Ex-Pepperdine Coach Thinking of Comeback

Dave Gorrie, who retired as Pepperdine’s baseball coach last May, will be inducted into the American Baseball Coaches Assn. Hall of Fame at the group’s national convention in San Francisco next January.

But he is not quite ready to be put on a shelf. He said that he is a candidate to succeed Stan Morrison as the athletic director at UC Santa Barbara, his alma mater, where he was the head baseball coach for 19 years. Morrison was recently named head basketball coach at San Jose State.

Gorrie, who coached for 10 years at Pepperdine after leaving UC Santa Barbara, said he may also return to coaching some day.

Gorrie said he retired because he “needed time off to sort things out.”

“After 29 years you cease to see the forest for the trees; you get bogged down in details. When one season melts into another year after year, I think you sometimes cease to have improvement or growth.”

He said that his year off from coaching has been “a very valuable period. I’ve learned a lot of things. I’ve talked to other coaches about how to do things, and I discovered I was doing some things very well and other things not well enough. I also discovered some things about myself. So it’s been good--and very refreshing.”

Gorrie, 58, who still teaches physical education at Pepperdine and looks as trim as anyone in his classes, said he is still “physically able to coach.”

And he hasn’t really been far away from baseball. Far from it.

He has been teaching hitting and pitching at a baseball school in Agoura, advising coaches Gary Adams of UCLA and John Herbold of Cal State Los Angeles and speaking at clinics.

He “might go back to coaching some place, sometime.” But not at Pepperdine and maybe not as a head coach.

“When you give up your position, that’s it,” he said. “Pepperdine has a very fine young coach (Andy Lopez, former coach at Cal State Dominguez Hills) and a good program.”

He said that his return to coaching would probably be “at the college level. It depends on the opportunity, but I’d make somebody a good assistant. I know what he (would be) going through.”

Gorrie has gone through plenty.

Born in Olney, Tex., he moved to Pasadena as a youngster and played baseball at Pasadena High with Bob Lillis and Dick Williams, who became major league managers.

He attended Pasadena City College and later UC Santa Barbara where he was a star outfielder and top running back. A member of the UC Santa Barbara Athletic Hall of Fame, he posted a slugging percentage of .688 in the 1953 season, still a school record.

After college he spent three years as a Navy officer.

He began playing minor league ball in 1958 for the San Francisco Giants organization. He was released by the Giants and caught on with the Athletics, then in Kansas City. He played three seasons at Seminole, Okla.; Crowley, La.; Columbia, S.C., and Rochester, Minn.

He said he was offered a contract to play with Portland in the Pacific Coast League but decided that he was too old to reach the majors. And when UC Santa Barbara offered him the job of head coach, he accepted.

“You always would like to know whether you could have done it (played in the major leagues), but there were a limited number of jobs at the top and progress was slow.”

He said he hurt his chances of going to the majors by playing for UC Santa Barbara until he graduated and then spending three years in the Navy. “I cut my own throat.”

Still, he was more than satisfied with college coaching. “ You may not make as much money as selling real estate or stocks and bonds, but it’s been a helluva good life.”

Being a college baseball coach proved to be a helluva good life for him. At UC Santa Barbara, his teams had a record of 355-397, and the Gauchos won a Pacific Coast Athletic Assn. championship in 1972.

The good life got better at Pepperdine where his Waves were 409-202 in 10 seasons and earned six berths in National Collegiate Athletic Assn. tournaments. His 1979 team went furthest, advancing to the College World Series and winning three of four games before being eliminated by Cal State Fullerton.

Baseball sometimes thinks of itself as a changeless sport, but it has changed--and not always for the better. Gorrie has seen the introduction of the designated hitter, synthetic playing surfaces and aluminum bats, and he hopes someone will do something to change aluminum bats so that they are less a danger to pitchers.

A couple of seasons ago one of his pitchers, Tony Lewis, was seriously injured when hit in the face by a line drive off an aluminum bat. Balls hit with aluminum bats have more velocity and force than those hit with wooden bats.

Gorrie said Lewis suffered multiple fractures of his cheekbone. Although Lewis recovered and played minor league ball last year, Gorrie said the pitcher “was not very far from death” after being struck.

Gorrie said aluminum bats, used mostly at amateur levels of baseball, are “an economic fact of life.” Wooden bats crack easily; aluminum bats last almost forever.

“But I hope (the aluminum type) will be adapted, purely from the standpoint of the safety of pitchers.” He said metal bats can generate such force that “it’s like a doggone shooting gallery sometimes. We don’t want to get anybody killed out there.

“If an aluminum bat were more like a wooden bat in weight, you couldn’t manipulate it as easily and generate all that speed. Players would have to learn to become better hitters, and pitchers would have half a chance.”

Gorrie thinks that college baseball has changed. “I’m not sure the best teams are any better than the ones of years ago, but I know there are more and more good teams.”

Players are generally better, he said. “They have more of an opportunity to be better; they are playing more.

“They have more access to good coaching, and there is so much more sharing of information. They have the opportunity to be stronger because of weight training. They can see themselves (in action) with the advent of videotape. They have every reason to be better.”

Gorrie thinks that the one thing that hasn’t changed in baseball is the attitudes of players.

“I don’t notice any difference at all. Some players know it all; some are very receptive--and that’s the way it’s always been. I know society has changed to a degree, but I don’t think human nature has changed.

“I find the players as enjoyable to work with as they were 29 years ago.”