After every game, Jim Dietz and I sit together in the coaches’ room and talk about how the game has gone and where the San Diego State baseball team is headed.
He sits there, sometimes shocked with how well his team is playing. Other times, he sits there disgusted, wondering if his team has learned anything his coaching staff has ever taught them.
Good or bad, Dietz sits there and loves to gab about his team. Every time we talk, he uses many of his favorite sayings. After a come-from- behind win, he likes to use “the rally in the valley” or “the miracle on 55th Street.”
My favorite and what seems to be his favorite to say is, “Good things happen to good people.” He says it just about every time we meet.
When he says it, he’s talking about his team or his coaching staff. When I think about it, he should be talking about himself.
Don’t just take my word for it. Ask any of his current and former players and they will have a few nice words to say about their coach.
Former Aztec and current Chicago Cubs first baseman Mark Grace gets a huge smile on his face when you say the words Jim Dietz to him. Grace told me his former coach was an “amazing man” and how he’s a “better person” for knowing Dietz.
Current center fielder Stewart Smothers said he “appreciates everything” Dietz has done for him and thanks his coach for sticking with him.
Dietz’s most famous protege, San Diego Padres outfielder and future Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn, can go on forever talking about Dietz’s genius. He calls Dietz “the hardest working man in baseball” and simply “a great man.”
Some good things have come this great man’s way while coaching here for 25 years. He was named Western Athletic Conference Coach of the Year in 1986 and 1994. In January 1983, Dietz received the “Super Star Award” presented annually by Collegiate Baseball for outstanding achievement in the field of amateur baseball.
He has received several awards and reached many career accomplishments during his quarter of a century of service on Montezuma Mesa. Most recently, on March 1, 1996, he became just the 17th collegiate coach to reach the 1000-win milestone.
Even with all of Dietz’s success, there still had been a void in his life. Dietz had been wanting and asking for a new baseball stadium since the first day he stepped on campus in 1971. Matters came to a head last spring when Dietz threatened to quit his job if a new facility was not built.
Thanks to a nearly $4 million donation from Padres owner John Moores and his wife Becky, as well as donations from Gwynn, Grace and others, he kept his job and got a new ballpark.
Despite construction delays and normal new facility problems, Tony Gwynn Stadium has been great. Larger crowds have come out, and the 1997 baseball team has played well in its new home.
The 3,000-seat, state-of-the-art facility has many of the luxuries Dietz had only dreamed of. There are covered sunken dugouts, a players’ meeting room and an umpire’s room
