Silver Bullets Succeed In Almost Every Way -- Women's Baseball Team Well Into Third Season

FORT MYERS, Fla. - Question: What does Michael Jordan, baseball player, have in common with the women who play professionally for the Colorado Silver Bullets?

Answer: Jordan couldn't hit, either. His batting average: .202. The Silver Bullets: .183.

Which proves that no matter how much you excel in another sport - basketball for Jordan, softball for most of the Silver Bullets - the first lesson of baseball is: Thou Shalt Be Humbled.

Question: What's the difference between Michael Jordan and the Silver Bullets?

Answer: Jordan quit after one season of minor-league ball, which is why he'll be playing the Knicks on Sunday in the second round of the NBA playoffs.

The Silver Bullets are in their third year and counting.

They may not yet be an artistic success - the team was into its third season before it had a home run and it was an inside-the-park homer - but the Silver Bullets are survivors, complete with corporate sponsors, a cable TV deal and a fan following that club president Bob Hope calls "a mile wide and an inch deep."

And don't underestimate the loyalty of those fans. Like Kitty Stanford, who showed up for a Silver Bullets exhibition game wearing a pair of "SB" earrings and a blouse she'd embroidered herself with spangles that spelled out Silver Bullets.

Lest you think the Silver Bullets are of interest only to sunbirds with time on their hands, Kevin Costner is a fan, too. Prodded by his daughters, who watched the Silver Bullets on TV, the actor put together a team of celebrity pals that last August played the women in a minor-league park in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif.

"They had a full house," Hope said, "for what may have been the first game ever played in full makeup."

Any other day, and the Silver Bullets eschew rouge for eyeblack. What is appropriate for a middle-school teacher, the job 27-year-old Missy Coombes walked away from, has no place on a ballfield, where Coombes is in her third season, second as ace of the Silver Bullets' staff.

"This is all about dreams and being successful and taking a risk," said Coombes, who went from being the only female player in her hometown Little League in California to pitching a complete game in Boston's Fenway Park last summer.

"And being willing to fail before succeeding. I think people can see how much we've improved in three years. We've still got a long way to go, and we know that."

The plan, in the beginning, was for the Silver Bullets to play games against minor-league competition. That idea was quickly abandoned, as the Silver Bullets won just one of their first 23 games and were shut out 13 times, seven times in succession. The team won just six games all summer, was outscored 292-77, and hit just .141 while making 104 errors in 44 games.

"I think Michael Jordan is the perfect example," Coombes said. "He hadn't played baseball since high school. Most of us had either never played, or hadn't played since we were 14, when we switched to softball.

"As great an athlete as Jordan was, he couldn't just walk in and play baseball at a high level."

A power-hitting outfielder named Lisa Fritz might have helped. But Lisa Fritz turned out to be Gerald Fritz, an impostor hoping to finance a sex-change operation. Fritz was released, one of the easiest cuts manager Phil Niekro ever made. The rest were painful. "I was either a dream maker or dream breaker," said Niekro, who had to talk one player from jumping out of an eighth-floor hotel window.

Niekro, the former 300-game winner hired to manage the Silver Bullets, may not have taught the team there was no crying in baseball; he broke down himself while telling some players he was sending them home. He did, however, put a stop to hugging the third-base coach after a triple.

And his teaching went beyond the frivolous. Niekro, who last managed Atlanta's Class AAA team in Richmond, says he has never had players more receptive to learning fundamentals than the Silver Bullets.

"You talk about the love of the game, the purity of the game," Niekro said. "These girls have a dedication and a commitment like nothing I've ever seen before.

"I'm showing them things that they've never seen before, and they've got minds like sponges. That's the joy of it."

The Silver Bullets, playing against teams of college players, semipros, military men and amateurs, nearly doubled their victory total, going 11-33 last season. Coombes, 0-10 in 1994, went 5-8 last season as the only left-hander on the staff, striking out eight in a complete-game win over a semipro team in Albany, N.Y., last June.

This season, for the first time, Niekro did not invite every player back for spring training. The talent pool is expanding; among the rookies this season is Laura Espinoza-Watson, the all-time home-run hitter in NCAA softball history while at the University of Arizona.

She became the first-ever married Silver Bullet when she wed Arizona football player David Watson two weeks before the start of spring training.

Another newcomer, switch-hitting Tammy Holmes, is a student at Cal who was a high-school all-American in both volleyball and basketball.

"Maybe you see this game and say, `Well anybody could beat these guys,' " Espinoza-Watson said after the Silver Bullets had routed a team of over-40 locals, "but this is just a start for us now. You can see we're finding a lot of good players."

The future? Hope, the former promotions director for Atlanta in the National League, said his preference would be for the Silver Bullets to join a Class A league, where a woman could prove her worthiness as a potential big-league prospect. A second option would be to remain a national team for female players, while upgrading the competition. A third avenue would be a formation of a women's league, if the sport proved popular enough.

It's much simpler for Missy Coombes.

"The ultimate goal here is for a woman to have an equal opportunity to play ball," she said. "The ultimate goal is not to put a woman out there for the Cleveland Indians or the Los Angeles Dodgers.

"But someday in history, if there is a woman who deserves to be a major-league prospect, you don't say no just because she's a woman."