He Couldn’t Get Into Game, So He Got Out of It : Baseball: Playing skills of Jason Parsons, a former standout at La Quinta High, are undermined by internal turmoil that even he has trouble explaining.

COSTA MESA —  A light breeze delivers the scent of freshly cut grass at the Orange Coast College baseball field as Pirate players, arriving for an afternoon game, gather in the first base dugout.

From the nearly deserted third base dugout, Jason Parsons waves to OCC Coach Mike Mayne, who then wanders over for a brief chat with his former

player. After some good-humored verbal jabs, Mayne touches on a subject that, for Parsons, remains an open wound.

“He should be playing and he knows it,” Mayne said.

There they were again, the words Parsons doesn’t want to hear, the words that ring in his ears like the pings of balls off aluminum bats. If only others could see where he’s coming from, and where he wants to go--without baseball.

“People ask me if I’m still playing and I get the same lecture,” Parsons, 19, said.

A few years ago, when Parsons was crushing pitches at La Quinta High School, no one even conceived of Parsons not in a baseball uniform somewhere. Especially not after his senior season in 1989.

That year, Parsons moved his 6-foot-3, 195-pound body from the outfield to behind the plate and finished fourth in the county in batting (.477), first in runs batted in (38), tied for first in hits (42) and tied for second in home runs (nine). He helped the Aztecs to an 11-3 record and a second-place tie with Pacifica in the Garden Grove League.

Those numbers were a vast improvement over the previous season, when he hit .280 with only one home run after starting the year on the junior varsity team. But they weren’t a fluke. Parsons worked hard to improve his hitting.

“I had decided on some new ways to go about preparing myself,” Parsons said. “I lifted some weights and tried to get some agility moves down. And I practiced hitting until sometimes my hands bled.”

But through it all, his physical ability was being undermined by an internal turmoil that Parsons has trouble explaining. Even now, after quitting the OCC team to concentrate on his business management studies and supermarket job, Parsons wrestles with his feelings about baseball.

“It’s tough to find words to describe the feelings,” Parsons said. “People call it ‘burnout,’ or ‘loss of interest.’ I don’t even know what to call it.”

His former coach at La Quinta, Dave Demarest, casts a vote for the first explanation.

“He just got burned out, and I think it’s a shame because he had some potential,” Demarest said. “I’d like to see him play. I think that if he had stuck with Orange Coast for a couple of years, he could have written his own ticket.”

Parsons said he can’t pinpoint why he began to veer away from baseball, but lists as contributing factors his own displeasure at achieving anything less than perfection and pressure from his father to excel.

“Besides the mental games I was playing with myself, I had to deal with my father telling me I was dipping my shoulder or something. I didn’t need to hear that. I knew when I had a lousy game,” Parsons said. “I think he was kind of trying to project himself through me. It got to me in high school.”

Still, Parsons said he went into his senior season at La Quinta with hopes of getting a full scholarship to play for a Division I college. He wanted an education, and professional baseball, which never became an option because he was never drafted, didn’t appeal to Parsons.

“The last thing on my mind was to have to struggle through the minor leagues,” Parsons said. “It’s not what I wanted to do. To me, it would have been wasted years.”

Yet, when Nevada Las Vegas came calling--plus then-Division II Cal State Northridge with a partial offer--Parsons knew he wasn’t long for the game.

“I was real impressed with Northridge, but I didn’t have the money to go there right away,” Parsons said. “UNLV offered me a full ride. I visited there, took the scholarship home, signed it and never sent it back. Turning that down was my first realization that I was coming to a fork in the road.”

Parsons looked at the paths ahead and chose to try to rekindle his love for baseball at OCC. However, it didn’t take long for what little flame remained to get blown out.

He had some decent preseason games, but Parsons said he was bothered by tendinitis in his arm and a lack of focus. After being suspended for various infractions that included showing up late to practices and missing a game without an excuse, Parsons packed it in for the season. The decision didn’t surprise Mayne.

“To be perfectly honest, I don’t think that Jason was ready to commit that much time and effort to playing,” Mayne said. “I thought that his only chance to ever come back was to quit at that point and take some time off from baseball. I told him I’d love to have him back, but I’m not going to ask him. It’s up to him, on his timetable.”

Parsons returned to the field last summer in Connie Mack baseball, playing in a tournament in Arizona and the league’s world series in New Mexico. But once again, he was gripped by ambivalence.

“After our last game, which we lost to Puerto Rico, I walked out to center field and sat there for about 15 minutes with tears in my eyes, and I knew it was over.”

Now, nearly a year later, Parsons sits on wooden benches on the sidelines of someone else’s field of dreams and waxes philosophical.

“It doesn’t really matter what other people think of me not playing,” Parsons said. “There’s more to life than baseball.”