To hear his coaches tell it, Leo Estabrook was a “Bulldog” in every sense of the word.Estabrook, a big, overpowering right-handed pitcher for the Lynn English baseball team during the 1990s, died Tuesday after battling health problems for the past year. And at least one coach – Jim Tgettis, formerly of Lynn Classical and currently at Salem – feels Estabrook was among the very best products of the Lynn athletic system.”He was very capable of dominance,” said Tgettis, whose teams battled Estabrook and English in some memorable games in the late 1990s when they seemed to meet annually in the finals of the Nipper Clancy Tournament.”You had to find a way to beat him,” said Tgettis, whose teams actually did that twice during his career. “He wasn’t going to beat himself, that’s for sure. He was tough-minded, and he was a real workhorse.”More importantly, his former coaches say, Estabrook was just a good person.”As good as he was at baseball,” says Dick Newton, who coached him while he was an assistant at English, “that’s how good of a person he was.””He was an all-scholastic player,” said his coach at English, Ron Bennett, who stayed in touch with Estabrook after his playing days were over. “He was unselfish, and he had a great attitude.”He was a true team player,” Bennett said. “You are very fortunate if you could have one player in a lifetime with the qualities Leo Estabrook had.””He was a warrior for us,” said English athletic director Gary Molea, for whom Estabrook played quarterback while Molea coached the Bulldogs. “He never came off the field for us. Same thing in baseball. He’d pitch every day for us if he could.”Bennett said that once, he actually tried to do just that.”He’d won our opening game in the state tournament,” Bennett said, “and he came up to me right after and asked if he could pitch our next game, which was the following day.”I told him no, because he could ruin his arm if he did that. He replied, ‘I promise you, I won’t ruin my arm.'”Newton said there was always more to Estabrook than simply baseball, and that when it came time to put the game aside, and concentrate on life, he adjusted.”He was a bulldog, and he was tough,” said Newton, “but baseball aside – because in the end we all know that baseball doesn’t mean a whole lot – he was a good guy, a good father.”He was a nice guy to have around. There are a lot of people around the school who are really going to miss him. His visits to English after he left the school were always pleasant. He always appreciated what he had when he was here.”Both Tgettis and Molea took pains to comment on Estabrook’s relationship with his daughter.”The last time I saw him we were on the subway, and he had his little girl in his lap,” Tgettis said. “She was important to him, and it’s just so sad that he won’t be here for her.””He always had his daughter with him,” Molea said. “He wanted to make sure she was going to be OK. Now ? it’s a sad situation. As a dad, he looked as if he had all the right intentions. He was a real caring father ? and that made me feel good.””Everybody knows about the baseball,” said Chris Tgettis, who coached Estabrook for the Gautreau American Legion team. “But he had to overcome a lot, and he was a wonderful father. Every time I saw him, he was with his daughter. And he was always talking about her. She was always right by his side.”He had his bumps in the road, like everyone else, but he overcame them. It was nice to see.”Chris Tgettis recalls that Estabrook never complained – even when he would seem to have had a right to.”I remember one time we were having trouble with our catchers getting injured,” he said, “and whoever it was we had back there, he had to strike out four batters in an inning twice. But he never said anything. Never pointed fingers.””Leo Estabrook was as tough as a competitor as we ever faced,” said former Item sports editor Paul Halloran, who was the manager of the Swampscott American Legion team while Estabrook played for Gautreau.