Overview:
The Gauchos won 25 of their last 28 regular-season games, often rallying in dramatic fashion, and advanced to the West I Regional final
The national pastime once seemed to have little future at UC Santa Barbara.
Al Ferrer found Campus Diamond to be nothing more than a sandlot with a chain-link backstop when he arrived as the Gauchos’ new baseball coach in 1981. Gophers outnumbered the fans.
The budget for baseball scholarships, salaries and operating expenses was being kept at Depression Era levels.
It’s no wonder that more than three decades passed after “Smokey Joe” Martin’s 1936 debut with the New York Giants before the next UCSB alum followed him into the big leagues.
But the Cinderella season of 1983 forever changed the trajectory of Gaucho baseball, leading to upgrades in both facilities and budget.
It began to arise four decades yore thanks to a gritty, unheralded bunch that had a knack for miraculous comebacks.
“Around the seventh or eighth inning of every game, they’d start their rally cry of ‘Gauchos on fire!’” Ferrer once pointed out.
“We’d fall behind and you’d hear guys saying, ‘We got ’em right where we want ’em.’”
Those on-fire Gauchos, who became only the third team in UCSB’s history to earn an NCAA Tournament berth and the first to crack the 40-win mark with a 44-22 record, ignited an eternal flame with both the campus and community.
The Gauchos have advanced to the NCAA Tournament 12 times since 1983. They reached the Promised Land of the College World Series in 2016.
They will be in position to earn their seventh berth in the last 10 NCAA Regionals under coach Andrew Checketts when they complete the Big West Conference season this weekend at Hawai‘i.
UCSB (35-17 overall, 18-9 in league) is battling UC San Diego (34-18, 21-9) and Cal State Fullerton (29-21, 18-9) for the league title.
Becoming a Major Player
Assistant athletic director Bob Brontsema, who served as the Gauchos’ head coach from 1994 until 2011, witnessed the program’s entire metamorphosis from minor sport to major player.
He played second base and batted leadoff for the 1983 team.
“Basketball wasn’t flowing at that time,” he told Noozhawk. “We were the team that was flowing pretty good, so we got a lot of coverage and a lot of respect.
“We actually had so much more talent the year before, but we didn’t really hit our stride until 1983. We just didn’t think we could be beaten.”
“Gauchos On Fire” didn’t actually spark to life until halfway through the season. UCSB had been plodding along with a 17-17 record, losing its first three games in Southern California Baseball Association play, when a dramatic 6-5 win over UC Irvine ignited a nine-game winning streak.
“Dan Clark hit a home run to win a game in extra innings, and we just started going crazy,” Brontsema said.
The nine-game winning streak ended with a 3-1 defeat at Fullerton, winner of the previous six SCBA championships.
The Titans strutted into Santa Barbara later that week with chants of “S-C-T-A! … S-C-T-A!” Their self-important acronym stood for “Southern California Titans Association.”
Fullerton continued to assert itself during the first game of the doubleheader at UCSB when it tied the score at 8-all on an error by Gaucho first baseman Paul Smith.
“They were really in my ear,” Smith said later. “They kept saying, ‘Clank, clank.’”
He responded by cracking the first pitch he saw in the ninth inning far over the left-field fence for a walk-off home run.
“Five straight games I’d lost to those guys,” Smith said after emerging from the mob scene at home plate.
“It broke the jinx. I was 0-for-8 in the series. Thank you, Lord. Thank you.”
UCSB continued on to win the nightcap, 2-1. The SCBA was suddenly up for grabs.
Loose Group Won Tight Games
“It really became the whole ‘Gauchos On Fire’ thing when we swept that doubleheader at our place,” Brontsema recalled. “It was a loose group to begin with, and a close group.”
Kent McBride was the next Gaucho to go from rags to riches, hitting a three-run home run in the bottom of the ninth on May 2 to beat Long Beach State, 4-2.
“It seems I’ve choked in just about every situation that I’ve come up in lately,” McBride admitted after the game. “I’ve been dying to drive in a big run.”
It would become the first of many for the junior leftfielder.
A horde of students turned the May 7 home game against Pepperdine into a raucous keg party. Many of them were vengeful Gaucho volleyball players who had just lost to Pepperdine at the NCAA Western Regional finals.
“Pepperdine’s baseball team had gone to their volleyball match and ragged our team unmercifully, and so they came back in force for payback,” Brontsema pointed out.
The volleyball Gauchos saved their best digs for the end. They heckled the Waves’ pitching staff into walking seven batters and hitting another during the final two innings.
A 5-1 deficit turned into a 6-5 win when Smith singled home Craig Fleenor in the bottom of the ninth.
“They really seemed to make their pitchers go a little crazy out there,” he said afterward.
Slamming with The Hammerheads
Athletes from other Gaucho teams and fraternities soon joined the fun. The group named itself the “Hammerheads,” devising foam hammers into caps. They even began traveling to road games.
They got even more creative, Ferrer pointed out, when university officials stopped them from hauling beer kegs into the stands.
“They stashed one on the softball field and ran tubing through the fence so they could still drink,” he said.
Bob “Fud” Ferraro, the team’s savvy senior catcher, could remember when “there were about five people in the stands — and two of them were my parents. But lately, we’ve been getting about 1,000 screaming fans a game.”
The head Hammerhead would lead those screams with their signature cheer:
“Is this a ball?” … “Is this a bat? … “Is this the winning team?” … “Is this the loooooosing team?”
The Hammerheads cried out the answer to each question.
“Yes, this is the loooooosing team!” they’d shout in unison while pointing toward the opposing dugout.
