By Bill Center
San Diego Union-Tribune
May 11, 2019

   

Bill Sandback, the most successful baseball coach during the first decade of the CIF’s San Diego Section, died Friday afternoon in San Diego. He was 85.

Sandback’s Crawford High Colts won four large-school section baseball titles and reached the section championship game seven times in his eight seasons between 1962 and 1969. Including American Legion games, Sandback posted a .743 winning percentage (391-133-7) at Crawford. He later coached Mesa College’s baseball team for 14 seasons.

In a sport with no state playoffs, Crawford was named the Cal-Hi Sports’ Baseball Team of the Year in 1965 when Bob Boone was named the state’s Player of the Year. Sandback was the Cal-Hi Baseball Coach of the Year in 1968.

Under Sandback, Crawford won five Eastern League titles at a time when the league was ranked the second best in the nation by a national magazine. The Colts won section titles in 1962, 1964, 1965 and 1968 and lost in the championship game in 1966, 1967 and 1969.

Fifty-six players coached by Sandback played professional ball and his list of major league players includes four catchers — Dave Duncan, Ed Herrmann, Boone and Tim Blackwell.

“He was way ahead of everyone else when it came to coaching baseball,” said longtime coach and umpire Dave Gonzalez, who served Sandback as an assistant coach for a season at Mesa College.

“Bill was a tremendous baseball educator,” said Boone, who played on Crawford’s title teams in 1964 and ’65 and now serves as an assistant general manager with the Washington Nationals. “His process for teaching baseball was special. I still use some of his techniques working with younger players today. He had such a passion for the game and the ability to teach his players, as, he’d say to ‘play the game right.’ He had this 100-question test covering what we did in certain situations. Bottom line, he could live with a loss if we played the game right, but because we played the game right we didn’t lose very often.”

Earl Altschuler, another of Sandback’s players at Crawford, said the coach “is on the short list of people who influenced my life. He taught you so much about life in addition to baseball. If you were on time, you were late. Everyone polished their cleats after every practice and game.

“We looked and played sharp. We were always the better prepared team. He knew baseball and wanted to share everything he knew.”

Said Tom Whelan, who was on Sandback’s first Crawford team: “Coach was very low key, but you could tell from the first day he was our head coach that he was knowledgeable. He’d just take you aside and say something that stuck with you as long as you played.”

Sandback was born on April 5, 1934, in Minneapolis, and played baseball, football, basketball and ice hockey in high school and baseball and ice hockey at the University of Minnesota. He received his degree in 1959 after serving two years in the Army.

Sandback’s master’s thesis in college was titled “Percentage Baseball” and he was applying analytics to his baseball coaching long before it became popular.
“Don’t ever bunt,” was one of Sandback’s early rules. He wanted his hitters to be aggressive and not take strikes. And he emphasized that his players watch the other team take infield before games and study the arms of opposition players. Sandback coached aggressive baseball on offense and fundamentally sound baseball on defense.

“Bill kept stacks of statistics from as far back as his high school coaching days,” his widow, Gretchen, said Friday. “He studied baseball. I’d hear him talk to some of his earliest players on the phone and he could go over what they did as players.”
Sandback’s teams were not deep in numbers. Several of his championship teams at Crawford had no more than 14 players.

“There was a lot of baseball talent in the area at the time,” said Altschuler. “If you made the team, you could play and were going to play. Sandback didn’t let guys sit.”
Sandback almost never coached at Crawford. He came to San Diego in 1960 and taught for a year at Memorial Junior High. When he was offered a coaching job closer to his birthplace, Sandback went to the Education Center to turn in his resignation when he was told about the baseball coaching position opening at Crawford.

He remained in the physical education department at Mesa College until his mid-70s and also ran — and played in — a recreational basketball league at the college for more than four decades.

Small World Department

 

John Fry and seven of his 7th Graders from his Student Teaching stint at Pacific Beach Junior High pose on the sea wall in front of his apartment at 3254 Strand Way in Mission Beach in the Summer of 1968.  Second from the right is Terri Ketchum, who went on to become Miss San Diego and Mrs. John D'Aquisto.  John D'Aquisto graduated from Saint Augustine High School, had a career in professional baseball, did time for some financial improprieties, and now apparently has a career as a painter.  Click HERE to check out his web site.