Consent and a Triple Header

 

 

Late in the spring of 1976, The SMU Mustang Baseball team was down. The exuberance that every spring season brings had long since faded. A statistical review of my senior season is particularly tough to take. Under harsh light, the details of the games in which we were competitive and also leading late in games are not evident. Looking back at the scores, we seemed to be just bad enough to lose games. There were a few blowouts, sure, but we lost a bunch of close games, too. The record shows that we committed 106 errors in 38 games and hit .189 as a team.

Waco, season series finale, 1976:

By the time our trip to Baylor University in Waco, Texas came around, our record was 2-33. We actually thought that Sports Illustrated might be interested in our story. And, we may have been worthy of at least a mention if we hadn’t swept a double header against the University of Dallas in the middle of the season. There were several stingingly frank articles in our school newspaper, The Daily Campus, that were very polarizing for the university. The articles basically said the status quo was untenable, and that the University needed to either spend substantial money and boost the baseball program up, or do away with it altogether. I agreed. Our poor record was the culmination of neglect that our program had experienced for the last four years. There was already in place a plan to convert our home ballpark, Armstrong Field, into a track complex and move the team off-campus. The very future of SMU baseball was in doubt.

Thinking too much about losing is a potential pitfall, of course. If you try to attach too much importance to your role in a season like this, it can be hard on your self-esteem. However, disassociating yourself from it can be a form of denial that is also dangerous. Thus, you have a dilemma. You ultimately have to decide that the season does not define you. But it does change you. This season simply kicked us all a bit sideways.

We arrived in Waco for our last Southwest Conference series of the season and last three games of my college career. After checking into our motel late Thursday afternoon, the first thing we were told was that there had been a ‘malfunction’ of their sprinkler system that had flooded the field. We could not play our Friday games. The Bears, anxious to get these games in with the last place Mustangs, petitioned the league for a triple header on Saturday. With our second-string catcher David Bostic in Dallas playing fullback in SMU’s Spring Football Game, Bruce Gietzen would likely have to catch all three games on one day. Not good, and maybe unprecedented in D1 baseball. It was years later that we would learn that a Baylor player had actually sneaked on the field in the middle of the night and turned the water on, as depicted much later in the movie “Bull Durham” so that he could attend an out of town party with his girlfriend.

That is how it came to be that we were stuck in a motel for at least two days with little to do. I was rooming with my best friend at SMU, outfielder Rob “Goose” Goss, second baseman Mike “Jake” Jaccar and our third baseman Jack “Pandy” Speake. Thursday night with no game the next day, a party was planned for our motel room that included at least two cases of beer, two bags of ice, some cheap cigars, and our bathtub that would work nicely as a beer cooler. I know what you are thinking. Of course, drinking beer on a road trip was taboo. We had merely decided to try and make the best of our situation, which was staying in a cheap motel in Waco, Texas for three days.

The four of us were in our room, waiting for the beer to get cold, when Coach Finley came in. Yikes! He was as bored as we were, and restless, which only added to the tension. Furtive looks all around.  We are all thinking the same thing: man, I hope he doesn’t need to use the bathroom! There would be trouble. Getting dismissed from a team with a record of 2-33 would be beyond embarrassing. Our bad luck; Finley had a large wad of chewing tobacco that he was working on. After pacing around our room for a while, of course eventually he had to spit. As he disappeared into the bathroom, we four exchanged guilty looks. Plain and simple, we were ‘busted’. Oddly, he came back out, and resumed the conversation as if nothing had happened. After just another short while, he had to spit again. He could not have missed seeing the beer in there. Something else was afoot.

He would not leave. One by one, several of our teammates came in for the party. Each, upon seeing Finley there, gave questioning looks to me, Goose, Jake and Pandy. All we could do was shrug. Then it dawned on me as to what was happening. He was waiting for a bigger audience! I think he also wanted to see who else might be in on the beer drinking. Finally, when about seven or eight of us were there, he went in for a final spit.

“All right, what’s going on? It looks like a damn brewery in there! Whose beer is that?!”

“It’s Landsmann’s beer, Coach.”

Jake said it with such audacity and confidence that it set Coach Finley back on his heels a bit. Brian Landsmann was our naïve strait-laced freshman shortstop from Cleveland, Ohio, and one of Finley’s favorites. Landsmann was also a guy to whom Finley enjoyed giving a lot of good-natured grief. Finley, recovering quickly, got this somewhat maniacal look in his eye, and in an instant, we knew he was ‘all in’. He growled, “Get Landsmann in here, then!” Someone left to get Landsmann, who came in looking like he had been asleep.

Finley led the perplexed young man to the door of the bathroom and pointed. “Landsmann, they said this is your beer!”

Landsmann, turning beet red, with all eyes in the room on him: “Coach, I…uh…don’t know…uh…” After a few minutes of protestation, Finley finally let him off the hook.

Next, surprising everyone, Finley roars, “This is too damn much beer for just you guys to drink. Get the rest of the team in here!”  The whole team was roused and dispatched to our room to drink the beer. Finley did not partake, although he stayed until the last can was finished. As the party dwindled down, only a few of us remained. We were watching the Johnny Carson Show. Lounge singer Robert Goulet came on, and as he sang some now unmemorable song, all of a sudden with no warning, “Smack!” A large wad of chewing tobacco hit and stuck to the wall just above the TV. It had sailed a bit high. Apparently, Coach Finley was unimpressed by the song stylings of Mr. Goulet.

Coach Finley had known that his Mustangs were hurting and puzzled about the results of their efforts on the field this season. The ‘Stangs were licking wounds from a season no one had seen coming, and no one would ever forget. He let the beer incident go….and never another word was said about it, although I do have pictures:

The record shows that we lost three in a triple header to Baylor on Saturday, ending the season at 2-36. There was nothing particularly memorable, at least for me, that happened on the field for us that weekend. The memories we had made were off the field this time, and came from trying to live through a really strange season. And Waco was an apropos setting.