For These Coaches, Going Extra Innings Is a Way of Life : SDSU’s Jim Dietz Built Program With Bits and Pieces

The rusty pickup truck, windshield cracked and cab smelling of exhaust fumes, pulled to a quick stop. Jim Dietz, San Diego State’s longtime baseball coach, hopped down from the driver’s seat.

Darkness had fallen over Smith Field, but Dietz had one final task before calling it another 12-hour day. A couple of empty soda cans had been left in the parking lot.

Leaving the engine running, Dietz scurried across the lot, picked up the cans, threw them in the back of the truck and started to drive away. But not for long.

A few feet later, he again applied the brakes, jumped out of the cab and began rummaging through a trash can. He found several more cans that he tossed into the truck. If he had seen some old newspapers, he would have grabbed those, too.

Before anyone starts thinking Dietz is a neatness freak or some kind of back-to-nature environmentalist, understand this: He does this to pay his baseball bills.

Every discarded aluminum can, every copy of yesterday’s news is like money in the bank to Dietz. Forget ERAs and RBIs; the mathematical formula that matters to Dietz is 11 aluminum cans to the pound equals 49 cents in revenues for the SDSU baseball program.

“Might have 49 cents right there,” Dietz says, half beaming, half laughing.

After seventeen seasons as SDSU baseball coach, Dietz still is trying to make ends meet with his part-time salvage business.

“Every time I see an aluminum can, I screech to a stop,” he said. “I jump out, pick up the can, put it in the car and drive on. That’s crazy, I know, but that’s what I’ve been doing. I need the money.”

He needs the money to run what, despite its budgetary limitations, has become one of the better college baseball programs in the country.

The Aztecs have won 705 games, lost 394 and tied 15 since Dietz joined the program in 1972. They have been to the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. tournament six times in the past nine seasons. Once they lost out on a chance to make the College World Series with a one-run, 11-inning loss in the West I regional to eventual champion Cal State Fullerton. When SDSU (19-13-1 before a doubleheader with Colorado State Saturday night) plays host to the University of San Diego Tuesday night at 7 p.m., it will be Dietz’s 1,119th game as the Aztecs’ coach.

SDSU has had only three coaches in its 50 seasons of baseball. None has coached or won more games than Dietz.

“Seven hundred games,” Dietz said, “I don’t know how we’ve won them. Everything has been so stacked against us.”

One reason for the success may have been talent. Thirty-two of Dietz’s former players are playing professional baseball. Among them are Kansas City pitcher Bud Black, Yankee shortstop Bobby Meacham, Houston pitcher Dave Smith and outfielder Tony Gwynn, the Padres’ two-time National League batting champion.

“The man has done wonders,” Gwynn said. “If it wasn’t for him, I don’t know if there would be a baseball program. He is the only coach I know who would climb up a light stand to change the lights himself.”

Those lights, by the way, were another Dietz project. They were financed through private donations, but their installation is typical of the way Dietz has rebuilt almost all of Smith Stadium through a combination of wits, guile, pleading, begging and an occasional deception.

Afraid that some on campus would object to the lights on environmental grounds, Dietz said he never received formal permission to install them in 1975. One weekend, while the campus was quiet, Dietz had the poles sunk into the ground. He said nothing.

“We didn’t install the fixtures; we just waited to see if anyone would notice the poles,” he said. “Nobody did for about two weeks. By then, it was too late. We put the fixtures on, and we’ve had lights ever since.”

Other major improvements have included a press box, indoor batting cages and a clubhouse that includes offices, a classroom and a complete locker room with showers and a sauna. Also, the left-field fence was moved back. All the improvements were made or built by Dietz, his players and community volunteers. None were school-financed, and few were built with formal approval or according to the university code, Dietz said.

Such schemes have made Dietz somewhat of a renegade within the athletic department. He considers himself a disciplinarian and acknowledges that he is not the most popular coach with his players. He is the kind of coach whom players come to appreciate more after they leave the program.

“When I was there, I realized what he was saying,” Gwynn said. “I took it to heart to try and improve myself, whereas a lot of guys curse him under their breath. They do the stuff, not really wanting to do it. But I can sit here, and this is my sixth year in the majors, and say some of the stuff I do out here today, I can remember him telling me to do.”

Like those lessons, Dietz has endured. He has outlasted his share of athletic directors.

“I’ve tried to do the best job I could and not ask very much of an administration,” Dietz said. “I’ve just tried to stay on top of things and pay my bills.”

This year, he said, he will spend around $140,000. SDSU provides him with about $90,000. The rest must come from his own fund-raising. The bulk of that is raised during the team’s annual exhibition game with the Padres. The game Friday drew 30,047 to San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium and probably raised about $30,000 for Aztec baseball. Dietz said he expects the game to produce the best profit in its five-game history because of the efforts of Lonnie Keeter, a former Utah coach who was hired last fall as the team’s first marketing and promotions director.

