Wallach Is There for Titans, and for His Family

It is a sound Tim Wallach never wants to hear again.

A crack you can’t describe, followed by a terror you can’t imagine.

Wallach saw the ball leave the metal bat and then heard it hit the head of his 13-year-old son, Matthew, the pitcher. Before he reached the field where the Yorba Linda Little League team was playing, Matthew had crumpled to the ground.

“I was more scared than I’d ever been in my life,” Wallach says now, a year later. “You just can’t imagine.”

Matthew spent four days in intensive care with a skull fracture. Lori, Tim’s wife and Matthew’s mom, says she thanks the Lord every day that her son is fine, happy, healthy, pitching again, and that she was not a witness to the accident.

“I had gone to the car to get something for my youngest son,” Lori says. “I was coming back to the field when a friend told me Matt had been hurt. Then I heard over the PA someone asking for people to call 911.”

This accident, this traumatic parental moment, is one of the things that has brought Wallach back to his old college, Cal State Fullerton, as a first-year assistant baseball coach.

It is Wallach’s time, for the next few years, to be around for his three sons. He wants to be able to coach Matthew, 14, Brett, 11, and Chad, 8. He wants to be at their games, play catch in the backyard and, yes, pick them up off the pitching mound and be with them at the hospital, telling a dazed and frightened child that things will be OK.

Wallach was a member of the Titans’ first national championship team in 1979, as well as the national college player of the year. He had a 17-year major league career and was an All-Star third baseman five times for the Montreal Expos.

After retiring as a player with the Dodgers, Wallach managed the organization’s Class-A San Bernardino team and then took a couple years off. Last year, Wallach let Fullerton Coach George Horton know he’d be interested in returning to his old college team as a coach. This year, there was an opening.

As Fullerton is hosting an NCAA regional for the first time this weekend, Wallach’s family is in the stands watching dad, the rookie college coach.

This is not exactly the big leagues anymore.

While USC was beating Virginia Tech Friday afternoon, the PA announcer asked fans to please, please, arrive late for Saturday’s first game. While Fullerton has expanded its stadium enough to earn a regional, there’s no extra parking. Saturday is also commencement day at Fullerton, so, baseball fans, gates won’t open until 1 p.m. for the 1:30 game.

But Wallach, 42, didn’t come to Fullerton to be big-time. He came to learn to be a good coach and to be close to his home in Yorba Linda.

Tim and Lori are Orange County born and raised. Wallach graduated from University High and went to Saddleback College before coming to the Titans. Lori grew up in Garden Grove. She met Tim at a college party.

“After all the years in Montreal,” Lori says, “we were looking forward to coming home for a while. Being able to get this Fullerton job has just been great. I can tell every day when he comes home how much Tim has enjoyed coaching these guys.”

This year, this job, would not have meant much had things turned out as badly last summer as Tim and Lori feared. It is the problem with metal bats. The ball can travel so hard, so fast. A 13-year-old’s head is not supposed to meet that batted ball.

“I thought he was dead when I first saw Matt,” Lori says. “Tim was beside himself.”

Says Tim: “You feel a little helpless and a lot scared. Matt is there, unconscious, and you just don’t know what to think.”

When the paramedics arrived, Matt had regained consciousness. This was good, Lori thought. Then the paramedics said they wanted to take Matt to Western Regional Hospital because it was best for head trauma. This was bad, Lori thought.

“You think maybe he just has a concussion and then the doctors are telling you it’s a fractured skull,” Lori says. “Tim never left the hospital, for four days, not a minute. I know how glad he was to be here for us.”

By the day after the accident, Matt was complaining that the precautionary neck brace was impeding his sleep. There were three more days in intensive care, but Lori and Tim knew if Matt was cranky, things were fine. In fact, Matt has come back to pitch this year. Tim thought maybe Matt would be too scared to be on the mound again but that has been no problem.

Wallach would like to be a head coach someday. In the majors for sure. Maybe in college. But for now, helping train college players and watching his sons is a fine life.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com