Marden’s Marvelous Make Over : San Fernando Coach Leads Once-Woeful Tigers to Brink of City Baseball Title

Steve Marden sat in the bleachers at the San Fernando High baseball field, stretched out his legs after a hard day’s practice and was struck by a strange revelation.

Despite 16 years as coach, Marden realized that he had never camped out in the stands before. His time had been spent on the other side of the chain-link fence.

“Hey, I’ve never sat here before,” he said. “How’s the view?”

For years, the view wasn’t all that great. Not that it mattered. Nobody was watching. Yet Marden remembers what it was like in the mid-1970s, when the ideal vantage point was miles away.

“Coming out to watch the team play was tough,” he said. “Kids were getting blown out, there were a half-dozen people in the stands, there wasn’t much talent out there. There wasn’t much enthusiasm, there wasn’t much pride.”

Enthusiasm and pride are hourly buzzwords of Marden, 45, foremost purveyor of you-gotta-love-it baseball. Marden started rebuilding when he took over the struggling program in 1976 and has hardly stopped to take a breath.

Tonight at 7:30, the Tigers will make their second appearance in a City Section 4-A Division final at Dodger Stadium.

He already knows that the dugout at Chavez Ravine is a nice place in which to sit.

Marden’s voice steadily rises as he carries on an animated conversation--with himself. Arms start waving. He stands. White flecks of dried saliva form around his mouth.

A ballyard yarn is being spun.

The topic is San Fernando’s classroom tutorial sessions, wherein Marden quizzes and lectures players on what action to take in certain game situations. As is sometimes the case when Marden gets rolling, punctuation becomes an afterthought.

The following is a verbatim transcription of a question-and-answer session between coach and players that Marden reconstructed (periods and commas supplied as a public service):

“On a hit and run, what kind of a lead do we take? A short lead, a long lead?”

“A long lead?”

“Noooooo, no.”

“Why not a long lead? I don’t know.”

“Short lead. And why?”

“No, coach.”

“Yeah! Short lead! Because with a short lead we can make a very quick crossover step. The quicker we can make the crossover step, the sooner we influence the second baseman that we’re going.”

Actual elapsed time of the preceding dialogue was a head-spinning 18.21 seconds. Sometimes, your ears need a safety belt. Oxygen can get thin around this guy.

Longtime observers will swear there have been times when Marden--a never-ending source of dugout banter--has talked one of his players into getting a base hit.

He is charisma with a jolt of caffeine. Marden oozes positive reinforcement.

“He’s definitely verbal,” said Kennedy Coach Manny Alvarado, who served as a San Fernando assistant in 1988. “That’s his nature. He’s a talk man. He’s convincing.”

When Marden took over the program in the spring of 1976, he needed every ounce of salesmanship he could muster. Nobody wanted to play. Nobody attended games. Nobody cared.

In the three previous seasons, San Fernando was 3-42 in Mid-Valley League competition. To say the team was a cellar dweller was an understatement.

In his first year, he looked at a photo of the junior varsity and found that uniformity had nothing to do with the Tiger uniforms.

“The first three guys in the front row had three different uniforms,” said Marden, who trudged off and told the school administration that he needed funding for new uniforms.

“They said, ‘Sounds good. We have no money.’ ”

He struck a deal anyway. Marden promised that if the school would loan him $1,500 for uniforms, he would pay it back at the end of the year. The school came through--and so did Marden.

He got his hands on a soft drink vending machine and had the metal shop build and attach a set of casters. For the next few months, Marden single-handedly kept the machine serviced and stocked. Every morning he wheeled it out on the blacktop. Every night he wheeled it back indoors. He repaid the loan and made an additional $300 for the program.

“But you know, what a pain in the . . . it was,” he said, laughing. “On a hot day, I had to load that stinking machine five times. But it was important. We had to establish pride, and the first step is for the kids to feel good about their appearance.” The baseball facility made the ragtag uniforms look like Bill Blass pin stripes. There was one pitching machine and no batting cage. Marden took care of the latter in short order.

He placed a portable backstop against a wall and cemented a pole in the ground. The foundation set, Marden went fishing for a net to drape over the rudimentary contraption.

“I went down to San Pedro, found an old fisherman and traded the guy a bottle of Scotch for some old netting,” Marden said.

It wasn’t pretty. It was a start.

The program now has four pitching machines, two batting cages, a bullpen area for both the home and visiting teams, the best electronic scoreboard in the region, an outfield fence, a public-address system and sets of bleachers along both foul lines.

