A SWING IN MOMENTUM : After Opening the Year in a Slump, Ryan McGuire Rediscovered His Batting Stroke

Ryan McGuire’s baseball cap looks like it has been tied to the trailer hitch of a pickup truck and dragged across the Bonneville Salt Flats. It is so peppered with salt that brine shrimp could live in it for weeks. It is so petrified from sweat that the Woodland Hills West first baseman probably doesn’t need a batting helmet.

Even at the American Legion level, though, ballplayers are a superstitious lot. And since McGuire is batting .416 with five homers and 30 runs batted in and his team is in the state playoffs, which open today in Yountville, he’d probably go three weeks without a bath if it meant a few more hits.

“This hat’s working pretty good right now,” McGuire said in reference to its less-than-decorous appearance. “And I don’t want to change that.”

The thing is, he does change it. When practicing, McGuire wears a brand-new team cap. Its colors are still royal blue and white, a definite change from his game chapeau, which is a royal mess.

Six months ago, McGuire’s hat couture would have received little attention. But after the way his junior season at El Camino Real High began, McGuire probably washed everything he owned after each at-bat.

As a sophomore, McGuire rolled up the kind of accolades that, for most players, would have made an expand-o-matic headband almost mandatory. After batting .397 McGuire, a 6-foot-2, 190-pound left-hander, was selected to the All-City Section 4-A Division team and named the state’s sophomore player of the year by Cal-Hi Sports.

The college recruiting letters poured in and the attention was magnified. At age 16, McGuire was more popular than white-out at City Hall. As a warm-up for his junior year, certain to be an improvement over the 1988 season, McGuire batted .444 with 22 RBIs while playing for West last summer. This kid was hotter than a Rob Lowe home video.

McGuire and El Camino Real, however, took a collective header last spring. McGuire started with a one-for-15 skein and the team stumbled to a 1-7 record. For the first time since he began playing baseball as a 9-year-old, McGuire found himself wondering what had gone wrong. This season, it seemed, reaching for the stars left his head in the clouds.

“I wanted to hit well over .400 and do a bunch of other things offensively,” he said. “Setting my expectations so high, as soon as I started playing poorly, I started cussing myself and it snowballed.

“I was pressing and wasn’t getting the pitches I wanted to hit. And since we weren’t winning, I was pressing to try to win games.”

Got that? No impressing, just depressing.

“The whole team was hurtin’ and we weren’t playing good ball,” he said. “It was the worst time of my life. It was awful.”

A one-for-15 skid may not seem that terrible, but at the high school level, where a season consists of approximately 60 at-bats, it can leave a guy hurtin’ for certain. McGuire, for instance, finished at .294 (15 for 51) after hitting .389 in his final 36 at-bats. Had he managed one more base hit, just one little flare here or there, he would have finished at .314. Almost as bad as the slump was the advice with which he was inundated. Virtually everyone he came in contact with had suggestions on how to end the drought.

“Everyone and their mother said something,” he said. “Anyone that had ever seen baseball on TV had something to say.”

Later on, McGuire picked up the pace, batting .417 over the final weeks, but he finished with just nine RBIs. So, after being tabbed as one of the best prospects in Southern California, he wasn’t even among the best on his team: six El Camino Real regulars had higher averages and four drove in more runs.

McGuire fared better as a starting pitcher--he was 4-2 with a 3.60 earned-run average--but that may have further diluted his concentration. This summer, he has pitched in four of West’s 30 games, all in short relief.

“He came up as a junior and I think he felt he had to take the whole team into his own hands,” said West outfielder Jason Cohen, who has played alongside McGuire for the past two seasons at El Camino Real. “He felt it was his full responsibility to carry us. He thought he had to hit .500, that he was expected to be All-City and throw a no-hitter every game. The pressure built up to where it really affected his hitting.”

After their 1-7 start, the Conquistadores won eight games in a row--including a pair of wins over highly regarded San Fernando--and advanced to the playoffs where they lost in the first round to Sylmar.

