Recruiting missteps hurt USC baseball

What happened to USC baseball?

That is the question I set out to answer when I started writing this piece. What happened to the 12-time National Champions, the most successful program in the history of the sport? What happened to the team of Rod Dedeaux, the college baseball Coach of the Century? How can a program that had but two head coaches for 65 years have had three in the last four?

Naturally, I started where every other child of my generation would: I Googled it. Though the first hit was about the USC Trojans, more than half the results on the first page were about the baseball program at that other USC, South Carolina.

I have done a lot of Internet searching regarding USC athletic programs in my time here, and to see South Carolina pop up with that frequency is unheard of. Case and point: A Google search of USC men’s soccer — a sport which the Trojans do not even compete in — returns results for this school’s club team before South Carolina’s varsity program.

So, what happened to USC baseball?

First, the past: Rod Dedeaux served as the head coach of USC baseball for 45 years, guiding the Trojans to 11 National Championships and amassing 1,332 wins. When Dedeaux retired following the 1986 season, former player Mike Gillespie took over.

From 1988 to 2002, USC made a regional every year but one, including four appearances at the College World Series and a championship in 1998. But in 2004, USC suffered its first losing season in nearly 20 years. By the end of the 2006, Gillespie was out.

Officially, Gillespie “retired,” but it is no great secret he was forced out by then-Athletic Director Mike Garrett. After just one season of “retirement,” Gillespie was named the head coach at UC Irvine, where he guided the Anteaters to the NCAA regionals in each of his first four years there.

Gillespie was replaced by, ironically enough, his son-in-law Chad Kreuter — and it’s been all downhill from there.

Kreuter was 111-117 before being let go after the 2010 season. His replacement, Frank Cruz, was 48-63 before being fired for an NCAA violation before last season. And then that 2013 squad had the least wins of any Trojan team (20) since the 1957 team went 18-4.

“I think Kreuter was just in over his head at USC,” said Baseball America’s Aaron Fitt. “The Trojans had one of the best coaches on the West Coast in Mike Gillespie, and they ran him out of town for someone with very little college coaching experience and not much feel for how to build a college program.”

Indeed, the consensus regarding the demise of USC baseball stems from recruiting. College baseball’s relationship with its professional counterpart is not as straightforward as basketball or football. In baseball, a player coming out of high school is eligible to be drafted by a professional organization. Should a player decide to turn down the offer and attend college, he is not eligible for the draft again for three full years.

That creates a complicated guessing game for college coaches: You have to recruit talent, obviously. But focusing too much time and effort on a highly talented player is risky, because there is a good chance he won’t come to school at all.

“They got killed a couple of years where almost the whole class signed,” said current USC head coach Dan Hubbs, then the pitching coach at Cal. “That’s like the death penalty. It’s just really hard when you don’t have protection for those guys, and they didn’t.”

To a certain extent, players spurning school for the pros can be considered unlucky, but not when it becomes the trend, as it did under Kreuter.

“(Kreuter) didn’t do his homework very well,” said Perfect Game USA’s Kendall Rogers. “And you keep a coach like Kreuter for four years, with the recruits he lost, you’re gonna ruin the program.”

A professional baseball contract, even a small one, is quite the sum of money, especially to an 18-year-old kid. And this dilemma is further complicated at a place like USC. The NCAA allots baseball programs just 11.7 scholarships to divide amongst its team, meaning that with very few exceptions, every player will pay at least a portion of their tuition. That portion of tuition is much higher at USC than it is at, say, Cal State Fullerton.

“It’s not a matter of ‘do kids want to come to USC?’ That’s not the issue and never has been,” Hubbs said. “The only issue we have here is, ‘how do we make it affordable for a family?’ And then we have to do a good job on educating kids as to why this [school] is more beneficial than signing in the draft.”

Last year, the Trojans had six commits drafted. Five of them signed with pro teams.

“They need to be smart about which players they go after,” Fitt says. “Clearly, USC has lagged way behind most of the conference in this area over the last decade.”

So what happened to USC baseball? The answer appears to be simple: Chad Kreuter. That might not paint a complete picture, but it wouldn’t be wrong either.

Nick Burton has probably spent more time at Dedeaux Field over the last three years than he has in class. He plans to focus quite a bit on USC baseball in his column, “Any Given Saturday,” this semester. To plead with him to do otherwise, visit dailytrojan.com or email Nick at [email protected].