Garrido’s Quest for 1,000 Leaves Him Blue, Orange

Only nine men have raked enough infields, suffered enough bus rides, placated enough boosters and survived enough sore arms to win 1,000 NCAA baseball games. Rod Dedeaux is one. Ron Fraser is another. Cliff Gustafson. Jim Brock. The legends of horsehide and aluminum.

With six more postgame handshakes at the mound, Augie Garrido will bring the list to 10. A thousand victories--with nearly 800 of them coming in the borrowed blue and off-the-rack orange of Cal State Fullerton, where baseball is spoken in a different dialect than at USC, Miami, Texas and Arizona State.

Sacrifice? At Fullerton, that’s budgetary policy.

Pitch? Garrido makes several of them on a daily basis, to alumni, to school administrators, to potential donors, to anyone willing to spare a dollar to send a Titan to Omaha this June.

Hustle? That’s what Garrido was doing Thursday afternoon, zipping from a meeting in Anaheim with the sponsors of his annual baseball tournament to an interview in Fullerton, at which he apologized, huffing and puffing, for arriving 20 minutes late.

“It’s hard,” Garrido explains by way of trademark punchline-and-painkiller, “when you have no money.”

Garrido laughs. As always, it beats the alternative. But 18 years at Fullerton have taken a detectable toll, from the hair on his head (gray now) to the features on his face (lined now) to his manner in less-than-casual conversation (careful now).

Instead of flying off the handle, Garrido now grips it tightly.

Where a salty one-liner once sufficed, Garrido now leans back in a chair, presses his fingertips together, stares at the ceiling and turns philosophical, waxing on about “the essence, the soul of things” and “what’s really important” and “compassion for the needs of our players.”

Gone, perhaps forever, is the cocksure young coach who stared into a battery of microphones after losing the first game of the 1979 College World Series and predicted a Cal State Fullerton championship, a week before pulling it off.

Same for the “arrogant, opinionated, self-focused” little general--adjectives supplied by Garrido--who once inspired a sportswriter to muse, “If Augie Garrido had been Custer, he’d have sworn the Indians were in trouble.”

“I think I think differently now,” Garrido says, and he brings up 1979 as a significant reason why.

“We went to Omaha that year, it was our second time there, and this team was good ,” Garrido begins. “At the (pre-tournament) press conference, I was asked about our team and I went through our statistics very factually, because it was like, ‘Who the hell is Cal State Fullerton? Who are these guys?’

“Then a sportswriter from Mississippi State asks the first question--’Coach, do you realize that tomorrow you’re going up against Ron Polk, and Ron Polk has written the most successful coaching book on baseball ever, and have you read that book?’

“I said, ‘No . . . and I haven’t read Walter Alston’s book, either.’ ”

Tone had been set. One evening later, writers and coaches were reconvened after Polk’s Mississippi State squad had defeated Fullerton and “the same writer is there, ready to dig in. He asks me, ‘Now that all eight teams have played a game, Coach, who do you predict will win?’

“I said, ‘Cal State Fullerton.’

“And he says, ‘Do you realize that only five teams in the history of the College World Series have lost their first game and come back to win it all?’

“I said, ‘No, but that wasn’t your question. You asked me who’s going to win this tournament. Cal State Fullerton is going to win this tournament.’ ”

Ruthian it was not, but a called shot is a called shot. The Titans won their next five games to prove their coach right, but beyond that?

“I thought (the championship) was going to solve all my problems,” Garrido said. “I wanted the school to jump in and support the program. I wanted the stadium to be built. I wanted things to be easy . . .

“But do you see? Do you see what happened? We won it all--and it got worse. It didn’t get better, it got worse. ‘We just won the championship, can you give me what I want?’ The answer was no.

“That’s probably where I started feeling that winning really doesn’t matter. It got me thinking about what’s really important about coaching college baseball--teaching and helping young people help themselves to become what they want to be.”

Garrido won another World Series in 1984. Still no stadium. He left for Illinois in 1988, pursuing such worldly riches as indoor batting cages and full scholarships, but he was cold and unhappy there. Lured by the groundbreaking and installation of light standards at what is now the Titan Sports Complex, Garrido returned to Fullerton in 1991, returned to Omaha in 1992--and saw his budget cut, again, before 1993.

Changed? Yes, Garrido pleads guilty as charged. But demolished and completely rebuilt? You will notice that the wording is still “Augie,” not “August.” The song remains the same; the volume switch has only been lowered a notch or two.

“In 1979, I was defiant,” Garrido says. “That’s probably the word for it. To get out of Vallejo, a tough shipyard town, you had to be. I defied my parents growing up. I boxed in the Golden Gloves a little bit. I developed what you would call a prize fighter’s mentality.

“Yeah, there probably was a carryover to Fullerton. From what I didn’t know and by being unrealistic, I refused to accept my role. Win an NCAA championship? At Cal State Fullerton? Why not?

“My Dad worked in the shipyard and we grew up living in the projects. How do you get out? If I accepted my role there, I’d be working at the shipyard.

“And guess what? They just closed that shipyard down.”

When Fullerton lost the 1992 College World Series in a 3-2 crusher to Pepperdine, Garrido said he was “pleasantly surprised by what I felt. There was a strong feeling of compassion that took me above my own personal feelings . . .

“These kids were devastated, but they had learned the definition of words they didn’t know before, like ‘teammates’ and ‘courage,’ ‘integrity’ and ‘giving.’ I told them they did me a great service just by letting me watch.

“These guys believed they could fly. And they did. It was great just to watch. I’m sure I got more out of it than they did.”

After 994 victories, moments such as those generate the most genuine thrills. Or take this season’s team--”fourth in the conference in fielding, fourth or fifth in the conference in pitching, fourth in the conference in hitting, and we’re 14-1 in the conference,” Garrido says. “How’d we get there?”

After 994 victories, you come to appreciate those times that reconfirm that, no, you haven’t yet seen it all.

“Obviously,” Garrido says, “this is where I’m supposed to be. I tried to get out of here once--and I came back.”

How could Garrido resist? How To Win 1,000 Games The Hard Way--at Fullerton, Garrido wrote the book.

Where else was he going to hold the signing party?