Marden says the “big-ticket items,” such as the scoreboard and outfield fence, were funded by two massive alumni games in the late 1980s that would have made Barnum & Bailey proud.

“We had skydivers, we had Raiderettes, this thing was unbelievable,” Marden said, his eyebrows raised. “We had helicopters hover overhead and guys swooped down on ropes with the game ball. We were on the news, we had it professionally videotaped, it was fantastic, they did one helluva job. We raised some big money.”

Ricardo Montalban, a San Fernando alumnus, was honorary chairman at one event and thousands turned out to watch the boys throw around the not-so-Corinthian leather. By this time, of course, word had leaked out to the local populace that Marden’s fantasy island was the place to be.

“You look around and there is graffiti everywhere,” Marden said. “This is like an oasis. They paint all over everything else, but look at the condition of our field and our facility. The community respects it.”

Players, those who used to transfer to Kennedy or Sylmar rather than toil for the toothless Tigers, are staying home. Right-hander Frank Serna, a 1989 graduate, was a terror in Mission Hills Little League and coveted by several schools. Serna said he lived in Poly’s attendance district but was considering attending Granada Hills or Monroe, which he said had expressed considerable interest through the player grapevine.

While he was still in junior high, Serna met Marden on the sidelines at a San Fernando football game.

“I walked up and said, ‘Hi! I’m Frank Serna,” said Serna, who is now one of Marden’s assistants. “And he said, ‘Uh, Yeah.’ ”

Intrigued by Marden’s seeming indifference, Serna enrolled in San Fernando’s magnet program. Despite his youth credentials, Marden completely retooled Serna’s delivery and it paid off immediately--Serna earned All-City honors as a sophomore.

Players remain fiercely loyal. In San Fernando’s 10-2 defeat of Sylmar in the semifinals Tuesday, former players Rudy Sanchez and Robert Chavez deciphered the Spartans’ signs and passed the word to Marden.

“We’re like a family,” said Sanchez, one of approximately 20 former players at the game. “Everyone is very close.”

Such stealthy activities, testimony to Marden’s extensive organization, are hardly new.

“He has three kids on the bench whose sole purpose during games is to steal signs,” Alvarado said. “And if you don’t already know that, well, then it’s too late.”

Marden’s preparedness might be unmatched in the area. Before each game, his assistants, a half-dozen in number, are handed a 10-page brief on the hitting tendencies of each starter in the opposing lineup.

“He runs a college program,” Alvarado said. “It is very intensive.”

Of course, with all the work he puts in, Marden hates to lose games to anybody, especially the weatherman. Once, a few years ago, heavy rains left his beloved field under a blanket of water. Yet Marden was determined to play.

He sprinkled the infield dirt with gasoline, tossed a match and jumped back. The dirty cloud of black smoke could be seen for miles. Fire trucks responded. Marden talked even faster than normal to get himself out of trouble.

Later, Marden tried it again. This time, the local fire chief dropped by and offered Marden and the San Fernando principal a seat of a different sort--in the local jail.

The king of fire-em-up baseball had, for once, been doused.

LIFESAVER

Sanchez loves being part of the Tiger clan. A month ago, he arranged his work hours so he could begin dropping by practice and helping out.

There was a time, however, when others wanted his companionship.

“I don’t know what would have happened to me without baseball,” said Sanchez, a 1989 graduate and a former catcher at Mission College. “When I was young, I knew all the gangs, they were all around me.”

Sanchez, perhaps because he was a ballplayer, was considered a person of status and left alone.

“It was weird,” he said. “There would be gang fights and stuff in the neighborhood, and all the car windows would be broken but ours.”

Rudy Vargas, a left-hander who started for San Fernando in its 3-2 loss to Monroe in the 1989 City final, publicly credited Marden’s program with getting him out of a gang and “saving his life.”

He is not alone.

“I feel really good about that,” Marden said. “I’ve got to believe that there are a half-dozen kids on the ballclub right now that, if they weren’t playing baseball, would be on the street. If (baseball) is your reason for being in school, I’m not thrilled with it, but at least they’re in school.”

The San Fernando attendance area, which includes parts of gang-infested Pacoima, can be violent. Four years ago, Serna’s best friend was mortally wounded when someone forcibly stole the vehicle he was driving and then shot him twice.

