Hansen's Sunday Notebook: Kindall's UA baseball legacy goes deep

Four days after Chip Hale was hired as manager of the Arizona Diamondbacks, he drove home to Tucson and sat for an interview inside McKale Center.

Thirty years ago, in the fall of 1984, Hale was a freshman third baseman for the Wildcats. He became one of the key players in Arizona’s 1986 national championship season under coach Jerry Kindall.

Hale is the third Kindall player to become a big-league manager, joining Phillies/Red Sox/Indians skipper Terry Francona and ex-Astros manager Brad Mills.

“It’s not just the managers that Coach Kindall has helped to develop, it’s baseball people at every conceivable level,” said Hale. “It’s a very long list.”

Here’s one man’s Top 20 (not including Francona, Mills and Hale) from Jerry Kindall’s impressive baseball genealogical chart:

-Jim Fleming, former vice president for player development, Miami Marlins.

-Mark Johnson, head coach at Texas A&M for 26 years

-Tod Brown, head coach at North Dakota State

-Clark Crist, hired last week by the Arizona Diamondbacks to be their national cross-checker of scouting

-Robbie Moen, area scouting supervisor, Southern California, for the Tampa Bay Rays

-Gil Heredia, pitching coach of the Diamondbacks’ Single-A affiliate in Visalia, Calif.

-Jack Howell, minor-league field coordinator, Seattle Mariners

-Pat Roessler, director of player development, New York Yankees

-Alan Regier, former minor-league field coordinator, Chicago Cubs

-Ron Hassey, former manager of the Triple-A New Orleans Zephyrs

-John Moses, former first base coach Cincinnati Reds and Seattle Mariners

-Craig Lefferts, pitching coach for Oakland’s Single-A affiliate, the Vermont Lake Monsters

-Alan Zinter, minor-league field coordinator for the Cleveland Indians

-Kevin Long, former hitting coach, New York Yankees

-Jerry Stitt, former head coach, Arizona Wildcats

-Wes Clements, former manager, Double-A Corpus Cristi

-Bobby Ralston, head coach Cal Stat-East Bay

-Casey Candaele, infield coordinator, Texas Rangers minor leagues

-Scott Stanley, national scout, Miami Marlins

-Damon Mashore, outfield coordinator, Los Angeles Dodgers minor leagues

Records in college football are broken with such frequency that you rarely pause to absorb the silly numbers posted week to week.

But in Arizona’s wild loss to USC, quarterback Anu Solomon threw 29 incomplete passes (he was 43 for 72), which is a school record.

The “old” record didn’t last long: Solomon threw 26 incomplete passes against Cal last month; he finished 47 for 73 in the “Hill Mary” win over the Golden Bears.

Arizona is on pace to break its season record for incompletions; it already has 106 at the regular-season midpoint. The record is 212, which includes bowl games.

But a lot of football analysts now compute stats the way baseball sabermetrics in recent years declared that items such as singles and stolen bases have lost significance. (Although I don’t agree.)

The new football math says that incompletions aren’t as important any longer because teams like Arizona snap about 20 more plays per game than in the years before spread offenses.

Arizona snapped 1,082 plays in Rich Rodriguez’s inaugural season, the first UA team to hit 1,000. A year ago RichRod called 1,030 plays. If this year’s Wildcats play in a bowl game, 13 games, it is on pace for a record 1,142 plays.

So what’s 29 incompletions as long as Solomon’s completion percentage remains close to the current 62.6 percent?

In the pre-spread days, incompletions were a fatal statistic. Arizona’s pre-RichRod team record was 25, in a 51-37 loss to Stanford in 2001. Its individual record for incompletions was 24 by Willie Tuitama in a 2007 loss at ASU, and 23, both by Tuitama, in two puzzling losses to New Mexico in 2007 and 2008.

To me, the most damaging statistic through Arizona’s first six games is that opponents have completed 64.1 percent of their passes. Only the 2011 team that got Mike Stoops fired, at 65.9 percent, has been worse.

Former Tucson Toros, Sidewinders and Padres general manager Mike Feder has such deep baseball roots that he connects to both World Series managers, Bruce Bochy of San Francisco and Ned Yost of Kansas City. Bochy was a .253-hitting catcher on the 1977 Class A Cocoa (Florida) Astros. Yost was a .192-hitting catcher on the 1975 Wausau (Wisconsin) Mets. Feder was the general manager of both clubs.

When new D-backs manager Chip Hale set the UA career record for games played, 255 consecutive starts from 1984-87, he was not always the first to answer to “Chip.” Arizona had three players named Chip during that time: Hale, pitcher Chip Dill and first baseman Chip Stratton. Dill is now an assistant baseball coach at Tennessee. Stratton is the athletic director at Rincon/University High School.

Tucsonan Dan Reynolds, a retired school administrator, will be inducted into the USA Track and Field Hall of Fame (officials’ division) on Dec. 3 in the USATF’s annual convention in Anaheim, California. Reynolds has been a track and field official/referee of note for more than 30 years. He worked the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and 1996 Atlanta Olympics. He was the head clerk at this year’s IAAF Junior World Championships and has been a part of UA and Pima College track and field for three decades. It is a long-deserved honor.

