Miami’s struggles this season have many baseball fans nostalgic for better days. If you’re one of them, there is no better book than “The Wizard of College Baseball: How Ron Fraser Elevated Miami and an Entire Sport to National Prominence.” It’s a well-written and entertaining read that captures the full range of Coach Fraser’s influence (available
HERE). We sat down with the author, David Brauer, to discuss Coach Fraser's impact on Miami and college baseball:
On how he became a Miami fan: In the early days of ESPN broadcasting college baseball, I gravitated toward Miami because they were always on TV. Growing up near Champaign-Urbana and going to the University of Illinois games, we had Augie Garrido as head coach here for three years. He rose that program into national conversations. So I took more of an interest in college baseball. And then you find it on ESPN and who's on? It's Miami. They're constantly on. Then you watch the College World Series and Miami's there. So it's like, “All right, well, I watched them before. Yeah, I'll root for them.”
In 1992, I made my first trip to the College World Series. I was waiting outside Rosenblatt Stadium to go see Miami play. I'm wearing a Miami shirt and hat, and the team's getting off the bus. I was an awkward teenager walking up to Coach Fraser and said, “Hey, good luck, Coach.” And he said, “Wear that hat with pride, son.”
On the genesis of the book: In 2017, I made a trip over to Miami during a family vacation in South Florida. I hadn't been to the city before and had a couple sites to see. The University of Miami was on that list. I wanted to see what Mark Light Stadium looked like. I went into the Hall of Fame to see what baseball memorabilia might be there. And a conversation started with Earl Rubley, former President there at the Hall of Fame, who happened to be manning the desk. I had an Illinois shirt on, so that struck up the conversation because he had some ties back this way. And then he's telling me Ron Fraser stories. It turned into, “Was there ever a book written about him? Because I feel like there's so much there.” And that's kind of how we got started.
On the state of college baseball when Coach Fraser joined the Canes in 1963: You could almost look at it as more of a club sport, or maybe a Division III non-scholarship type of situation, because there just weren’t a lot of scholarships for baseball at that time. It was truly an afterthought when you think about pro prospects, because all the star players were going into the professional ranks out of high school. College baseball was the leftovers.
On what Fraser brought to the Canes: He had a great coaching mind. He was in his mid-20s when he came to the University of Miami. He had graduated from Florida State. He went to the Army, started coaching on an American base in Germany, and eventually became the head of Dutch Baseball. He won championships there in European competitions. He wanted to come back to the States when he was young to start a family. There were only two job openings at the time. It was Auburn and Miami. He landed at Miami. There's some good stories and background in the book about how that serendipitously occurred. But the rest was history.
Getting the program off the ground was a significant challenge. One of the previous coaches, not too many years prior to Fraser, was Jimmie Foxx, the great Hall of Famer. And if Jimmie Foxx can't bring enough name recognition to a program, who can? The facilities were poor. The interest was minimal. It was a very difficult situation to get started. In fact, his first year, the team didn't even have equipment because they had all given it away. His mandate from the athletic director at the time was, “Do the best you can, but don't spend any money.”
On how Miami became the first team to play on turf: In his innovation, he was probably thinking along the lines of saving some money. But remember, he played a style where the running game was important, pitching and defense. Miami was not a real big power-hitting team. To use those strengths to his advantage, he was trying to be innovative by getting turf on the field.
On how he took advantage of Miami weather: For the Northern schools, it was essentially like spring training coming down and getting a few games in. So Fraser would invite several Northern teams down and that would start his schedule. Then he turned it into a tournament that actually became the second largest tournament behind the NCAA Tournament. He would make sure the Northern teams played each other first, and then Miami would play those teams in the evening.
What was the purpose behind that? Well, the Northern schools are canceling out their number one pitchers because they're playing each other. So you're going to face a second or third starter. And then all these guys are coming down South and they're seeing sunshine and 80-degree temperatures for the first time since the summer before up North. So they're laying on the beach and by the pool, they'd get sunburned and they weren't quite ready to play in the evening.