“Baseball is just the icing on the cake,” Serna said. “He wants us in school. He wants us to be responsible people and he wants us off the streets.”

Marden’s sphere of influence reaches far beyond the East Valley, however.

“In an indirect way, he’s helped a lot of kids all over the Valley,” said Bob Lofrano, the baseball coach at Pierce and the former coach at Chatsworth High. “Not all of them were Tigers.”

Marden helped design the current City Section playoff structure and also formulated the conference scheduling so that teams meet twice in the same week. Teams no longer can hold out their best pitcher exclusively for use in the tough league games.

In the spring of 1989 during a bitter teachers’ strike against the Los Angeles Unified School District, City coaches refused to work, jeopardizing the playoffs. With a settlement in the offing, Marden stepped in, lobbied until the wee hours of the morning to have the playoffs reinstated, and succeeded. Ironically, the Tigers were eliminated in the first round by Monroe, the earliest playoff exit by a San Fernando team in the past four seasons. Alvarado, his onetime assistant, won the City title at Kennedy that year.

“I felt an obligation to the kids and an obligation to the coaches,” said Marden, whose teams have made it to the semifinal round or beyond three times in four years. “I think the cancellation of the playoffs may have put a little extra pressure on the board of education to settle the thing.

“I really wanted to play the games. I didn’t feel too bad because Manny won it.”

Marden’s playing career was nondescript. A shortstop who posted strong offensive numbers in high school, he graduated from Cleveland in 1963 and enrolled at Arizona, where he soon learned that he did not possess the tools to play major-college baseball. He went into coaching.

He first was hired at Pacoima Junior High in 1968 and hoped for a varsity position coaching basketball or baseball at his alma mater. When that failed to pan out, he took a position coaching the B and C basketball teams at San Fernando in 1973.

At the time, San Fernando was obsessed with leather of another sort--the football. Future Heisman Trophy winner Charles White led the Tigers to City Section titles in 1974 and 1975. Baseball was hardly a priority sport, even for the ballplayers themselves.

“Baseball was the athletic alternative for the kids who weren’t good enough to run track or play football,” Marden said. “We were doormats.”

Marden took over in 1976. The team made the playoffs in 1978 and by the early 1980s, the Tigers were competitive with Mid-Valley League powers Granada Hills, Monroe and Kennedy.

“We were a legitimate contender,” he said. “We were in the upper division.”

The best was still ahead.

In 1988, the Tigers pulled off perhaps the biggest victory in school history when they knocked off Chatsworth in the 4-A semifinals at Cal State Northridge. The Chancellors were ranked No. 1 in the nation by USA Today and had won 26 games in a row.

“Define the word team and that’s San Fernando baseball,” said Lofrano, then the Chatsworth coach. “He tells his players, ‘You can beat Goliath.’ ”

Marden has been winning for years with a slingshot--and a few good arms with which to twirl it. In Marden’s 16-year tenure, 1990 graduate John Najar (Fresno State) is the lone player to have signed with an NCAA Division I school. Marden can think of no ex-Tigers playing professionally.

Slingshots, longshots, whatever. All it takes is desire, Marden said.

“We’re not going to beat teams because we’re more talented, we’ll win because we have what it takes right here,” he said, thumping himself in the chest. “We’re going to win because we want it more than they do and we work harder.”

Although Monroe defeated San Fernando, Marden learned a valuable lesson in the 1988 final.

“The No. 1 goal this time is to have fun,” he said. “I made some gross mistakes last time.

“We sat in that dugout and I remember some of the things I was saying, like, “Tell me who lost last year at Dodger Stadium! Tell me who lost! Nobody knows. Baby, there’s a basket of fruit at one end and a pile of . . . at the other. It’s one or the other, that’s all.’ ”

Marden stares at his feet as he tells the story, his voice no longer jumps from one octave to the next. He realizes that on occasion, he says too much.

“I over-inflated them,” he said. “We were sky high after beating Chatsworth and I made them an emotional wreck.”

Sometimes, it is better to tread lightly. That also applies to those who have walked across Marden’s yard.

A few minutes after Wednesday’s practice, a young ballplayer and his friend walked out on the varsity field and started playing catch. Marden wandered over.

Said Marden: “Is that ball one of ours?”

Wide-eyed kid: “No, it’s mine.”

Marden: “Are you sure?”

Kid: “Yes.”

Satisfied, Marden couldn’t help but slip back into public-relations mode.

“OK,” Marden said. “Keep throwing that fastball, son.”