College World Series: Augie Garrido remains bona fide all-star and key mentor for OU coach

OMAHA, Neb. — He may be gone, but the late Augie Garrido is hardly forgotten.

The former Texas baseball coach, who won two national titles with the Longhorns and three with Cal State Fullerton during 15 career trips to the College World Series, was enshrined as an NCAA-CWS of Omaha Inc. “All Star” before Friday's Texas-Notre Dame game. He died in 2018 at age 79.

Appropriately, Oklahoma head coach Skip Johnson — Garrido’s pitching coach for 10 years — took his staff to Garrido's favorite Italian restaurant in Omaha, Lo Sole Mio, which will close its doors July 2 after more than 30 years in business.

Johnson still gushes about all he learned from Garrido — nothing more significant than taking games a pitch at a time.

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"I really didn't know what I was doing as a baseball coach" going from Navarro Junior College to Texas, Johnson said. "And being around Coach Garrido and Coach (Tommy) Harmon in that and listening to what they talk about, one pitch at a time, I learned a lot how to teach guys in that environment. It's really just about one pitch. And control yourself."

Garrido was the first coach to win national championships with multiple teams and is the second All Star inducted in what will be an annual event, after the late USC head coach Rod Dedeaux.

Garrido’s honor was accepted at the stadium by his wife, Jeannie, along with several family members and a close friend. His name was added to a bronze plaque inside the stadium near Gate 1.

Garrido’s career spanned six decades, and he was the only coach to win multiple national titles at more than one school.

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Like brother, like brother?

Ivan Melendez’s parents, Raul and Julie, both attended the Dick Howser Trophy ceremony, along with his two brothers, Zack and Ian, both of whom play baseball.

Zack’s a pitcher, and Ian is a 15-year-old second baseman.

Asked if Ian has the same power that he does, Melendez said, “It’s early. We’ll see."

Melendez leads the country with his 32 home runs this season and became the fourth Longhorn to win the Howser Trophy.

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Stacking up wins

Texas A&M’s sudden resurgence to make the CWS after missing out on the entire NCAA Tournament last year took off after the Aggies started getting timely hits, a problem in the early season.

First-year head coach Jim Schlossnagle told his team in late March, “Scoring runs is just like eating Pringles. You can’t eat just one.”

The Aggies, with starting pitcher Micah Dallas at the forefront, picked up on the theme and started bringing cans of the potato chips to the ballpark, and before long it became a rallying cry and they had won 16 of their last 19 games heading into Friday's CWS opener with Oklahoma.

The Kellogg’s company, which owns the Pringles brand, caught on and saw the promotional upside and mailed A&M a huge box of the stackable chips as well as shirts and caps. Of course, you can’t bring food into Blue Bell Park in College Station, so fans consumed the chips outside the stadium.

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Streak stopper

Had a nice chat with Bill Cousins, the former longtime sports information director at Rice who annually serves as the CWS press conference moderator.

We were discussing the documentary about legendary strikeout pitcher Nolan Ryan, in which a healthy dose of the Ryan-Robin Ventura beatdown is included.

I told him I was there when Stanford stopped the 58-game hitting streak of one of the best hitters in college baseball history in a CWS game and asked Cousins if he knew who snapped the streak in 1987.

“Yeah,” Cousins said. “Lou Spry.”

The late Spry served as the official scorer for CWS games for decades and was there for Ventura’s last at-bat of the game for Oklahoma State, when he reached on a sharp grounder to the Cardinal second baseman, but the play was ruled an error and not a base hit. The pitcher, by the way, was Jack McDowell, who would later become a teammate of Ventura’s with the Chicago White Sox after both were first-round picks of the team.

Ventura has always said McDowell was “a nice friend” who never brought up the streak.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Augie Garrido remains bona fide CWS All-Star and mentor for OU coach