On Fraser’s promotional tactics: We could devote an entire episode to that. But it was about “How do you bring people in? How do you get them interested?” He said it himself: baseball isn't the most attractive sport sometimes for people to attend. It can be slow-paced for the casual fan. How do I spice it up? We're going to have something going on between every inning.
So not only did you have all the giveaways between innings, you had money grabs, you had baseball bingo, which is a staple now in pretty much any ballpark. The bigger promotions were giveaways or theme nights.
One of the really interesting ones was open-heart surgery night. How is that a promotion? Well, somebody “wins.” And if they need an open-heart surgery, they have a year to cash in on that. Obviously, it's a pretty safe bet. He also had car giveaways. People would get so excited about getting a car. But when the car comes through the centerfield gate, you're wondering if it's even going to make it in or back out, given its conditions. There are so many like that.
On Fraser’s competitiveness: He was highly competitive. That's one of those characteristics you need as a coach to be successful. His vision was not only the off-the-field things and the fans and the entertainment side of it, but also to win. When he was growing this program, they came so close so many times. But that ‘74 season where they made it to Omaha for the first time and knocked off the mighty USC Trojans, who were the dynasty of the time, put them on the map for good. They ended up falling in the championship game. But everyone took notice nationwide. And that first national championship finally came in 1982. That wasn't the most talented team. He had a couple of teams that just preceded that team which were loaded with Major League players. It's kind of ironic that as much talent as he had with some of his teams, his two national championships came with teams that really were the underdog story.
On why Miami Baseball captured fans nationwide: Exposure, first and foremost. When Miami would go to Omaha, Fraser would take a bunch of hats and shirts and pass them out to people they'd see at the hotel or maybe going to the ballpark to create fans. Now they're going to root for Miami and you've got a little bit of a home advantage.
The television side was so key. ESPN made them their Game of the Week on the college schedule. They had so many appearances throughout the 80s. They became a household name. Obviously, the football program takes off after. The baseball program set that model for success.
The top players wanted to go there. You knew you were going to be on television at a time when television games were very few and far between. That’s really where the mystique took off. The colors of the uniform, the style of play, the hidden ball trick in the ‘82 College World Series. All these elements come together. The notoriety from these crazy promotions. He had news stories from 60 Minutes and national news outlets that have nothing to do with baseball, just talking about what he's doing off the field. It really was the team of the 1980s. They were the marquee program in the nation.
On Fraser’s innovations in college baseball: The closer is probably one of the biggest. In the 1970s, the starting pitcher was expected to go pretty much the whole game. Fraser wanted to get some bullpen guys to try to finish those games out. And so he employed, basically, a closer. So many teams followed suit with it, and it was successful.
He had an innovative set of signs that were hard to pick up and steal. His style of play was very aggressive on the base paths, lots of hit-and-run, using that turf to his advantage. He established that as the go-to for success in college baseball.
On Fraser’s impact on world baseball: In Europe, he made the Netherlands the power. The Dutch team consistently won those European championships. You still see that today. That's the preeminent baseball nation in that part of the world.
At Miami, he would take goodwill trips in the summer, with mostly Miami players, and go down to some of the countries in Central America. They would gather supplies to help the people there, but also some baseball instructional manuals and things like that. He created a baseball instructional manual in Spanish that was a hot commodity there. They’d play exhibition games against teams like the Nicaraguan national team. They faced Dennis Martinez in a game.
Then he said, “OK, well, how do we make USA Baseball into something?” Rod Dedeaux (USC) had really laid the groundwork with that. But most of his focus was on the West Coast. He would take trips to Asia, play in Japan, and play in countries over there. Fraser had that Central American, Caribbean experience.
