McCurdy: No 'might have been' with Lanny Martin's baseball coaching career

MARION — When Lanny Martin took over the Ridgedale baseball program in 2017, it had been more than a decade since it enjoyed a winning season.

Inheriting a young group as green as the grass they played on, the Rockets had junior high level understanding of the game's nuances, were mostly of junior varsity age and were forced to play a varsity schedule in the always tough Northern 10 Athletic Conference.

That team predictably went 2-22 overall and 1-15 in the league.

Undeterred, Martin went to work and turned them into baseball players — and winners.

In 2018, the Rockets were 16-11 and 6-10 in the N10. The following year was even better, going 17-7 overall and posting its first-ever winning N10 mark at 10-6 before going to the Division IV district tournament.

Ridgedale was poised for a special 2020 season as the freshmen who took their lumps in 2017 were now seniors and ready to hand out lumps of their own. Adding to the specialness of the upcoming campaign was the fact that their 70-year-old coach was going to enjoy his final season on a baseball diamond after decades in the sport from youth to college levels.

Alas, it would never come to be. The COVID-19 pandemic hit just as the spring teams were starting practice. At first the Ohio High School Athletic Association postponed the start of the season before pulling the plug altogether, wiping out 2020 from the record books.

With so much of its hitting and pitching returning, Ridgedale had real expectations at challenging for a league championship, and if it could get by state power Newark Catholic in the district, a potential long tournament run, too.

In the midst of the shutdown, it got Martin to thinking of a favorite poem by John Greenleaf Whittier.

"The quote is simply this: Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been.’ I think that sums it up really well for everybody this season, but especially at Ridgedale High School and the baseball program. It might have been, but we will never know," Martin said in the spring of 2020.

In January of 2022, it wasn't about what might have been with Lanny Martin. It's about what was.

Martin died last week, and it's definitely a loss that is felt by many, including hundreds of former players.

"He was like a second dad to me," said a choked up Ridgedale girls basketball coach Brad Gerfen, who was one of Martin's baseball players from back in the day. "I played a lot of years of baseball with Coach. I’m still teaching my kids the things he taught me. There’s just not a better guy. I miss him terribly."

Added Denny McPherson, the longtime Marion Star sports writer, who kept the scorebook for many of Martin's teams going back to 1983: "He was about as good a friend as you could come up with. I know that."

Martin was organized and detail-oriented. That regimen became instilled in his players.

"They would go over and over and over stuff because he wanted the kids to recognize the situation when they were in the game," McPherson said. "He wanted them to recognize it right away and this is what we do. A lot of teams he would play wouldn’t have that same capability and that made some differences in games."

No one believed in baking the basics of baseball into a team more than Martin.

"It was his way. He had a plan and a purpose, and you were going to do it that way — and that as the right way. He taught you the fundamentals, and you still had fun doing it," Gerfen said.

Ridgedale Athletic Director Cherie Leach, wasn't the AD when Martin was running the Rockets. She was a mother to standout pitcher Sam Leach, a key player for those Martin baseball teams in the late 2010s.

"He was very much like a father figure to a lot of those boys," she said. "He demanded respect but respected the kids right back. I think that’s why they gave him so much respect. I couldn’t have asked for a better coach to coach my child."

And she should know. Leach herself was a longtime standout volleyball coach, so she knows what goes into it.

"Sam I know truly valued everything he learned from him," Leach said. "He’s part of the reason why he got to go on and play at the collegiate level (at NCAA Division II West Liberty in West Virginia). His dad coached him as well in travel ball and stuff like that, but Coach Martin instilled so much confidence and faith in our kids. That’s why the program continued to rise."

Doug Laucher, who assisted Martin's Prospect American Legion teams and later at Ridgedale, marveled at the connection between players and the head coach.

"The biggest thing I could say about him is yes he coached the game of baseball, but more importantly he coached the game of life," Laucher said. "That was the big thing. He would say to kids the things we’re doing on the field and the correct way to handle yourself on the field is the way you should handle yourself in life."

Before that final non-season at Ridgedale, Leach and Martin had a conversation.

"The kids were so well-taught and coached that they started the drills and were doing the coaching in practice," he told her. "I remember him distinctly coming to me and saying, ‘Cherie, this is going to be it!’ And then COVID got us."

The Rockets were denied a chance at a special season, and Martin was denied one final team to coach and teach.

If he was bitter, he never showed it publicly.

"I’ve had my day in the sun," he told me in 2020. "I’m sorry for them because they did get robbed, but guess what, the whole world got robbed. It’s not just this little locale. We’re all in the same boat."

And he wasn't interested in returning for one more year in 2021 if high school sports returned.

"I'm 70 years old. I can't swing a bat anymore because of my back. I can't throw anymore because of my arm and the pain. They don't make enough Advil," he said with a laugh. "Father Time catches up to us all."

He seemed content with how his coaching career played out, even with that lost season at the end of it.

For decades he led the various American Legion baseball teams in Marion County. He coached one season of college baseball at Alderson Broaddus in West Virginia. He was a part of the River Valley baseball staff earlier in his career, and he was the head coach at Elgin for a stretch. After Legion baseball in Marion went dormant, he had his final run with the Rockets.

Over the span of 40 years, that's hundreds of lives influenced by Martin.

"He was just so consistent with everything," McPherson said. "He won a ton. He enjoyed that obviously, but what he enjoyed more than anything else was the kids coming up after their career with him and seeing what they’d become and thanking him for it."

Prospect long held an American Legion baseball tournament on the Fourth of July when Martin was managing the team. The player-coach bond was never more evident than during that holiday.

"I think he had tough love," Laucher said. "Deep down there wasn’t one thing he wouldn’t do for kids. It would go beyond the field of baseball and into the game of life. He would promote them to colleges as well as jobs and would continue to keep contact with those ex-players and their lives."

According to Laucher, Martin treasured seeing what his kids turned into.

"A lot of those young men were back in our area (for the holiday) if they lived out of town and would come to the game just to see Lanny," he said. "That says a lot of what the program he ran meant to those kids. It shaped their lives besides the game of baseball. If that’s what we could do as coaches, then we did our job."

One of Martin's baseball kids was Gerfen, and he took those long ago lessons and applied them to his own teams.

"It was that toughness and that real structured routine at practices. That’s what I pulled from Coach Martin," he said. "You were going to do it the right way and be fundamentally sound. I respected him like he was a second dad. It’s sad."

McPherson said the greatest joy Martin had in coaching wasn't the wins or the championships, it was turning a kid's life around who might have been straying from the proper path.

"He was strait-laced on discipline," he said, echoing Laucher's viewpoint on Martin's connection to players. "He’d give you a second chance on something, but you were going to toe the line because it’s more than about baseball. When you get away from baseball and all this other stuff, you’re going to have to toe the line there, too. You may as well start learning that now, and he incorporated that into his coaching. He’s an excellent teacher in that regard, not only in baseball but in life for the kids.

"He really enjoyed that challenge, and for my money, he met every challenge."

Which brings us back to that line from his favorite poem.

"Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been.'"

Martin may have endured a "might have been" season at the end, but that doesn't define his baseball career or reflect on his essence as a mentor.

Everyone should cherish the impact he made on lives. It wasn't a "might have been" existence. It was — without question — one with true influence over generations.

Lanny Martin was a "definitely," and there's nothing sad on the tongue or the pen about that.

Rob McCurdy is the sports writer at the Marion Star and can be reached at rmccurdy@gannett.com, 419-610-0998, Twitter @McMotorsport and Instagram rob_mccurdy_star.

This article originally appeared on Marion Star: McCurdy: No 'might have been' with Lanny Martin's coaching career