UC Irvine Baseball Could Be Diamond in the Rough

The area in and around the office of UC Irvine assistant athletic director Paul Hope is filled with plans for the Anteaters’ highly anticipated baseball stadium, which is intended to help jump-start the multimillion-dollar resurrection of the sport on campus.

There are dozens of sketches, renderings and revised artist conceptions, drawings in both color and black and white and enlarged charts detailing phases of construction. Around the corner is a large three-dimensional rendering of what it might look like someday, and one of the sturdy iron seat-back chairs to be installed.

Despite some concerns, baseball is being given every opportunity to succeed at Irvine when it is brought back in 2002.

“There’s no question about it, to do what they are trying to do they have to make a major commitment,” said former UCI baseball Coach Mike Gerakos, now an assistant at University High. “Not just the athletic department, but the university as a whole. What [has been] done so far, you can see they are making a major statement along those lines.”

UCI had a baseball team from 1970 to 1992 and won NCAA Division II titles in 1973 and ’74. The program has a 643-565 record. It was dropped, along with men’s cross-country and men’s track and field, during a prolonged statewide budget crunch. Cross-country and track were restored the same year as non-scholarship sports.

But now, thanks to an aggressive fund-raising campaign and passage last spring of a student referendum that increased fees to bring athletic funding to the levels of other Division I schools nationwide, there’s a sense of euphoria at Crawford Hall. Each sport is expected to be fully funded with the maximum number of scholarships allowed by the NCAA. In addition, baseball is back and women’s golf and women’s water polo have been added, with perhaps more sports on the way.

A lighted soccer field at the school’s track stadium is expected to be ready for the fall, but it is the baseball stadium that is ticketed to be the cornerstone in a massive building process that administrators hope will bring Irvine to national prominence.

“Once it is complete, we believe it will rival any college field in the country,” Athletic Director Dan Guerrero said. “This marks the first time in the history of intercollegiate athletics here that it will be the focus of a concentrated effort in building facilities. Our desire is to build them the way they should be built, in a first-class manner.”

Guerrero, a former All-American second baseman at UCLA, was not at Irvine when the sport was dropped but was hired soon thereafter and immediately advocated bringing back baseball. Last fall Guerrero and Hope toured some of the best campus stadiums around the country seeking design ideas.

When completed, the palm tree-lined stadium, built atop the shell of the old 1,500-seat field, will have chairs for 2,400 spectators. Lights and a scoreboard, concession stands, batting cages, clubhouses, state-of-the-art dugouts and coaches’ offices are planned. Spectators will have a sweeping vista looking north at county foothills.

There’s one catch. There’s $3 million in hand for the first phase, expected to be completed by fall 2001. But the remaining $6 million has yet to be secured.

“Its completion is predicated on raising additional dollars,” Guerrero said. “It’s something we have to live with.”

The first phase calls for the current field to be lowered three feet to provide a better view for spectators and facilitate the installation of a major league-quality playing surface, dugouts, 600 seats, rest rooms, batting cages, landscaping and a grass berm on the first-base side where patrons will be allowed to spread lawn chairs and blankets.

The county’s baseball community seems pleased that Irvine is making a comeback.

“I’m happy to see baseball back at Irvine,” Capistrano Valley High baseball Coach Bob Zamora said. “It was a shame that it ever left. Orange County is a hotbed of baseball and this is a great place to recruit players. I hope Irvine uses its full allotment of scholarships to start.”

The Anteaters’ new coach, in fact, will have the NCAA maximum 9.7 scholarships available and a full complement of assistant coaches. Although Guerrero doesn’t like to talk numbers, there shouldn’t be a shortage of balls and bats, either. That’s something that Gerakos had to put up with during his 12-year tenure, when he raised most of the funds to run the program himself.

School administrators, alarmed by an annual athletic department deficit of more than $300,000, weren’t fully sold on whether a Division I athletic program was right for the Anteaters.

Today, with new funding and the state’s fiscal woes in the past, Gerakos sees nothing wrong with making the baseball field a centerpiece.

“The first step is to hire a coach,” Gerakos said, “but with that, the next thing is to build a facility. And if you are going to play Division I baseball in the Big West Conference, you need a Division I facility.”

In 1992, Cal State Fullerton got a 2,400-seat ballpark as part of a $10-million project that included construction of a 10,000-seat football/soccer stadium.

Not long after that, Long Beach State moved from its campus stadium to nearby Blair Field, the city’s former minor league park. It has been named among the nation’s top 15 amateur facilities by Baseball America magazine.

Local high school baseball coaches say the biggest hurdle facing the new Anteater coaching staff will be finding the right academic fit to appeal to recruits. The university is known for its strong science and biology courses, but it lacks traditional liberal arts majors favored by many athletes.

“That’s the biggest hang-up,” La Quinta High baseball Coach Dave Demarest said. “You try to get somebody in there and they don’t have a lot of majors that are appealing. Even Stanford and UCLA have a wide array of business education or communication courses. Hopefully, they will widen their offerings to make the place appealing.”

Villa Park High Coach Tom Tereschuk says Irvine will have to prove it can be flexible in support of athletes.

“One thing that concerns me . . . [is accommodating] athletes as far as scheduling classes,” Tereschuk said. “Sometimes you can’t get a class, or it comes down to playing baseball or getting done with your major. You can’t do both. There needs to be some kind of understanding that the athlete needs some type of support system to be successful.”

Guerrero said he has not spoken to anyone at the university about degree programs.