Yet the late-season run left McGuire and his teammates, many of whom also play for Woodland Hills West, eager to begin Legion ball. There were some misconceptions that needed to be straightened out.

“We had a lot of confidence going into American Legion,” McGuire said. “We had won at the end of the season and now was a chance to start over and show that we could have done better-- should have done better--than our record showed.”

Woodland Hills West (27-3), which plays Fullerton in a first-round game this morning at 9:30, has won 11 games in a row and 21 of its past 22. To be sure, McGuire’s rebirth at the plate has been a key in the winning streak. That’s a key, not the key.

“There are a lot of guys who are hitting about what Ryan is hitting, and one’s hitting better than Ryan,” Woodland Hills West Coach Gary Gibson said. “If he oh-fers on the day, some other kid picks up the slack. It does take a lot of pressure off him.”

Winning tends to boost the confidence level as well. El Camino Real’s combined record for the past two seasons is 17-19. Woodland Hills West, only the second District 20 team since 1976 to advance to the state playoffs, is 49-7 over the same span.

“This is the first time we ever won anything,” McGuire said. “Most of us are ecstatic. Right now, we know we’re going to Yountville, and it seems like someone is joking with us.”

Some are bound to think that, with the attendant publicity McGuire received after his sophomore season, he might have suffered from maximal cranial syndrome. The symptoms? Swelling of the noggin, inflation of the ego and a semi-permanent squinting of the eyes from reading news clippings.

“I think, to a degree, that his expectations were what the papers read them to be,” Gibson said. “That puts a lot of pressure on a 16-year-old kid, to try to live up to those expectations. It doesn’t help to get that overwhelming press at times.”

McGuire insists, however, that the slump was attributable solely to the pressure he placed on himself.

“I don’t think it was my head swelling or thinking I was better than I was, I think it was more that I had unrealistic expectations for myself,” he said. “I felt that I had to do more than I really had to do, that I had to be a left-handed power first baseman. That’s just not me.”

And lately, by design or not, he has not played like one. Certainly, the offensive explosiveness is there, but in contrast to the hitting habits of nearly every other high school player with above-average power, McGuire has stopped pulling the ball. Almost completely.

In the four-game District 20 playoffs, McGuire, who bats left, hit two home runs to left field. By the time West opened play in the Area 6 playoffs last weekend, teams were using a Ted Williams shift--the center fielder was in the alley in left-center and the second baseman was shading McGuire up the middle. Nevertheless, the location of McGuire’s playoff hits reads like a military cadence: Left, left, left, right, left.

A well-known major league scout, in fact, remarked to Gibson after an Area 6 game that McGuire’s inability to pull the ball is raising some eyebrows.

“Being left-handed and facing mostly right-handed pitchers, they will try to pitch him outside if they can,” Gibson said. “It’s a mistake on their part, because he can drill that pitch. But he will have to learn to turn more quickly on the ball. Later in his career, he’ll see more velocity (from pitchers) and he may not get those opposite-field hits he’s getting now--they may be foul balls.”

McGuire still hits for power--not many 17-year-olds can hit 380-foot line drives the other way--but he insists that trying to pull the ball under these circumstances would be self-defeating. If pitchers pull their punches by tossing him off-speed stuff on the outside corner, McGuire says he’s happy to settle for a gapper to left-center.

“The way they threw to me in the two tournaments, with fastballs and breaking balls, I’m fighting myself and I’m fighting them if I try to pull those pitches,” McGuire said. “Believe me, it’s tough to sit there and try to hit it into their shift, but it’s tougher to try to hit around it.”

This, of course, marks a shift of sorts for McGuire too. Last year, he might have tried to pull similar offerings.

“The slump was awful to go through, but I understand a lot more about myself because of it,” he said. “Now, if I go one-for-four or oh-for-four, I don’t come back to the dugout and spike my helmet and throw my bat.

“Having that poor season was a real learning experience.”