Bags in hand, dreams in mind, he arrived here in 1969. Raff Yagjian had come to Syracuse University to play baseball. He was 18. He knew SU fielded a baseball program. That was about it.

Raff got a nice initiation. Quickly, he learned what it felt like to take batting practice in a 20-degree freeze. He took his first steps onto a field that The Daily Orange would later eulogize as a ‘Vietnam rice paddy.’ He tried out the Manley Field House pitching machine, then realized that it didn’t work. He met a coach who one teammate termed as ‘awful,’ who Raff would later remember as someone who ‘just wanted his paycheck.’

Raff met his teammates: a lot of local guys, a lot of guys with catchy nicknames, not many guys with talent. He observed the indifferent student body, which usually spawned home crowds between 25 or 50. He tried, after practices, procuring a towel from a crotchety equipment manager dubbed Old Zack, who’d bark, almost on command, ‘You’re only baseball players. Baseball players don’t get towels.’

Suddenly, Raff had a good idea of Syracuse baseball, and painfully, he’d learned it too late.

‘I remember seeing what I was getting into,’ Raff now recalls, ‘and thinking to myself … shit!’

Perhaps even then Raff saw it coming. As it turned out, before Raff’s junior season in 1972, the SU athletic department announced it would ‘suspend’ the baseball team come summer. That was the term used at the time. A couple folks guessed the team might come back. But then again, who wants to revisit a dream when you already know it’s a nightmare? In reality, with a tightening budget and the nascent Title IX ruling, the Syracuse baseball team didn’t stand a chance.

In 30 springs since, SU has remained without baseball. Maybe this way it’s for the better, you’re thinking. The team was a waste.

But see, Raff made the same mistake once. He felt that way, too. That’s why he loves telling the story of the 1972 Syracuse baseball team – the last one this school ever fielded; the one Raff played his heart out for; the one that taught him, and everyone else who played on it, that memories can bloom right out of shit.

‘Here’s what I remember:’ Raff now says. ‘It was just an eclectic bunch of guys – we came from different parts of the country; we had different philosophies, different personalities. But that last year, without even knowing what was happening, we kind of came together.

‘We really became a good team, and that’s what I think I took from that last season. It was a collection of every personality you could meet in real life. And collectively, we pulled together. Just as they were about to cut the program, it seemed like we might be taking it to another level.’

‘Here we were,’ teammate Billy Tegeler remembers, ‘not a major sport, but the girls still loved us. Any big party, we’d get invited. Baseball players are a little crazy, and we had our share of wacky guys that year. A couple of real clowns. We took buses everywhere, played a lot of cards. We all kind of played together just because we loved baseball. And – you know what? – we had a doggone good team my senior year.’

‘We were not an NCAA-class team,’ recalls then-freshman Kevin Kuppel. ‘We didn’t have fancy stuff. We didn’t have great talent. But we made it into a good year. That’s what I kind of remember the most.’

‘It was almost a bit of an embarrassment to the university,’ Tegeler now says, ‘because there they were trying to get rid of us, and we kept on winning games.’

To open the season, manager Andy Mogish sent his team southward, for a 12-game road trip. The Syracuse Nine returned in dismal shape. Three players suffered injuries, and the team’s leading hitter, Barry Carron, would miss a few weeks with strep throat.

Only weeks separated the team from extinction. Temptation begged the players to stroll through the rest of the regular season, bag another year of losses and place a fitting stamp of closure on a forgettable program.

Raff and his teammates couldn’t have guessed that 1972 would be any different than any of the previous, fruitless baseball campaigns.

Thing is, Dick Woodbridge didn’t know any better. Until ’72, the guy hadn’t been at school for a while. Something about the Vietnam War. That year, though, he became the team’s best pitcher. He was 32. Teammates called him ‘Pops.’

Though Pops didn’t have much pop – he couldn’t throw more than 70 mph – he couldn’t lose, either. After the 3-9 start, SU won its next three games, and Pops got the win every time. After a 1-0 loss to Colgate, Syracuse won four more games in a row, and despite the typical start, they’d climbed back to .500 – 10-10.

Then, during one particularly soggy afternoon, rain dispatched Syracuse away from its typical home, Lew Carr Field, located behind Manley Field House. For its contest against Buffalo State, the teams agreed on a site in Liverpool.

There, Tegeler pitched the game of the season. In a seven-inning complete game, he hurled a no-hitter. A bunch of guys on the team went out that night, and let’s just say that Tegeler didn’t drive.

Tegeler couldn’t help but smile. His team was winning constantly. Jumping into the NCAA postseason didn’t appear like a stretch. And as for all the problems with Syracuse baseball? Well, that just made every win feel even better.

If this wasn’t a story about real life, the curtain would fall right about now. Teammates drinking, toasting Tegeler, cursing the fate of extinction they battled. But sadly, the dreamy 1972 season ended without an NCAA playoff birth, because Syracuse sputtered in its last few games, and finished with a 12-13 record. The season didn’t even save the team. A few weeks later, in fact, baseball disappeared forever at SU.

Raff learned that year, though, that good stories don’t have to come with gift-wrapped endings and smiles. They can end unfulfilled. They can end with failure.

‘It seemed,’ Raff remembers thinking, ‘that we were putting our dreams in the hands of people who didn’t even know what our dreams were all about.’

But see, that’s not entirely true. The 1972 baseball players showed otherwise. Somewhere along the way, they decided their season deserved a little hope. They decided to take the white flag off their flailing legacies, and instead, to fight for them, to save them. And eventually, in their last season and lasting memory, they decided to play some great baseball, without letting any other shit get in the way.

Published on September 16, 2003 at 12:00 pm