Mazey Reflects on Mountaineer Career on Eve of His Final Season as Skipper
February 13, 2024 01:00 PM | Baseball, Blog
Share:
By: John Antonik
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - Randy Mazey remembers standing outside the dugout in his normal place at Monongalia County Ballpark, watching his team put a pretty good beating on 25th-ranked Texas Tech.
It was in the late innings of a game his West Virginia Mountaineers had well in hand, and he began thinking about his two children, son Weston, who everybody around here knows as Wammer, and his daughter Sierra. Wammer was playing a baseball game at Mylan Park and Sierra was playing a softball game in another part of town.
"I thought to myself, 'I'd rather be there right now.' When that thought occurred to me, I realized that's not fair to my team, the community and the state," Mazey said last Friday. "If you are ever doing a job, and at any moment in time you wish you were somewhere else, then it's probably time for someone else to run this program."
So, Mazey acted on his instincts and set in motion the unique arrangement he made with WVU director of athletics Wren Baker of coaching his final season this year and then handing the baton to his right-hand man, Steve Sabins, to continue what he's created.
And what Mazey has built here over the last 11 years is quite a lot.
When West Virginia was in the market for a new baseball coach back in the summer of 2012, the Mountaineers were transitioning into a power conference with few resources, no facilities and no recent success to sell.
The program had not been to an NCAA Tournament regional since 1996, the year Mazey took his Charleston Southern team to the same regional in Clemson, South Carolina, and WVU's athletics director in 2012, Oliver Luck, was pondering the future of Mountaineer baseball.
Among the options he was considering:
Continue it on the same course.
Invest in something that's likely not going to give a good return on his investment.
Or pull the plug and drop the program as Iowa State did when it ended baseball in 2001.
To help him figure things out, Luck assembled a group that included representatives from the Arizona Diamondbacks, which WVU benefactor Ken Kendrick owns, and the Pittsburgh Pirates, which Bob Nutting owns.
Their recommendations made a big impression on him.
No. 1, Luck had to invest in a better baseball facility, which he already knew. He had plenty of experience doing that when he oversaw the Houston Sports Authority that led to the construction of Minute Maid Park, Reliant Stadium and the downtown, multi-purpose arena that serves as the home for the Houston Rockets and Comets.
So, getting politicians to agree on building an athletic complex that requires Tax-Increment Financing (TIF) and other public funding methods was right in his wheelhouse. It wouldn't be easy, but he figured he could find a way to get that done; and he did when Monongalia County Ballpark, which has now added the name Wagener Field to it, officially opened in 2015.
No. 1A on their recommendation list, and a much more difficult task, was finding the right guy to lead the program.
Because West Virginia is located in a part of the country that presents climate challenges for baseball, the organizational people with the Diamondbacks and the Pirates told Luck to locate a coach who could recognize hidden talent and develop it.
It's easy to recruit players who play in Texas and Florida because what you see is what you get. In the Northeast, where there are plenty of raw but talented athletes, a little projecting is in order.
Therefore, Luck needed to go out and find himself a soothsayer.
And he couldn't have found a better guy than Randy Mazey to become Mountaineer baseball's head soothsayer. Mazey's resume included stops at major programs with significant resources – Clemson, Georgia, Tennessee and TCU – and smaller programs such as Charleston Southern and East Carolina where it takes a little guile and moxie to make things work.
Making Mazey the perfect fit for WVU was the fact that he grew up close to Morgantown in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, meaning he understood the specific needs that are required of schools located in this part of the country. Randy Mazey in his familiar place during a game at Monongalia County Ballpark in 2020 (All Pro Photography/Dale Sparks).
It was a difficult job, but not an impossible one, as Mazey recalls.
"In this profession, there are programs that you look back to over the last 20 years or so that people consider to be sleeping giants, so to speak," he said. "Everyone in the coaching profession always thought that this was one of them. It wasn't just a power five program, but a power five program you thought you could make a difference in.