“They really made it a great environment,” Brontsema said 40 years later. “They were just like a bunch of guys from our dugout, only they were out there in the stands. We really had the visiting team surrounded.
“It was time to catch fire, and they were the ones cheering us on from the start to finish.”
Steely Bunch of Base Stealers
It all started on the field with Brontsema. He set the table — as well as a school record — by stealing 45 bases that season. Paul Morehouse swiped 27 more and Paul Brown added 23.
The Gauchos were successful on 166 out of a whopping 226 steal attempts that season.
“Al’s philosophy was to put as much pressure as he could on pitchers and make them think of multiple things,” Brontsema explained. “We just kind of embodied that.”
All-America shortstop Dan Clark won the Gaucho triple crown, leading the team in batting average (.349), home runs (11) and runs batted in (47). He also shared the SCBA Player of the Year Award with Fullerton’s Tim Thompson.
UCSB also had plenty of depth. Nine Gauchos batted over .300, including Rick Irwin (.330), Bob Gray (.318) and Paul Collura (.310).
“Al rotated a bunch of guys,” Brontsema pointed out. “We had a rotation at third base with Collura, Irwin and Brett Hyland, and one of those guys was often the DH (designated hitter).
“Mark Swancoat and Kent McBride were in and out of left field, and John Fisher was a guy he called in off the bench a lot.
“It was the Earl Weaver-type of managing in which Al would put together three guys to make one really good player.”
He also had a deep rotation of pitchers led by All-American Dan Yokubaitis. The left-handed ace set several school records that year which still stand. They include pitching wins (14), starts (20), complete games (11), and innings (152⅓).
His record of 124 strikeouts wasn’t surpassed until Rodney Boone whiffed 128 just two years ago.
“Yok led a pitching staff that was just outstanding,” Brontsema said. “It really helped knowing we had a Friday guy who was going to go out and get us a win.
“Mike Fulmer and Brad Kinney were really good starters, too. Fulmer was such a character and a competitor, while Kinney was the quiet guy who never walked anybody.
“We also had a great bullpen with guys like Barry Dacus, Frank Spear and Scott Steindorf.”
UCSB, which won 25 of its last 28 regular-season games, swept Loyola Marymount in a three-game series to tie Fullerton for the SCBA championship with a 22-6 record.
A special playoff between the two teams was scheduled for Long Beach State’s campus diamond to determine the league’s automatic qualifier for the NCAA Tournament.
UCSB’s Titanic Victory
The Titans kept the Gauchos in check for the first seven innings while taking a 4-1 lead. That prompted Ferrer to huddle his team together and ask for another comeback.
Outfielder Todd Goodman quoted him as saying, “If we lose, we probably aren’t going to get a berth in the NCAA playoffs.”
Ferrer then stirred the pot further by summoning four pinch-hitters in the eighth inning. Three of them reached base safely.
“It seemed like every move Al made that year worked, whether it made sense or not,” Brontsema said. “Someone would go up there and come through.
“It was a coach’s dream, really. It was just a magical type thing.”
And then it all came down to Mr. Magic. McBride, who had already whacked four game-winning hits during UCSB’s late-season surge, found the bases full when he took his turn in the eighth with the deficit whittled to 4-3.
“It was weird when we found out we might not go to the regionals,” he said during a post-game interview. “This team is really a family — we all get along so well. Our team bus is a lot of fun and we’ve been looking forward to the trip to the NCAAs.
“We would have hated for it to end like this, after playing so hard and coming so far. You just should have seen the look on everyone’s faces when we heard this might be it.”
Those looks turned into ones of ecstasy when McBride drove the ball off the fence in right-centerfield to score all three runners. His blow capped a five-run inning that gave UCSB a 6-4 victory.
Their Roll Ended By a Roller
The Gauchos, who were sent to the West I Regional at Stanford, entered comeback mode again after losing to San Diego State, 7-5, in the opening game of the double-elimination event.
They bounced back with a 7-3 win over Oregon State and a 9-5 romp in the rematch against San Diego State.
UCSB was brewing another comeback in the Regional final against Stanford when Smith’s three-run home run in the eighth inning reduced the Cardinal lead to just 6-5.
But a bad hop on a slow roller — together with what the Gauchos claimed was a bad call by the umpires — allowed Stanford to pull away to victory in the bottom of the inning.
Brontsema has searched for the game film ever since to see if the ball was actually fair or foul.
“I don’t think the umpires would overturn the call now,” he said with a laugh, “but it would be nice to know how things would’ve turned out had we gotten out of that inning.”
The Gauchos did acquit themselves as good sports to Stanford’s president before they got out of his stadium:
“There were about 4,000 people there, and the stands were trashed,” Ferrer said. “But where the Hammerheads had sat was clean. They’d picked up everything.
“He went, ‘Wow, what a classy group.’”
Keeping The Band Together
Much of that group, along with 18 of the 25 players from the 1983 roster, attended the 40-year reunion of that team in January.
“I love the fact that we’ve all remained close and still get together,” Brontsema said. “It’s a special group.”
A large number of Hammerheads joined the party. Former Gaucho volleyball star Casey Gorman formally reunited the old gang more than a decade ago to raise money for UCSB baseball scholarships.
“They give us about $50K annually,” Checketts pointed out. “The lifetime total for the HH crew is $378,950. That’s pretty impressive.
“We got a good turnout for alumni weekend. We had over 120 at the golf tournament. The dugout was full for the game.”
He had the 1983 team take a bow between the second and third innings of UCSB’s intrasquad game. Yokubaitis threw out the first pitch.
“He went all the way up on the mound,” Checketts said. “He threw from the rubber and buried a strike.”
It was just one more comeback by the Gauchos On Fire.