Last year the game was rained out, forcing Dietz to scour the community for funds. This year, he came up with a sponsor for the game--Jack in the Box. Leave it to the imaginative Dietz to find a way for the Padres, a team owned by Joan Kroc of the McDonald’s fortune, to play in a charity game promoted by a fast-food rival.

“That game saves the program,” Dietz said. “Without it, we’d be in big trouble.”

As it is, Dietz must hustle. Although he said his university-provided funds are “no different than 80% of the other Division I college baseball programs,” Dietz aspires to more.

“If I just stayed within the budget, I couldn’t win,” he said. “Most universities give you a budget, but it isn’t realistic to be successful.”

So the Aztecs hold charity games, banquets, raffles; they sell souvenirs, baseball cards and outfield billboards; they run a concession stand, and, yes, they pick up garbage.

Dietz needs the scrap money this time to finish a scaffolding around the year-old electronic scoreboard in center field. He had been hoping to use the money to buy a video recorder to replace one that had worn out, but when the scoreboard went on the fritz, Dietz had to switch priorities.

He also had to borrow some money out of the Scotty Dietz Fund, a baseball scholarship fund established in honor of Dietz’s son, who died in 1979 after a three-year struggle with leukemia.

Gwynn finds it demeaning that Dietz, at 49, must still raid someone else’s rubbish to make his program successful.

“It is unfair all the stuff he has to do to build a baseball team. But in his mind, it is what he has to do.

“I am sure he would rather be at home with his family on a Sunday morning having Sunday breakfast instead of riding around trying to find some plywood somewhere.”

But that is how Dietz has built the Aztec program. Literally, scrap by scrap. The clubhouse, built in 1974, is a patchwork of abandoned and donated building materials. “The whole stadium is like some kind of Rube Goldberg contraption,” said Fred Miller, SDSU athletic director.

The building has the touches of one of those backyard clubhouses built by kids. Some of the wood looks as if it were left over from a picnic table. The lighting fixtures in Dietz’s office are of different designs. The tile in the locker-room shower is a rainbow patchwork of colors.

Dietz does not complain. He is grateful for all the community support. The latest was a new roof over the home dugout.

“Every time I think we’re really in trouble, somebody steps forward,” Dietz said. “It is mind-boggling. It could be a framer. It could be a roofer. It could be an electrician. It could be a welder. It could be a bricklayer. I don’t know how these people know we need them.”

Dietz has covered up some of the imperfections, most notably the knotholes in his rustic office paneling, by filling his walls with personal and baseball memorabilia. Among the many items on his walls is a sketch, dated 1979, for a new SDSU baseball stadium.

It is but one of several designs scattered around the clubhouse. The cost of building a new 1,500- to 3,500-seat stadium on the site of Smith Field is estimated by Miller at about $1 million. No donor has stepped forward with a firm commitment.

That leaves the Aztecs with an antiquated stadium that has bleacher seats for only about 400. The state does have plans to replace some of the beachers, removed for safety reasons last year, but the $170,000 project is just a stopgap. Dietz wants a new facility that he believes could help attract the kind of players and attention that would make the Aztecs a consistent national power.

“I’ve been hoping for this new stadium for a long time,” Dietz said. “We’ve been close a few times, but it has always fallen through. Each time it does, it is a real heartache.”

As Dietz speaks, he picks up a three-dimensional model of the latest artist’s rendering. The two-year-old model is covered with dust. But it keeps Dietz dreaming.

“We’re going to build that stadium,” he says. “I don’t know how, but it is going to happen. And we’re going to get to the College World Series. I don’t know how that is going to happen, either, but it is going to happen. I don’t know how. I don’t know when. I just know it’s going to happen.”

By now Dietz has turned wistful. He carefully places the model back on the shelf. He turns out the lights and heads down the stairs. He is the last one to leave the clubhouse. The parking lot is nearly empty--just Dietz, the pickup truck and a few aluminum cans.

DIETZ AT SDSU

YEAR W L T PCT. 1972 25 32 1 .438 1973 31 25 1 .554 1974 37 24 0 .607 1975 22 25 0 .468 1976 36 22 1 .621 1977 49 16 1 .750 1978 38 27 0 .585 1979 55 18 1 .750 1980 40 26 3 .601 1981 51 17 0 .750 1982 58 30 3 .654 1983 62 15 0 .805 1984 66 23 0 .742 1985 42 30 1 .582 1986 42 23 1 .644 1987 32 28 1 .533 1988 19 13 1 .594 Totals 705 394 15 .641