Rake’s Progress : Saddleback Coach Spruces Up Playing Field, Program’s Image

It may be summertime, but the living is not easy for Marshall Adair, Saddleback College’s baseball coach.

At a time when most community college coaches are enjoying a well-deserved vacation, Adair is still thinking about his club, not Club Med.

You won’t find any brochures on his desk praising the virtues of Maui, the Bahamas or Acapulco.

What you are more likely to find is a rake and shovel.

Adair arrives at Saddleback’s Doug Fritz Field each weekday morning about 9. In recent months, he has helped dig a warning track, enlarge the dugouts, install a scoreboard and coat the bleacher seats with plastic so that Gaucho fans no longer will have to worry about splinters. His current task: removing the crabgrass from the outfield.

The reason Adair is spending what should be spare time as the Gauchos’ assistant groundskeeper is simple. He says Saddleback, which was 16-19 each of the last two seasons, has an image as a bad baseball school. And he thinks that having a perfectly manicured field is one way to help the Gaucho baseball program, which has had more losing seasons (11) than winning ones (five), change that image.

“It’s an awful lot of work--I can’t count the hours I’ve spent out here,” Adair said while overlooking the field. “But it’s something I feel I have to do, because the groundskeeper has other assignments at school and can’t spend much time with the field.

“My feeling is that a lot of people don’t know about the Saddleback campus, let alone our baseball field. We have a great facility and I want people to notice it.”

After working on the field for an hour or so, Adair stays to umpire games of the local high school summer league he established so he can get an early look at South Orange County players.

After the games are over, Adair, tired from a day of being exposed to the hot sun, stays to drag and water the field. On nights when Saddleback plays a Metro Conference game there, he may not get home until after 9.

Adair, 42, who replaced Jim Brideweser as the Gaucho coach after the 1985 season, thought that Saddleback would contend for the South Coast Conference championship. Instead, the longtime Saddleback assistant and former San Clemente High School coach watched his team lose 11 of its last 14 and finish eighth, ahead of only winless Compton.

That finish is why he doesn’t think that putting in a 12-hour day during the summer is unreasonable.

“I’m not punishing myself because we didn’t do better,” he said. “But I’m at the stage now where I’m trying to build consistency in our program, and until I get to that point I’ll keep doing this.”

If Adair sounds demanding, it’s because he is. But when you’ve accomplished what he did as a player, you can see why he expects a lot from his players.

In 1962, he was an All-American quarterback at Cerritos College. The following year, he was an All-American catcher for the Falcons.

Adair then signed with the San Francisco Giants, and, according to former Cerritos Coach Wally Kincaid, would have made it to the major leagues if he had not suffered a severe shoulder injury.

But for all his experience, Adair is not above admitting that he still has things to learn as a coach.

“I discovered a lot of things last year,” he said. “What stands out is that I learned you have to play as a team to win. You can’t be a bunch of individuals, like were were.

“We were the most unteam team I’ve been around. It was an older group of players, some from other programs, and they weren’t interested in team goals. Because of that, we lost I don’t know how many games in the late innings. We’d have a lead and just collapse.”

Adair is focusing his recruiting efforts on freshmen. He thinks that team unity will improve if he has more players who are with Saddleback for two years and fewer sophomore transfers from other community college and four-year programs who stay for only one year.

Some of his top prospects are catcher and pitcher-first baseman Ken Briggs of Foothill, catcher Don Roberson of Mission Viejo and outfielder Chad Fouts of El Toro.

“They’re all good-attitude, good-character kids,” Adair said. “I really expect us to contend for the conference title next year, and in two years I expect to contend for the state title. I really think we’re a sleeping giant here.”

Saddleback will get at least one break in 1986. The old South Coast Conference, long regarded as one of the most competitive in the nation, has been disbanded. The Gauchos will join Orange Coast, Rancho Santiago, Cypress, Citrus and Riverside City in the new Orange Empire Conference. Three members of the old South Coast Conference--Golden West, Fullerton and Cerritos--will play in the new South Coast Conference with Mt. San Antonio, Long Beach City, El Camino, Pasadena City and Compton.

But Adair says his team will do well no matter what conference it plays in, as long as he can change Saddleback’s image. That’s why shaping up the field, umpiring the games and holding them at Saddleback are important.

Said Adair: “When I recruit these players in a few years, I want them to say, ‘I remember him. He was the guy I met at Saddleback.’ ”