Horton Fires Up Titans

Five errors, 14 runners left on base, a 5-3 loss at home to Arizona State. Coach George Horton was embarrassed. He said that on television. Horton saw a Cal State Fullerton baseball team that seemed to take its talent for granted and didn’t seem to know what it was wasting.

That was Feb. 23. Horton’s Titans, which had started out the year ranked No. 2 in one national poll, were 6-7 and moving aimlessly through the season.

“After that Arizona State game,” second baseman David Bacani says, “coach was mad, very mad. And the next day we came to practice and found out about the nine-inning challenge.”

Nine innings. It’s what the Titans weren’t playing. All nine innings. It’s what Horton was going to make the Titans learn to do. So on Feb. 24 the Titans ran the Goodwin Field stadium stairs. Nine times.

“I thought a couple of them were going to die,” Horton says.

The next day, it was nine laps around the field. Every day since it has been nine of something, nine of some unpleasant-but-necessary task.

“I think we all learned something,” says Bacani, a senior from Los Alamitos who has started all 60 games for Fullerton this season. “It was a great move by coach. Another great move.”

The Titans (44-16) host an NCAA Super-Regional Friday through Sunday at Goodwin Field. Mississippi State (39-22) is the opponent. The Bulldogs have a 12,000-seat stadium in Starkville and it would not have shocked Horton if the Titans, despite being seeded No. 1 in the whole tournament, had been sent off to Starkville. Two years ago, the Titans were seeded in the top eight and got sent first to Notre Dame and then to Ohio State.

Horton was unhappy about that and said so. Horton was not afraid to say that the NCAA seemed not to care about performance or what advantages a team had earned on the field. Horton was not afraid to say that the NCAA seemed only to care about making as much money as possible.

“I got the feeling after that, the NCAA was a little embarrassed,” Horton says. “I think it would have been hard for them to send us away this year.” Plain speaking works sometimes.

Horton is the perfect man to coach baseball at Fullerton.

It wasn’t an easy job, what Horton was asked to do when he replaced legendary Augie Garrido in 1996.

The Titans had won the College World Series in 1995 and Garrido went off to Texas. It was Garrido’s program at Fullerton. It was Garrido who built it from nothing into a national powerhouse. It was Garrido who won three national titles and who palled around with Kevin Costner, a Fullerton alum, and who, as Horton says, “could BS as well with the President of the United States as with a baseball scout.”

Not Horton. Horton was the loyal assistant who doesn’t want to think about talking to the President. Sometimes, loyal assistants are best left as loyal assistants.

And some turn out to be the perfect head coach. “I had no doubts,” Horton says. “I do have confidence in myself.”

How could he not?

Horton says his father, Joe, who lives with Horton and his wife, still has a grainy video taken when Horton was 1 1/2. “I was swinging a bat,” he says, “and, boy, could I ever hit the ball. I don’t know how, but I did.”

Reared in Downey, Horton played baseball--he was a left-handed catcher--and football. “I was either big-boned, which was how my parents described me,” Horton says, “or I was fat. I was a center in football, but I had the mind of a quarterback. I was always doodling plays. If you found any of my notebooks from junior high or high school, you’d find them filled with football plays I was inventing.”

When he was a junior in high school, Horton lost 50 pounds. “My mother got tired of me being ‘big-boned,’ ” Horton says, “and I got a dollar for every pound I lost.” Now he was 5-8 and 170 pounds and while Horton did get recruited to play football at Cerritos College, “I realized I had no future there as a 170-pound center.”

So he played baseball for Wally Kincaid. There was also no future for a weak-armed, 5-8, left-handed catcher. But Kincaid was convinced there was a future for Horton in right field or at first base--wherever he could play and Kincaid could get Horton’s strong, fluid swing, the one he had as a toddler, into the batting order.

After two years at Cerritos, Horton went to the University of Hawaii. “Six or seven of my teammates at Cerritos got scholarships to Cal State Fullerton,” Horton says. “They wanted me to come as a walk-on. So I went to Hawaii. I stayed for a semester and I was miserable.”

Horton came home, walked on at Fullerton and, as per NCAA rules then, had to sit out a year. “So I became the third base coach and I was pretty good at it,” Horton says. “I saw the game well, made the right calls, understood pitching.”

The coaching bug was permanent. Horton played for two of Garrido’s teams, including the first to go to Omaha for the College World Series. “You didn’t get a day off between Games 1 and 2 back then,” Horton says. “We liked to say we lost so fast we saw our own jet stream on the way home.”

And then Horton went back to Cerritos to coach. He had once planned on being a dentist, had even majored in biology in college. But it was baseball Horton loved. It is still baseball Horton loves.

Horton won three community college state titles in his six years at Cerritos. He came back to Fullerton in 1991 to be Garrido’s assistant. As the Titans’ head coach, Horton has won four Big West titles, made a trip to Omaha and won 100 games faster than Garrido (147 games for Horton, 169 for Garrido).

In 1999, Horton handled an childish incident with just the right amount of discipline and grace. Four of his top players got arrested for throwing rocks off the roof of a restaurant in South Bend, Ind., after the Titans had won the regional there. Fullerton went to Columbus, Ohio, the next weekend to play Ohio State in the super-regional without those players, whom Horton suspended. The Titans won; Horton had taught his players a lesson.

“We were stupid, it was a bad situation and Coach Horton did everything right,” says Bacani, who was one of the players. “It wasn’t easy for anybody, especially for coach. I don’t know if we all thought so at the time, but coach did the right thing in suspending us.”

Two years later, the Titans are where they belong, playing in a super-regional at home, an honor they’ve earned.

Horton has always understood Fullerton’s limitations. He understands there will never be a stadium as big as what Mississippi State has or facilities like he saw at Ohio State. The big-name high school players will always look first at USC or Stanford. He understands why Garrido left for Texas and doesn’t rule out a similar move some day.

“It would be nice to see what you can do with all the resources,” Horton says. “On the other hand, the grass isn’t always greener.”

Folks at Fullerton better paint the grass at Goodwin very, very green. Because it’s hard to imagine they’ll ever find a better coach.