In the Face of Adversity, Coach Garrido Sports a Smile

Augie Garrido, glutton for punishment, is the Cal State Fullerton baseball coach who won two championships while the going was bad, got out while the going was good and returned, inexplicably, three years later just as soon as the going went downhill fast.

The budget buzzards that circled overhead during his first tenure in the 1970s and ‘80s have begun to dive and swoop, driving a gymnastics coach into retirement and a football program nearly out of business.

Garrido’s new team, not the same as the old team, lost nine of its first 12 games.

His best pitcher, James Popoff, has an earned-run average of more than 5.00.

His best hitter, Phil Nevin, has slumped from 14 home runs in 1990 to three in 1991.

His new stadium won’t be ready until next season, so for now, his Titans play in a quirky little municipal park that features rumbling trains beyond the outfield fences and outfield fences that turn short fly balls down the left-field line into home runs and long fly balls down the left-field line into outs.

So when you talk with Garrido, the standard conversation-opener becomes a straight line.

“So, Augie, how’s it going?”

“I’m doing better than Mike Port.”

Once a Titan, always a Titan. Garrido hasn’t forgotten. He knows that if you’re going to coach at Fullerton, you have to understand that there’s no such thing as a half-empty glass of water.

At Fullerton, a half-empty glass of water means your players shower free for a week.

Thus, funky Amerige Park, the Titans’ temporary home field, “has been great,” according to Garrido. “It’s got little crooks, trees hang over the fences, it’s like how the old fields in the minor leagues used to be. The trains run every few minutes. I’m looking for a copy of the Doobie Brothers’ ‘Long Train Running.’ It would make a good team song for us.”

And the Titans’ 30-21 record and second-place standing in the Big West can’t be considered a comedown, regardless of Fullerton’s six trips to Omaha since 1975. “We’re doing OK,” Garrido says. “We’re not as good as we could be, but we could be doing a lot worse. We’re doing OK.”

And the switch from the resource-laden University of Illinois back to the open palms of Fullerton, where every week’s another crisis, remains a career move Garrido would make again.

“Absolutely,” he says. “No question about it. I’m in the middle of the kinds of things I like to be involved with. It’s difficult. It can be uncomfortable. But that’s all a part of it.”

It’s a thin line that separates positive thinking from the bottom of a bull’s stall, and Garrido treads it often. He pulls back when he has to, acknowledging that “the problems here are greater than I thought they were going to be, but now that I’m here, I want to be a part of the solution.

“I was very aware of Cal State Fullerton’s financial problems; I knew how shaky things could be because I’d dealt with them in the past. (But) I didn’t anticipate the athletic department’s situation with the football program, the change in athletic directors, the state budget cutbacks. . . .

“Our president, Dr. (Milton) Gordon, has run into things that have been totally unexpected. Every day, you look up and wonder--’Is that the last Scud they have? We only have four more Patriots, how many Scuds do you think they have?’ ”

Garrido is asked about the coin flip on the football program. Heads, Fullerton keeps football. Tails, football loses . . . and Garrido’s baseball program gains in the process?

Some of those hundreds of thousands of dollars being raised to save blocks and tackles would look pretty attractive sitting in Garrido’s recruiting-scheduling-and-conditioning kitty.

“I really don’t have those feelings,” Garrido claims. “Too much is at stake. Who really cares if my job is easier?

“I’ve never had a good feeling about baseball being better off without football. It might seem like it would be easier, but if we didn’t have football, things for the rest of us might be more difficult in the future. . . .

“Our university has a unique relationship with the city of Fullerton. I think we’re in the very early stages of having a Fresno State, Arizona State type of setup here, where the community says, ‘This is our university.’ That’s very rare in a large metropolitan area like the one we’re in, but Fullerton has a chance to do it.

“Losing football would really hurt that relationship. A lot of the interest the community has in Fullerton sports is linked to football.”

While Gene Murphy searches for silver and gold, Garrido settles for silver linings. These days, he finds most of them on the north end of campus, where his baseball stadium continues to take shape.

“They’re way ahead of schedule,” Garrido enthusiastically reports. “We have a chance to be in it by next season, by January ’92. They’ve already put in the waterlines, the batting cage is up, the dugouts are in, the lights are being aimed and directed. It looks good. The basic architecture is the same as (USC’s) Dedeaux Field, and that’s one of the best small ballparks in the country.”

In the meantime, Garrido’s Titans make do with Amerige Park and its ragged edge of a left-field corner. A small fence juts into and out of fair territory, turning the challenge of hitting a home run into an amusement park game. Hit the ball just right, just over the first, and it’s a homer. Hit it a little longer and it stays in play, usually falling into the webbing of an outfielder’s glove.

“We call it the Bermuda Triangle,” Garrido says. “You have to hit it in the little triangle and you have to hit it just right. Too far, and it goes out of the triangle and back into play. When a ball goes out to left field, it’s like watching a pinball machine.”

And, no, the Bermuda Triangle hasn’t claimed Garrido yet. He’s still living and breathing, and lately the Titans have even been winning, rallying with last weekend’s sweep of Cal State Long Beach to squirm back into playoff contention, and not one second too soon.

“I was more than encouraged by what we did against Long Beach,” Garrido says. “I was amazed. Nothing we had done to that point indicated that we were capable of doing anything close to that. We just won three games against the best team in the league--and I don’t know how we did it.”

Little miracles. That’s what it took to get Garrido back at Fullerton, and now that he’s there, that’s what it takes to keep him going.