up a full scholarship at San Jose State to play for Cal Lutheran, as did relief pitcher Jeff Berman, who has simply astounded SCIAC batters with a blistering fastball and slider. Berman has allowed just one earned run in 15 innings for an earned-run average of 0.60. Mike Teron, who came over from Northridge, has an 0.48 ERA in 18 1/3 innings. Relief pitcher Louis Birdt, who came from Pierce, has an ERA of 1.50 in 12 innings.

And from Pepperdine came outfielder Bob Farber, who is batting .355. The junior colleges also have been more than kind to Cal Lutheran. The team’s second-leading hitter is Jason Wilcox (.393), who arrived from Scottsdale (Ariz.) Junior College.

Some at Cal Lutheran call the formation of this small-schools version of the 1927 New York Yankees just a stroke of good fortune.

“I come from a Christian background,” said athletic director Doering, “and I think one of the things that has happened is that we have received a large blessing. The Lord has blessed us with this team.”

More likely, the Lord helps those who help themselves.

“In other terms,” Doering said, “Rich Hill is a tremendous recruiter.”

Hill, the 29-year-old head coach, is a tireless, dogged recruiter. By his own evaluation, he has simply outworked and outhustled his SCIAC rivals for talent.

“I love being in the office until 10 at night, working the recruiting evaluation sheets and staying on the phone with these guys,” Hill said. “I really do. That’s the one opportunity I have to beat another program. Once the game starts, it’s all in the players’ hands. In the recruiting arena, it’s you against the other coaches. That’s what ignites my competitive fire. That’s what I love to do.”

Strangely, though, Hill claims little credit for luring the team’s best players to the school. He said that he did not recruit any of the Division I transfers, that all seven on the roster came to Cal Lutheran on their own.

“We do not go after any Division I players,” Hill said. “We had some guys show up on the first day of classes, guys who have really helped us. All of the Division I transfer guys fit that bill. They just showed up for class one day. Definitely. All of them were just blessings to our program.

“Cal Lutheran University is such an excellent school. On a sunny day, I believe the campus is one of the most beautiful places in America. Some of our best players this year just came and said, ‘I want to go to school at Cal Lutheran.’ They came to our admissions office. I’m not doing anything to get these guys.”

That is not how some of those players remember it.

“Rich Hill contacted me last year, and at the time I had other offers, including Pepperdine and UC Santa Barbara,” McMillin said. “They were much bigger programs, but they didn’t show the interest that Cal Lutheran did. Rich Hill convinced me that we’d have so much talent at Cal Lutheran and we’d have a winning season.”

And Lample, the catcher: “Rich Hill’s main selling point to me was that I’d be the starting catcher. That’s all I needed to hear.”

Another oddity: How were so many young men who happen to be able to yank a baseball 400 feet willing and able to give up either scholarships or the nominal fees of junior colleges to enroll at Cal Lutheran, where tuition and room and board rings in at $14,800 a year?

The answer is loans and grants. Nearly every player on the baseball team receives some financial aid. Nothing sinister there, though. Among the general student population at Cal Lutheran, 80% receive financial aid, according to Chris Munoz of the university’s admissions office.

“The financial aid helps a lot, but my parents are still making a huge sacrifice for me,” said infielder Joe Cascione, who transferred from Pierce last year. His father is a produce manager at a supermarket and his mother stays at home. “I’m not sure how much financial aid I’m getting, but I know it helps.”

Another major factor in Cal Lutheran’s success, according to rival coaches, is that the school has more relaxed academic admission standards than most schools in the SCIAC.

At one end of the gray-matter spectrum is Caltech. Scholastic Aptitude Test scores of a staggering 1,400 and a high school grade-point average of at least 3.8 are required for admission. At Claremont-Mudd, the requirement for admission is an SAT score of 1,250 and a GPA of nearly 3.5. The same numbers are the norm at Occidental College. And Pomona-Pitzer and Redlands, SCIAC schools that Cal Lutheran has yet to trounce . . . uh, play . . . also require similar numbers.

Cal Lutheran’s average student scored 980 on the SAT and had a 3.4 GPA in high school.

And so, a monster has been born.

“They are an exceptional team at the Division III level,” said Coach John Kirkgard of Westmont, a nonconference opponent that lost two games to the Kingsmen by 8-2 scores. “The numerous Division I transfers they have make a world of difference. If they have an advantage it might be because of the academic standards.”

Randy Town, coach of the Claremont-Mudd team that absorbed a three-game pounding by Cal Lutheran by the combined score of 40-7, agreed that the gap is enormous.

“The SCIAC has some pretty good teams, but I believe we will all get steamrollered by Cal Lutheran,” Town said. “Not just beaten. Even Redlands will have a hard time with them. A very hard time. Cal Lutheran can, I believe, compete at the Division I level. I mean it. They took apart a good San Diego State team.

“I have one transfer student on my team. One. . . . Our admission standards here are such that they prefer four-year student-athletes. I can lobby all I want against that, but I just waste a lot of effort.”

Town is not alone.

“I don’t want to be quoted as saying they don’t belong in this conference,” said Caltech’s D’Auria, “but it’s so hard to compete against a team like that. Their rules are different than our rules. There’s a huge difference.”

Others share that view and suggest darker reasons for Cal Lutheran’s success. Are the complainers poor losers? Perhaps. Envious? Maybe.

“Who knows what’s going on up there?” asked one SCIAC coach who demanded anonymity. “Are they cheating? Probably not. But they play within a set of rules that should be changed.

“Philosophically, something is very, very wrong with this conference now, with the admission of a school like Cal Lutheran.”

At Cal Lutheran, they’ve heard the grumbling.

“Caltech is really an exception,” Hill said. “They’re coming from a different angle than we are. Those kids are the future of our country, basically. Those are really different people.

“I don’t think our season has been a sign of any lack of competition in the SCIAC. Everyone seems to be looking for a reason why we’ve been so successful. The reason is simple: Our coaching staff worked its butt off night after night on the telephone and on Sunday campus visits to get the right people, and then the players we got worked their butts off and became better players than they ever were before.”