Andy Lopez got out with his health, his family, his finances and his reputation. In baseball, that’s a 4-for-4 day like none other.
He will escape innuendo that he a) lost it or b) got fired.
Lopez has been so immersed in coaching Arizona’s baseball team, and in fixing a three-year descent, that he forgot how old he is. In a Q&A session Monday at McKale Center, he asked his wife, Linda, if he is 61 or 62.
Andy Lopez is 61. He wears reading glasses now, halfway down his nose. It’s his only visible concession to time. All the hard mileage, four decades of fussiness, is on the inside.
“I feel like I can fix it, but I don’t know if I have the energy and I don’t know if I have the health to fix it,” he said. ‘It hurts me to say that.’”
Lopez took his job home with him. He took it to lunch. He took it to bed.
People are also reading…
The one thing he lived for, coaching baseball, might’ve killed him had he not walked away.
Before the Wildcats were swept by Pac-12 champion UCLA two weeks ago, Andy and Linda Lopez completed a yearlong dialogue about their future. They chose life over baseball.
He would retire or resign — or better, both. Maybe those visits to the cardiologist, and the 9-inch surgical scar on his chest, would no longer occupy their thoughts.
At a family council Sunday night, Andy asked his four children for their input. His youngest son, David, said, “When it comes to losing, you’re out of whack.”
Arizona’s baseball program has indeed been out of whack since winning the 2012 national championship. The Wildcats have gone 36-54 in the Pac-12, and failed to reach the NCAA tournament.
But because Lopez had banked so much equity in his 14 UA seasons, and because he had undergone lifesaving heart surgery in the fall of 2013, there was no prevailing chatter about firing him or pleading for him to retire.
“Andy and I have been talking for a few weeks about this, and I’ve been doing research (on possible replacements),” UA athletic director Greg Byrne said Monday. “But if Andy wanted to coach another two or three years, he would’ve been our coach for another two or three years.
“He earned that right.”
Some of Lopez’s decision to resign is that he is no longer the ever-present recruiter he was during his days at Pepperdine, Florida and his first 10 seasons at Arizona. You don’t chase 16-year-old high school shortstops at 61 the way you did at 41 and 51. You no longer speak their language. You no longer have the urge to sit through a summer league tripleheader on a hot July day in Long Beach, Calif.
And some of the reason Lopez is leaving is because, four years ago, his able recruiter and longtime associate, Mark Wasikowski, accepted a bigger paycheck from the Oregon Ducks.
Ever since Wasikowski left, the UA’s recruiting hasn’t been at Pac-12 standards.
This isn’t new.
Arizona Hall of Fame coach Jerry Kindall was also 61 when he retired after the 1996 season. Kindall’s final three UA seasons were dreadful: 20-70 in the Pac-10.
The prime of a coach’s life in Pac-12 baseball trends to younger men, 24/7 recruiters. It’s not ageism. It’s life.
Stanford’s Mark Marquess, 68, has won more games than any coach in league history. But his team hasn’t won a conference championship since 2004; he has been to just one College World Series in 12 years.
Sometimes, that One More Special Season is the one you had 10 years ago.
Byrne won’t have difficulty finding capable men willing to step into the McKale-Sancet-Kindall-Stitt-Lopez legacy. At a meaningless four-game Hi Corbett Field homestand against Abilene-Christian and Hawaii that ended Sunday, the Wildcats drew 9,503 fans total.
It won’t take much to rekindle the baseball buzz.
The coach first on everybody’s lips will inevitably be UC-Santa Barbara’s 39-year-old Andrew Checketts, a former Oregon assistant and Oregon State pitching star, whose team is hosting an NCAA regional this week. Checketts is what a younger Andy Lopez was 23 years ago, a time in which he led Pepperdine to the national championship.
Checketts, or whoever the next man writing out Arizona’s lineup card will be, will have a difficult act to follow.
“I hope one day I can sit back and say, ‘Hey, I was all right,’” Lopez said Monday.
That day is today. And then some.
Contact sports columnist Greg Hansen at ghansen@tucson.com or 520-573-4145.
On Twitter @ghansen711
Greg Hansen
Columnist
