It’s Just His Luck : CSUN Pitcher Kempton Dealt Yet Another Blow Along Comeback Trail

NORTHRIDGE —  Contagion, thy name is Keven Kempton. As if his personal black cloud isn’t bad enough, now it’s starting to rub off.

Last month, the Cal State Northridge pitcher was hit on the elbow by a line drive. Nothing new there. Kempton has endured a streak of bad luck that dates at least a year.

Later the same week, one of his roommates, outfielder Josh Smaler, severely sliced his hand while opening a can of tuna.

For Northridge, attempting to re-establish itself as an NCAA Division I contender after a losing season punctuated by injury and dissension, Kempton easily ranks as the team’s calamity lightning rod.

In baseball, a comebacker is a ball hit back to the pitcher. For Kempton, making an improbable comeback himself, this is where his latest chapter of misery begins.

Kempton was feeding balls into a pitching machine when a teammate drilled a line drive around a protective screen and off Kempton’s right elbow. The imprint of the rubber practice ball left dimples on his arm.

The impact mark was easy to spot--right next to Kempton’s six-inch surgical scar. A nice color scheme, purple and pink. His mood went from black to blue. He ran into right field screaming, “Why me?”

“I’ve been through a lot of . . ,” he said. “Everyone has. People go through different circumstances and persevere. I’ll get through it. I have to.”

Had the ball hit the senior right-hander in the head, he would have been fine. Heck, Kempton could have pitched with one eye or a broken nose. Anywhere but on that particular elbow, on which he had major reconstructive surgery last March.

For most of the past 10 months, Kempton’s world revolved around his elbow. He iced it down each night and spoke of it in the third person.

He was expected to pitch last Sunday in the second game of Northridge’s season-opening series against UC Riverside. Not so fast, lefty.

“This stuff is really tough, mentally,” he said. “But it definitely builds character.”

He could erect a pyramid to persistence. Inarguably, this is a guy with plenty of reason to hang his head. But Kempton has wallowed in self-pity before and it didn’t accomplish a thing. The fact that he ever arrived at Northridge, in light of his past avocation as a screw-up and ne’er-do-well, is significant indeed.

Kempton began a spiral of self-destructive behavior and self-absorption when his parents divorced during his sophomore year at El Monte High. Two parents used to attend every game. Just like that, none did.

He was devastated, inconsolable. He had been one of the school’s best athletes: quarterback, pitcher and basketball standout. By the time his senior year rolled around, he was academically ineligible. He had to take night courses and earned his diploma the summer after his classmates graduated.

Yet Kempton wasn’t out of the woods by any stretch. For two years, he didn’t do much of anything except raise hell and roast brain cells.

“Smoking it up, drugging it up, doing all sorts of (stuff),” he said.

Funny thing about parties. Once they end, somebody has to clean up the mess.

“I’m not sure he even remembers ages 18 through 20,” said Alison Anding, Kempton’s fiance.

People who know Kempton these days can’t believe his war stories, that someone so full of self-confidence could ever have contemplated suicide or lived so recklessly. The rudderless ship has become a cruise missile, bent on satisfying every objective.

Simply put, baseball became cathartic. Success replaced excess.

One day, when Kempton was two years out of high school, a coach from East L.A. College spotted him playing in a city league softball game, of all places. Hit ball, drink beer.

The coach made a good sales pitch and Kempton enrolled.

After a solid freshman year, Kempton went on an exhibition tour of Europe with several other top junior college players in 1991.

“That was when I realized El Monte wasn’t the nucleus of the world,” he said.

Like there was much doubt. There was plenty going on out there and Kempton wanted a piece of the action. He stopped the red-line partying pace and earned a scholarship to Northridge, where he was a 10-game winner as a junior. He was as consumed with the sport as he was with last season’s arm rehabilitation.

“Baseball is like a drug,” said Kempton, who will graduate this summer. “Walking onto the field is like taking a drug.”

Catchers on the staff called Kempton “Bulldog,” with good reason. He was making up for wasted time. He was an iron man as a junior, completing 13 of 15 starts--whether it smarted or not.

Kempton thinks his elbow troubles began during a game against Hawaii in 1993, “when I threw 170 pitches or whatever it was.” Heading into 1994, he knew there was a problem but figured he could handle the pain. Nobody had to know.

“All these things go through your head about how it’s your senior year, about how you went 10-4 the year before, about how the team is counting on you,” he said.

Typical. Pitchers treat arm pain the way some folks treat their cars. Hear a weird engine rattle? Ignore it and hope it goes away.

