Back In The Swing
Bank it. Steve Bennett will be drafted ahead of his roommate, Matt Santangelo.
OK, OK - so it’s a technicality.
Baseball conducts its June player auction three weeks before the NBA gets around to selecting a few collegians to fill in among the junior-high phenoms and Slavic 7-footers it is hell-bent on turning into instant millionaires.
Still, at least on that one day, the phone will ring at the house Gonzaga University’s ace pitcher shares with Gonzaga’s ace point guard and two other friends, and Bennett can figure it will be for him.
“One of the guys who lives with us, Vashon Weaver, is a personal trainer at 24-Hour Fitness and he’s a pretty handsome guy, so he gets a lot of girls calling,” Bennett said. “And Matt - he’s got fans, reporters, agents, TV people, you name it.
“I like to talk on the phone and I always answer it hoping it’s for me, but I wind up taking a lot of messages.”
But he’s been delivering some, too - both he and the Bulldogs, who have won seven of their last 10 games and turned themselves into factors in the West Coast Conference baseball race.
Heading into a weekend series at home against Portland, the Zags are two games in arrears of Loyola Marymount in the WCC’s Coast Division - something of a revelation, you’d have to think, since the beach-blanket schools of the league no doubt assumed baseball up here was played in Gore-Tex doubleknits and snowshoe spikes when GU was admitted to the lodge four years ago.
“Fans at other places used to yell at us that we didn’t deserve to play Division I, that we’d never win,” Bennett recalled. “Now we’re kind of laughing in their faces.”
But it’s a good, healthy laugh.
GU’s latest baseball resurrection has its roots in the basics - defense that has steadied of late, the usual solid hitting and remarkably good pitching. The team earned run average is under 5.00, which makes you wonder if the city council somehow rammed through a law when the sporting goods manufacturers were asleep calling for trigger locks on aluminum bats.
And don’t forget better chemistry, which began to improve a couple of years ago when coach Steve Hertz decided to, uh, weed his garden.
But who’s to say that Bennett, who has won six of nine decisions, isn’t the biggest reason.
“You have to have a horse that you ride,” Hertz said, “the guy you throw out there to get you started every series. Steve’s been the one punch, and Barry Matthews has been the two.”
Matthews is 8-1 as a starter, and when he’s not pitching doubles as GU’s designated hitter, carrying a .319 average. Those aren’t John Olerud numbers, but it’s hard to think of another collegian hereabouts who’s had that kind of two-way impact in a while.
But in the same way that his roommate has run the show on the basketball court these past four years, Bennett is something of a point guard, too. The ball’s in his hands. If he’s on his game, he sets the tone - a dominating pitcher who certainly looks the part as well as he acts it.
He is 6-foot-4, 240 pounds and throws a fastball that has topped out at 96 mph this year. In 75-2/3 innings this year, he’s fanned 88 batters - and opponents are hitting just .218 against him.
He professes an admiration for Stone Cold Steve Austin, though he admits he got hooked on pro rasslin’ because “it’s a soap opera for guys. You can watch pro wrestling and guys say, `All right,’ but if you watch `Days of Our Lives,’ they laugh at you.”
So if he doesn’t necessarily have the glare or the demeanor of a Randy Johnson-style intimidator, Bennett has the look of being all-business - which Hertz seems to prefer.
“Here’s how professional he is,” Hertz said. “We’re playing Pepperdine in the conference opener and he’s breezing. It’s 3-1 in the eighth and we boot a ball to give up an unearned run, making it 3-2. Then in the ninth, he punches out the first guy, punches out the second guy and goes to 2-2 on the last guy. The game’s over - only the guy runs into one and hits it out.
“I look out there, and with Steve it’s like nothing had happened. He strikes out the next guy and we go to the 10th, and they get one off our reliever. That’s a tough pill to swallow, but Steve didn’t lose it out there. Nothing staggers him.”
Not now, anyway.
Bennett was another find from the baseball wilds of Montana, where the sport isn’t played in high school and the only showcase is Legion ball in the summer. He signed with GU - his only Division I suitor - the day a big packet of recruiting propaganda showed up from Arizona, and then blew out an elbow his freshman year. Tommy John surgery - and more than a year’s worth of rehabilitation - followed.
“That matured me a lot,” Bennett said. “I’d always planned on playing professional baseball and that kind of shocked me into realizing I might not be able to if I didn’t focus on getting back and getting better. I had been a thrower and when I came back, I had to really concentrate on developing better mechanics.”
That determination has Hertz thinking Bennett might be an even better pro - a mid-90s kind of pitcher with regularity in the next few years. He also thinks Bennett could go in the first five rounds of the draft - if he doesn’t sign first with the New York Mets, who still have his rights after picking him in the 28th round a year ago.
“That’s the difference between my sport and Matt’s,” Bennett joked. “He has two rounds to get picked. I have 50. It just shows how good he has to be.”
Just to be the second pick in his own house.