Vultures Circling at UC Irvine

I’ve never been so popular in my life,” says Mike Gerakos as he hangs up the phone and heads out of his office, seeking refuge from the ringing in his ears.

For a few blessed minutes, Gerakos can escape the outpouring of sentiment over the nearly departed--his UC Irvine baseball program, which may or may not be sacrificed to the gods of university budget cuts, depending on which rumor you’re listening to, and when.

There have been phone calls from the parents of Gerakos’ players, wondering if their sons will have a place to play next year.

There have been phone calls from rival coaches to offer encouragement and, Gerakos cynically suspects, carve out inroads. “No one has come right out and said, ‘Can I have this kid?’ ” Gerakos says. “That’s probably the second phone call. The first is to feel things out.”

There has even been a phone call from a friend of a coaching friend who is looking for an electronic baseball scoreboard and wants to know, well, what Gerakos is planning to do with his.

“The vultures are circling,” Gerakos says.

Welcome to the worst week in the life of Mike Gerakos, who has spent the past 11 years fighting the uphill battle of making Irvine baseball work in the overlapping shadows of Cal State Fullerton, Cal State Long Beach, USC and UCLA. In retrospect, those were the good old days.

At least then, Gerakos was assured of the hill.

Now, who knows? Late last week, Gerakos began hearing interoffice murmuring. Then, over the weekend, the news broke in the papers: Irvine Athletic Director Tom Ford had been instructed to balance a budget $500,000 in debt, and baseball, with its price tag of just under $200,000, was sitting in the bull’s-eye of the blue pencil.

“Friday night, the rumors were going wild through the stands,” Gerakos says. “I was going to be fired, scholarships were going to be cut, they were going to drop baseball. My wife got tired of dealing with it, of answering all the questions. She missed the game on Saturday.”

Since then, Gerakos, and his program, have lived from news bulletin to news bulletin.

Have you heard? Irvine has raised $130,000 already.

Have you heard? Due to a clarification on university funding, the deficit has been reassessed at $415,000.

Have you heard? The new plan is that no programs will be cut, provided all programs are cut back.

Gerakos has heard them all.

He shrugs.

“The damage has been done,” he says. “Who wants to be involved with a dead or dying program? That’s the way people see us, now that the word got out. I don’t know who leaked what, but we, as a department, screwed up. The situation got blown out of proportion and now there’s no going back.”

Recruiting is at a standstill. Those who had signed letters of intent with Irvine have been released from that obligation. “We gave them the option (to look elsewhere),” Gerakos says. “After talking with Tom, we agreed that it was the most ethical thing to do, but at the same time, we have asked the recruits to have some patience.”

So far, there have been no defections, but no additions, either. “Right now, I don’t know what to do,” Gerakos says. “Do I go out and see a kid? Do I stay at home? What do I do?”

Suppose Irvine baseball survives but at a lower standard of living. Trim some scholarships, cut some corners.

Gerakos shakes his head. How does one go about cutting corners on a pea?

“For 11 years, we’ve tightened the belt buckle until there’s nothing there,” he says. “In four years, we’ve taken one trip out of the conference--this year, to Sacramento State. In 11 years, we’ve been on an airplane once.

“We were set to go on one next year. That shows you how naive I was. I agreed to go to North Carolina for a tournament next year, which would have cost us $12,000 or $13,000.

“Needless to say, we backed out of that.”

Gerakos begins naming some names. Augie Garrido of Fullerton. Dave Snow of Long Beach. Bob Bennett of Fresno State. They are the competition--all former NCAA coaches of the year, all immersed in rich baseball tradition, all vying for the same players Gerakos chases, if only for the exercise.

“I just don’t know how we could cut back any more and compete with guys like that,” Gerakos says. “It would be an impossibility. For 11 years, I’ve heard, ‘Mike, you’re doing a super job with what you have,’ but we haven’t done as well as we’ve wanted to in any of those years.

“Now, they’re talking about taking more away from us while the other people are building. I’m not on any death marches here. I can’t run out the clock. . . . I want to tell our kids that the university has made a commitment to improve the baseball program, to build a tradition here, but I can’t look them in the eye and tell them that right now.”

That is the saddest part, Gerakos maintains. Baseball shouldn’t merely survive at Irvine. It ought to thrive.

“We have an outstanding facility, we play in the Sun Belt, we play in the same area as three or four of the top 20 teams in the country,” he says. “A lot can be done here. This is one program they ought to try to save.”

Gerakos rises from the chair in his temporary hideaway and wanders into the hallway. He is thinking about braving the walk back to his office.

“I bet,” he says with a sigh, “there are 10 more messages waiting for me.”