Kempton stumbled in the first month of ’94. At one ignominious point a plate umpire asked Kempton in the middle of an inning if his arm was OK. Kempton’s velocity was down, and his losses (0-3) and earned-run average (7.71) were up.

The spirit was willing, but the body was weak.

“Your mind can only do so much when your body won’t allow you to do anything else,” he said.

Conceding his elbow needed to be rebuilt, Kempton went from examination to surgery in less than a week and plunged into rehabilitation. He would contribute in 1995, he promised, though recovery from the procedure typically takes a minimum of 12 months. The NCAA eventually granted him a medical redshirt year.

The night before he had the operation at the Kerlan-Jobe Orthopaedic Clinic in Inglewood, Kempton shaved his head. Step one of his manic recovery regimen.

“Didn’t want to have to worry about anything but the surgery,” he said.

Scant hours after the operation, in which doctors transplanted a ligament from his right forearm into his elbow, Kempton was back home with his player roommates. He was a perpetual-motion machine, albeit a somewhat sedated one. He became obsessed with finishing each task, no matter how insignificant.

“By the next day he was cleaning house, washing dishes, all that,” Anding said. “He refused to let anybody help him. He wouldn’t sit down.

“Everything he starts now, he finishes.”

Kempton began badgering doctors for information about his recovery time and vowed he would pare months off their one-year projection.

“You have to put the brakes on Keven,” said Dr. Ron Glousman, who performed the surgery. “He’s so motivated and gung-ho. You don’t have to tell him to do his exercises, you have to tell him to let nature take its course, to back off.”

Yeah, like back off the mound , pal. Two months after the procedure, Kempton started throwing the ball around, against Glousman’s advice.

“Everybody always tells me to calm down, but I can’t,” he said, with a trace of a grin. “I’m aggressive and I always will be.”

Developments last month definitely had a chilling effect. When Kempton was hit by the line drive, his arm went temporarily numb.

“I was in shock . . . I was yelling at God,” he said.

The jolt to the new ligament in his elbow left three fingers on his right hand numb for several days. The hand was a virtual claw.

Glousman said the elbow reacted “like a newborn baby being slapped.” That is, the new ligament screamed bloody murder because it wasn’t used to such trauma.

Kempton didn’t jettison his workout schedule, of course. He just modified it. Since his fingers were too numb to hold dumbbells, he taped the weights to his hand. Still, he may be sidelined for another two weeks or more, Glousman said, and Kempton’s body is sending some not-so-subtle reminders.

At a wedding last month, some of Kempton’s teammates threw ice at him. Kempton turned and attempted to give the infamous one-finger salute, but his digits would not cooperate. Later that night, he picked up a water glass with his right hand and spilled it.

His teammates, mindful of the rehabilitative effort Kempton has made, hope he gets a chance to play again. Kempton watched from the dugout after the surgery last year, grinding his teeth, as Northridge finished 25-30 and failed to advance to postseason play for the first time in four years.

“Everyone who’s played with him respects him,” said third baseman Jason Shanahan, a teammate for the past three seasons. “We need him this year. Poor guy, it’s been one thing after another.”

Recovery had been going great guns. In mid-January, Kempton pitched two scoreless innings during an intrasquad game. He was bouncing off the dugout walls. His comeback was nearly complete.

“It was like the World Series for me,” he said. “It was satisfying. For a half-hour, everything from the past nine months was in focus.”

Myopia hasn’t exactly set in. Kempton says maturity will help him make yet another comeback--and soon.

Kempton turns 25 in May. In college baseball circles, he is Methuselah. Kempton is, ahem, nearly seven years older than some freshman teammates. He is older than Dave Prosenko, an assistant coach. With Kempton on the hill, it isn’t a ballpark, it’s Jurassic Park.

This is noted daily by one and all. Coach Bill Kernen, 46, mentioned in a speech to his troops that they must trust his baseball acumen because they are only half his age. “Except for Kempton,” he added.

Smaler calls him “Pops” and a trio of freshman pitchers call him “Daddy.”

His new elbow, though, is only 10 months old. If it never lives to celebrate its first birthday, so what?

“What is the worst-case scenario?” Kempton said. “That I never play ball again? I’m not gonna play after this year anyway, so it doesn’t matter.”

The way Kempton the Elder sees it, salve and savvy go hand in hand. He’s disciplined and mature enough to handle life’s little obstacles--hopefully, there will be few more.

“I’m gonna win some games,” he said. “People will second-guess me, but I will contribute. I will be a factor.”