Turning Back the Clock on D-backs Manager and Yours Truly

One of the emotional challenges of advancing through middle age is trying to steer clear of things that make you feel old, or at least avoid the elements that cause you to ask, “Was it really that long ago?”

Something happened this past week that caused me to pause and ponder. The major league baseball season is well-underway. Reality hit me in the face when I was channel-surfing through the MLB Extra Innings package and I saw the young manager of the Arizona Diamondbacks on the top step of the team dugout focused on the ineffectiveness of his starting pitcher.

Last May Arizona fired then manager Bob Melvin and replaced him with A.J. Hinch. At that time Hinch became the major’s youngest manager ever at age 34 and 357 days.

Flashing back, it was the spring of 1991, and then again in the fall and winter of the same year, when I was recruiting for the Kansas State Wildcats football program in the greater Oklahoma City area. There was an intelligent, hard-nosed, athletic quarterback with a strong arm at Midwest City High School. The head coach told me he thought he could play Division I football, but he was also a heck of a catcher in baseball. But, depending on where he might project in the baseball draft, he might still consider football. I carried on the recruiting process and when the prospect and I spoke personally about how much we would like to have him in our program, yada-yada-yada, it was hard to avoid talking baseball because we were both as passionate about that as we were football.

A.J. Hinch went on to play baseball at Stanford, he earned a degree in psychology, got drafted in the third round by Oakland, and won a bronze medal playing for the U.S. Olympic team. His professional career lasted eight years before he opted to move into minor league operations and eventually director of player development for the Diamondbacks. Then came his quick ascent into the manager’s position.

It’s hard to believe the personable, dark-haired two-sport star I began to know 18 years ago is the skipper of a major league baseball team. I can still vividly remember sitting in the high school coach’s office with my gray V-neck Wildcat coaches’ sweater, admittedly with a lot more dark hair on my head and in my mustache, engaged in great conversation with A.J. Hinch.

I guess I am getting old when I have former athletes, or recruiting prospects, running a professional team. I wonder how he would have worked out as our quarterback? Good luck to A.J.; the D-backs are off to a bit of a slow start.