Search for new baseball coach is underway
Arizona athletic director Greg Byrne began his off-site search for a baseball coach Friday at the NCAA regional in Lake Elsinore, California, where USC’s Dan Hubbs and UC Santa Barbara’s Andrew Checketts might’ve been Byrne’s targets.
Maybe he crossed them off his list. Maybe they weren’t on his list.
To succeed in the brutally difficult Pac-12, Arizona must find someone who can swim with the sharks. Byrne must hire someone who is a shark, someone who doesn’t play nice.
Arizona has hosted one NCAA baseball regional in 25 years. That’s absurd. (ASU has hosted 11.) Andy Lopez was a mere 186-183 in conference games, and Arizona is 308-373 in league play over the last 25 years.
This isn’t a reloading situation. It’s a total reconstruction. Do you realize Lopez was just 26-39 against the Sun Devils?
The glory years of Arizona baseball were from 1950 to 1989. Lopez blurred all of that with an extraordinary 10-0 finish to win the 2012 College World Series. But the reality of college baseball is that Arizona is just another team, no better or no worse than Cal, which attempted to eliminate its baseball program five years ago.
Let’s say Byrne hopes to hire UCSB’s Checketts, who is the hot name on any coaching search in 2015. Checketts, a former Oregon State pitching star who helped restart rival Oregon’s program in 2009, was paid $152,000 base salary this year. Lopez’s base salary was about $175,000. Even Washington State paid baseball coach Donnie Marbut $172,000 this season. (Marbut has since been fired.)
In March, Checketts signed a contract extension through 2019. But one thing an Arizona baseball coach gets that a UCSB baseball coach probably doesn’t is about $400,000 a year in outside income from equipment companies.
ASU pays first-year coach Tracy Smith a $375,000 base salary. (It also paid Indiana $200,000 to let Smith go.) Like Lopez, Smith surely earns at least that much from the bats-and-balls people.
Byrne told me he would not break Arizona’s salary structure to hire a baseball coach. In other words, softball coach Mike Candrea’s base salary of about $180,000 is a guide. So it’s not like Byrne is apt to throw money at a baseball coach the way he could throw money at a revenue-producer like Sean Miller.
Would Checketts take an offer from Byrne? UC Santa Barbara plays at Uyesaka Stadium, which has a nice view of the Pacific Ocean but no lights. The Gauchos averaged just 537 fans per home game.
It would’ve been nice had someone from Arizona’s baseball family been more appealing. But Sabino High grad and ex-Wildcat pitcher and coach Tod Brown of North Dakota State is coming off a 20-31 year. Utah head coach Bill Kinneberg, another pitcher (and coach) from the UA’s glory days, slumped to 16-36-1 this year. And Shelley Duncan, the school’s home run king from CDO, is a few weeks away from making his minor-league managerial debut. Bad timing.
I get the feeling Byrne will hire a lower-bidder, someone like Checketts, and hope that UCSB’s back-to-back seasons of 40-16-1 and 34-17-1 are related as much to the coach’s work than to a one-time, career-type nucleus of players who made the coach look better than he is.
