A Mentor McGwire Will Not Forget

In a town of a thousand dirt diamonds and enough wide-eyed kids to fill them, it happens every day.

Somewhere, someone is teaching somebody to play ball.

The teacher pitches, the student swings. The teacher hits ground balls, the student chases them.

Every day, from dads to neighbors to volunteer coaches, somebody is getting calluses on their hands and dirt in their shoes for no pay, no prestige and often no thanks.

Then one day, one of those students grows up into Mark McGwire. And doesn’t forget.

And on the edge of one of those dirt diamonds, a little bit of somebody’s world is turned upside down.

“I did not teach Mark McGwire anything,” says Ron Vaughn, smiling over his cherry pie at Denny’s in Corona. “I just, uh, made some suggestions.”

Uh, McGwire says he did more than that.

He says Vaughn, a 49-year-old baseball scout who spends long days on hard benches watching Southern California kids, is one of the two men most responsible for his nationally captivating chase of the single-season home run record.

McGwire says it a lot. He has been saying it so much this summer that the only thing he has done more often than hit home runs is mention Ron Vaughn’s name.

He says it in every in-depth newspaper or magazine story. He says it in every lengthy TV interview.

He said it most succinctly when he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “Ron Vaughn, who’s one of my biggest mentors as a hitter, pretty much started me and taught me everything I needed to know.”

This is a guy who has not personally seen McGwire play in more than a year.

This is a guy who has not talked to McGwire since Christmas.

This is a guy who does not have one photo of him and McGwire working together.

“I guess because we did it during those times nobody was looking,” Vaughn said.

Which is sort of the way it always is.

Like the father, the neighbor, the volunteer coach, Vaughn is a guy who helped McGwire when nobody else had the time or expertise.

He met McGwire when they were both at USC in 1981-82--McGwire was a freshman pitcher, Vaughn was the hitting coach.

They started working together in the summer of 1982 in the Alaskan Summer League. Vaughn was an assistant coach for the Anchorage Glacier Pilots, and McGwire was going to be one of his pitchers.

“Then the manager told me we needed to bring up a big-hitting first baseman, and I had seen Mark in high school, and I said, ‘Hey, we already have one,’ ” Vaughn said.

Turns out, that might have been the most important baseball directive since the one that sent Babe Ruth to the outfield.

That summer, working with Vaughn, McGwire hit .403 with 13 homers and 53 runs batted in, and his pitching days were finished.

When McGwire returned to USC in the fall, Vaughn was missing, having left for Azusa Pacific because of philosophical differences with Coach Rod Dedeaux.

McGwire tracked down his old coach, and called him.

“Will you still help me?” McGwire asked.

“Where do you want to meet?” Vaughn said.

So, for the next five years, they met during free time and off-seasons while McGwire worked his way through college and the minor leagues.

Usually it would be at Mt. San Antonio College, near Vaughn’s Walnut home.

McGwire would bring his bats. Vaughn would bring a bucket of balls.

Vaughn would empty out the balls, sit on the bucket near McGwire, and softly toss him pitches that he would drive into a net.

Vaughn would work on McGwire’s hand positioning, his balance, his stroke, tossing ball after ball for as long as two hours a session.

McGwire would hit so many balls, so hard, that he would eventually hit the cover off them.

Because Vaughn was paying for the balls, he would keep using them until they were reduced to a mass of yarn.

When they got bored, Vaughn would secretly grab a piece of yarn from a battered ball, toss it to McGwire, then pull it back before he could hit it.

“When you are all alone, pitching and hitting balls for that long, you need to break up the monotony,” he said.

Sometimes they would move to a nearby batting cage, where McGwire would really tee off.

“I throw kind of straight,” Vaughn said.

Once, while Vaughn was peeking around the pitching screen to study McGwire’s swing, a line drive hit him in the back and knocked him breathless.

“I was having such trouble breathing, Mark had to carry me to my car,” he said.

For the next week, Vaughn showed up for his job at a food factory with seams on his back.

And so it went, five years, three or four months a year, two or three times a week, for nothing more than McGwire’s companionship during a post-workout lunch at Subway.

“Of course there was no pay,” said Vaughn, laughing. “A young guy wants me to help, I help. That’s what a baseball guy does.”

When McGwire joined the Oakland Athletics in 1987, he began working with major-league hitting instructors, including the other man he credits with his success, Doug Rader.

But he never forgot Vaughn, who left the food business to return to baseball as an area scout, first with the Chicago White Sox, then the A’s.

McGwire bought him and his wife dinner whenever they met, invited them to his Christmas parties, supplied him with a dozen autographed balls, most of which Vaughn has given to buddies.

Vaughn thought that was the extent of their relationship--just buddies--until McGwire began consistently speaking of him as his guru.

Writers from all over the country have been calling the unknown teacher this summer, and Vaughn has finally stopped being surprised.

“This just shows you what kind of guy Mark McGwire is,” Vaughn said. “Most people who get success, those guys in the past, they stay in the past.”

Not here. Not now. A teacher with callused hands and dirty shoes has finally had someone say thanks, has finally hit it big.

Sunday night Vaughn was sitting in his recliner in the office of his Corona home watching ESPN when McGwire hit his 55th homer.

His wife Barbara ran in from the family room saying, “Markie did it again!”

“Right then, it felt like family was doing it,” said Ron Vaughn. “And that’s all the payoff I need.”