Justine Schluntz, a former UA NCAA champion swimmer and the 2010 NCAA Woman of the Year, completed her doctoral work at England’s famed Oxford University last week. Schluntz, who attended Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, worked for the Tidal Energy Research Group at Oxford. Her doctoral work was focused on utilizing Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to analyze the fluid flow around turbines. Impressive.

Steve Kerr’s $1 million gift to the UA athletic department last week was not the first time he has donated to his alma mater. Athletic director Greg Byrne released figures saying 42 percent of Arizona’s basketball lettermen (and 29 percent of all lettermen) have donated to the school. Almost all are done anonymously.

Flashback: Kerr’s first income after his UA basketball days was $5,000 to film a TV commercial for the Lakeside Sports Club on East Golf Links Road.

One of Kerr’s first tough decisions as head coach of the Golden State Warriors has been to use ex-Wildcat Andre Iguodala in a sixth-man role. That’s a sensitive move for a man who started all 758 of the NBA games he has played. Iguodala told San Francisco reporters, “It’s just growing up, being smart about the situation. You could do the opposite and kind of just tank it just to say that it’s wrong.”

Josh Pastner “came out of retirement” Saturday and played in the Memphis Tigers’ version of “Midnight Madness.” Now 37, Pastner joked that he was a good three-point shooter in his Arizona days, from 1996 to 2000, but that his defense kept him out of the NBA. In 40 UA games, Pastner scored 42 points.

Former UA power forward Grant Jerrett signed a guaranteed $816,000 contract with the Oklahoma City Thunder this year. The Thunder have the option of retaining him in 2015-16 for $947,000. He underwent ankle surgery in the summer, and isn’t expected to be activated until December.

Matt Johnson’s 2012 state football champion Ironwood Ridge Nighthawks were a physical, run-first force. His 2014 team, which is now 7-1 and plays at 7-1 Salpointe on Friday in what so far qualifies as Tucson’s Game of the Year, is similarly defense-based. His team has only completed 21 passes this season, and rushes for 7.1 yards per carry. Johnson’s stout defense has six players with more than 30 tackles: Deacon Laurita, Harrison Beemiller, Nick Mazzioti, Cole Marmor, Mike Ayers and Dominic Quihuis. The 4,000 or so seats at Salpointe’s Ed Doherty Stadium are likely to be completely full.

UA freshman swimmer Trey Cashion, a two-time state champion at Walden Grove High School, did not swim in the UA’s opener against Wisconsin. He was snared in the NCAA red-tape machine. Because Walden Grove is a relatively new high school, the NCAA’s vast compliance office had not fully vetted WGHS’ academic courses, and thus Cashion had not been cleared to swim. Not that he’s academically marginal; Cashion is an engineering major.

Before Catalina Foothills swimmer Matt Lujan accepted a swimming scholarship from Arizona a week ago, he took recruiting visits to Ohio State and Wisconsin (as Cashion did a year earlier). Why the Buckeyes and Badgers? OSU assistant coach Dave Rollins is a former UA All-American and Wisconsin head coach Whitney Hite is a former UA assistant coach.

Antonio Pierce was an honorable mention All-Pac-10 linebacker at UA in 2000 who went on to become a Pro Bowl linebacker for the New York Giants and is now an analyst for ESPN. He flies to Connecticut each Wednesday to film his ESPN work. The rest of the week he is the head coach at powerhouse Long Beach Poly High, which has had 55 players reach the NFL. Pierce, 35, is paid $6,000 to coach the Jackrabbits; he leaves the team to ex-NFL receiver T.J. Houshmandzadeh on Wednesdays. So far it works; Poly is 7-1 and ranked No. 63 nationally by Maxpreps.com.

Tailback Nic Grigsby, who gained 2,957 yards at UA from 2007-10, quit the Winnipeg Blue Bombers last week, even though he led the team with 744 rushing yards. Bombers coach Mike O’Shea told reporters that Grigsby had been informed his role would be changed/reduced, and Grigsby chose to leave the team.

Moments before Arizona kicker Casey Skowron missed a 36-yard field goal that would’ve beaten USC 29-28 last week, new Arizona State baseball coach Tracy Smith tweeted “Miss it.”

And when the kick sailed wide right, Smith tweeted a thumbs-up icon.

That’s juvenile and unprofessional. I was dumbfounded.

Can you imagine Andy Lopez, or any Arizona head coach, similarly, making social media comments about a Sun Devil athlete or athletic event?

Ever?

Greg Byrne and his UA predecessors, Jim Livengood and Cedric Dempsey, would’ve a) croaked and b) forced the coach to make a public apology.

The UA-ASU rivalry is cookin’, among the most deeply-rooted in college sports. But when a 48-year-old head coach joins the chorus of Twitter knotheads, it’s nothing but embarrassing.

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