"There were a lot of people involved who convinced me that we were going to have the resources, and they would invest in the program to do the things we needed to do," he added. "You left those meetings thinking, 'Yeah, this program is in tough shape right now, but there is no doubt it's going to get better.' You just didn't know how much better."
Or how bad that baseball field really was down there behind the WVU Coliseum once he took a second look at it.
"Realistically, a lot of people thought I was crazy for coming here. The first time I'd take them to Hawley Field they would say, 'What are you doing Maze?'" he said.
But once Luck got the new baseball facility built, it took Mazey just two years to end West Virginia's NCAA Tournament drought. He got the Mountaineers back to a regional in 2019, hosting for the first time in 64 years, and returned to the tournament last year when his team won 40 games and spent a good portion of the season in the national rankings.
A great argument could be made that at least two of his other teams should have made the tournament as well.
Interest statewide in Mountaineer baseball is at an all-time high with season ticket sales off the charts, and, he could have the No. 1 player taken in this year's Major League Draft in consensus All-American infielder JJ Wetherholt, West Virginia's best pure hitter since Jedd Gyorko or probably Paul Popovich when he played here in 1960.
In addition to producing a quality baseball product, Mazey has developed first-round draft picks, all-star pitchers and accomplished professional players, not to mention his Big 12 record over the last two seasons is an impressive 29-19.
It's been a steady and constant rise since 2013, when he surprised everyone by winning 33 games including a winning record in Big 12 play, to where Mountaineer baseball is right now heading into his final season in 2024.
In his mind, the timing is right to pass the baton on and let someone younger teach the guys how to hit curveballs, cutoff men and play the game the way it's supposed to be played.
Mazey's thoughts about retirement center on the bigger picture.
"(Morgantown) has been so good to me and my family, and we've kind of ingrained ourselves in the community," he explained. "All I will tell you about my decision is I did it in the best interests of this baseball program, this University and this state – all of the things that I've grown to love so much.
"Had I not decided to do it when I did it, I'm not sure how the next two-to-four years would have gone here, so I did it for the right reasons, and I feel good about it as far as that goes," he added. "Retired is easy to talk about it until you pull the trigger, so we'll see how that goes once I get into it."
Because baseball is all-consuming, he says he's missed many facets of life since his college career at Clemson concluded in 1988 and his pro career in the Cleveland organization ended two years later. Baseball in some form has been the biggest part of his life since adolescence.
"In this profession, you miss so much of life," he noted. "You miss your family, and I wanted to spend more time with them than I've ever been able to do. I feel like we've gotten this program to a place now where it's sustainable. I didn't feel like somebody coming in from the outside who didn't know anything about this community would be the right thing for the program. Sabes has been with me for a long time now, and he knows how to do this thing.
"It's important to me, and all I can say about Sabes is I'm entrusting in him my son, who is coming here to play," Mazey said. "That should speak volumes about how I feel about him, the fact that I'm perfectly happy that my son will be under his guidance while he's here."
Which means Mazey and his wife, Amanda, will continue to be regular fixtures around the ballpark. In the meantime, the old ball coach thinks he might have a team good enough this year to remain on top of the wave that he is currently riding.
"You don't really know until you play somebody else, but I like our make-up, and I like my players," he said. "They are working extremely hard and putting in a lot of effort to be a good team, and that's what it takes."
And, once the regular season winds down and he's standing on the front steps of the dugout at Lupton Baseball Stadium in Fort Worth, Texas, wondering what his kids are doing, he will probably take another moment to think about life after baseball.
Dominion-Post sportswriter Justin Jackson asked Mazey that very question last Friday.
"I might become a reporter," Mazey joked, a devilish grin appearing on his face.
Now, wouldn't that be something?
"There are still some things that would be cool to do in my last year that we haven't done, so I'm not limping off into the sunset just yet," he quickly added. "It would be a really cool to go out with a bang, so to speak. That's my goal right now."
Mazey's final season as WVU's skipper begins this weekend in Deland, Florida, when West Virginia plays a four-game series at Stetson.