He asked, “How do we make USA Baseball more organized?” That’s when we get to the USA Baseball Federation, because it really wasn't a true organization at the time. It was just some college coaches creating an all-star team to go play in some international competitions. And then he wanted to get it to the Olympic stage. He and Dedeaux were so instrumental in that. Dedeaux coached the first team in 1984. When baseball became a medal sport in the Olympics in ‘92, Fraser was the coach.
One of the great stories was the ‘87 Pan American Games and Team USA against Cuba. There's a lot of correlation between the Miracle on Ice in the 1980s and that game. It was such a big deal for him to coach that team and to get a win over Cuba.
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On when Ron Fraser snubbed Fidel Castro: That was a remarkable story. I had multiple people tell me that story in different form. It was such a powerful event.
Team USA went down to Cuba to play a series. That wasn't happening a whole lot given the political climate. So here's Ron Fraser, the coach at Miami, and obviously there was a large Cuban population that came to South Florida. He knew the political tensions, and it was very close to him.
In walks Fidel Castro. The whole stadium stops, the game stops, and all the Cuban players rush over to him. Well, then he wants the U.S. team to come to him. Fraser said, “No, I'm not going to do it. He can come to us.” On the brink of an international situation, he navigated it perfectly. He was cordial, but he wasn't going to capitulate to Fidel Castro, even on his home turf.
On his method for catching players breaking curfew: Every few years, when they were on a road trip, some players would want to go see the city. Fraser would take a baseball and find somebody on the hotel staff. Maybe it was a bellman or someone at the front desk. He would give them a Miami hat, talk to them about the team, get them excited and make them a fan. He’d say, “I've got this baseball for you. Why don't you get the autographs of everybody that comes in tonight and let me know who you got on that ball the next day?”
So the next day, he'd get the ball and he knew which players came back after curfew because of the way he timed it. He’d be on the bus and call out the players that were in some hot water. They wouldn't know what hit him because they had no idea how he made that work.
On Fraser’s impact on the modern SEC: The seed was planted in Coral Gables. The blueprint was created. All those pieces that Fraser put in to build the University of Miami into the team of the 80s are what you need today.
When Skip Bertman left Miami to become head coach at LSU, he knew what he had to do. That was a program at LSU that, like Miami, didn't have much. They didn't have any attendance. They played in an old rickety stadium. Nobody followed LSU baseball, which is unfathomable today. Ron Polk (who also coached under Fraser) was at Mississippi State. Skip was more on the promotional side, a little more Fraser to him in that regard, and obviously spent more time under Fraser at Miami. But those two and their different paths to get to the same level of success started that run in the SEC.
The SEC didn't win a national championship until 1990. These guys had built it where they had two teams that were really good. Then other schools are saying, “OK, what do we need to do to get in this mix and get competitive?” Now look at where the SEC is today. But Ron Fraser had 6,000-7,000 people at Mark Light Stadium in the early 80s. That looked like the 15,000 that you see today at Arkansas or Mississippi State.
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On Ron Fraser’s impact on Miami football: Football survived being cut by one vote. Ron Fraser was very influential in keeping football around at the University and persuaded that vote to go that direction.
When Howard Schnellenberger came in, he's coming from a pro environment as an assistant coach with the Dolphins. He’s asking, “What's this guy doing with baseball that's got this place buzzing all the time? I want to do that with football." Because attendance was not good at the Orange Bowl. The success was limited. Much as Fraser had the blueprint for college baseball, he had the same type of recipe for football to say, “OK, maybe we want to incorporate some of this.”
Howard Schnellenberger picked Ron Fraser’s brain quite a bit about how to build that program, and he said so. We have some of those quotes in the book. You can’t even comprehend at this point in college athletics that a football program may have taken a page from a baseball program. But that was certainly a part of the success there when the U became the U. But the U was the U before, because of Miami baseball.
You can find "The Wizard of College Baseball: How Ron Fraser Elevated Miami and an Entire Sport to National Prominence" at ronfraserbook.com.
