by Teddy Allen
You figure it had to end this way.
If you know anything about Louisiana Baseball in general and Louisiana Tech Baseball in particular, you had to figure that one day, sooner or later, Fred McGaha would be in the University’s Athletics Hall of Fame.
Born in Bastrop, his dad Mel McGaha was a household name in north Louisiana back in the 1950s and 1960s when he went from a three-sport letterman and Hall of Famer for the University of Arkansas to player-manager of the Shreveport Sports to big-league manager of both the Cleveland Indians and Kansas City Athletics to minor league manager all over the place, though he kept his home base in Shreveport, where he became director of Shreveport Parks and Recreation in 1969 and later led the rec department in Bossier City.
He even squeezed in a season of playing basketball for the New York Knicks in the late 1940s.
Stud.
His son Fred, faster than his dad — he led the nation’s college division teams in steals in 1971 with 35 — didn’t waste the genes or the experience of growing up around the game.
“Pretty good pedigree,” said his Tech teammate Eddie Holman who, like McGaha, made the Southland Conference All-Decade Team for the 1970s even though each played just one year, 1972, in the league, Tech’s first year in the SLC.
“Fred is maybe one of the most important people in the growth of Tech baseball,” Holman said. “Super good teammate to play with. Funny guy, fun-loving guy who loved the game. For us, he was ‘the guy.’ We all had a lot of confidence in Fred.”
“He was dangerous because of his speed mostly, but his hitting was just amazing,” said classmate and fellow student-athlete John Allen, who qualified for the NCAA Championships in the javelin in 1973 after throwing for Tech’s conference champs. “He made people get him out. You just expected him to be on base, so you were already looking past his at-bat and wondering, ‘What are we gonna do next?’”
“High hopper, he was on base,” said Gary Patterson, the left fielder next to McGaha in center on Tech’s 1971 Gulf States Conference champs, a team that finished 36-14 and third in the NCAA Mid-East Regional in Marietta, Ohio, where McGaha made the All-Regional team. “Up the middle or anything to the left side, he was on base. He scored a lot of runs, and we won a lot of one-run and two-run games.”
“We’re a .500 team without Fred,” said third baseman Ronnie Burns, who led the ’71 team in homers. “We had some pitchers — Holman, Gary Crawford, Ronnie Botica — who could have probably played anywhere. But we don’t sniff the championship without Fred. He was the motor that made that team go.
“I’ve played with and against a lot of great players, coached two or three guys who signed (pro contracts),” Burns said, “but McGaha’s the best ballplayer I ever played with, coached, or played against.”
McGaha was twice all-conference, the league’s MVP in the ’71 title season, and despite a bad hamstring that left him limping and unable to play full-time for a bit during his 1972 senior year, hit .386 to win the George Kell Hitting Award as the league’s Hitter of the Year honor.
When his Tech career ended, McGaha owned Tech’s career and single-season records for hits, runs scored, total bases and stolen bases. Despite an increase in the number of games teams play today, he still owns the stolen bases mark with 75.
“We called him ‘The Bayou Greyhound,’” Patterson said. “Still call him ‘Bayou.’”
And don’t forget: while other boys were playing with slingshots and in the sandlot, McGaha had on a little Indians jersey and was shagging fly balls with Mantle and Maris in Municipal Stadium in Cleveland as an 11-year-old in 1961.
“We lived in Shreveport,” McGaha said. “Judson Elementary, Midway Junior High, then Fair Park. But once school was over, wherever daddy went, that’s where we went. I’m out there with all these big-league guys … I didn’t even know I should be in awe of them. Back then, to me, they were just regular guys.”
So McGaha in the Hall of Fame, you had to figure it would end this way.
A natural fit.
Except for one thing: when he got to Tech, he could hardly play dead in a cowboy movie.
“In high school,” McGaha said, “I was somewhat … lackluster.”
“My sophomore year at Tech was his freshman year,” Patterson said. “Me and (right fielder) Art Thigpen were in the outfield with him. I remember us looking at each other after a couple of practices and saying, ‘His daddy must have given (Coach Pat) Gravy (Patterson) a bunch of bats or something…’”
“I’d played with him at Fair Park: he couldn’t run, he couldn’t throw, he couldn’t hit,” Burns said. “I was at Tech already and heard Gravy signed him and thought, ‘Talk about a wasted scholarship.’ I couldn’t believe it.”
Thankfully, the story has a likely hero. James Farrar, who hit .390 for Tech in 1952 (10th all-time for a single season), was twice all-conference, and coached the Fair Park Indians to a couple of state titles in the mid-1960s. This was before he coached Centenary and before he was a scout for 27 years for the Houston Astros.
Dr. Farrar knew a thing or three about baseball and about talent.
“He told Gravy I was one year away,” McGaha said. “He felt I had potential. I’ll always be indebted to Gravy for taking a chance on me.”
McGaha hit .226 as a freshman, .236 as a sophomore. The teams were mediocre.
“Then I had a little bump,” he said.
Something like that. League champs, and Tech’s centerfielder was Player of the Year.
Nice bump.
“From his freshman to his junior years, he was the most improved player I’ve ever seen,” Gary Patterson said.
“Coach Farrar knew talent,” Burns said.
A few things helped. One, he was tough as a jockey’s rear end.
“I’ve been around some great competitors,” Burns said. “He’s as fierce as anyone I’ve ever run with.”
More help came in the form of yet another living, breathing baseball card: Luke Appling.
For 20 years, Appling played shortstop for the Chicago White Sox and hit .300 or better 14 times on his way to Cooperstown. McGaha can’t remember exactly where it was, but in some ballpark where his big-league dad was an assistant coach, Appling spent time throwing batting practice to a young and eager McGaha, teaching him how to go with the pitch, how to better use his speed.
That speed increased when Tech’s legendary track and field coach Jim Mize got McGaha to make his strides longer.
“He’d get up at 6 a.m. and run with the track team,” Patterson said.
“Soon, it felt natural taking those longer strides,” McGaha said. “Felt like I was running on air. That was my game: I could run. It helped me get a lot more base hits, steal bases, run balls down in the outfield.
Since McGaha didn’t have to worry about leaving a lot of extra room in his uniform for muscles, football coach Pat Collins, Tech’s defensive coordinator at the time, got Tech’s outfielder and leadoff hitter into the weight room a bit.
All those things, plus hours and hours with his teammates of playing pepper, sadly a lost art in today’s game, came together to help McGaha blossom as a player.
But nothing helped more than both Gravy — “He was such a hard worker, the kind of guy you wanted to play hard for,” McGaha said — and his teammates.
“Every one of them is a big part of my life,” McGaha said after rattling off the lineup, including where each player is today. “We lived together, we ate together, we worked out together. We’ve maintained that closeness.
“Even today, everybody seems to do what they can to help Tech,” he said. “Gravy was the background for us; he was Tech Baseball through and through. And Tech Baseball is one of the big things that’s helped keep us together.”
So after all this time, with retirements and grandkids and a doctor visit or two to keep age in the bullpen, you figure it had to turn out this way because you don’t quit being a team just because you run out of games. At least this bunch doesn’t. Vacations together. Reunions. Weekend dinners. Of course, ballgames. It’s always spring for the 1971 champs and their Hall of Fame centerfielder.
What started at “Tech Stadium” in the late 1960s continues today at J.C. Love Field at Pat Patterson Park. The circle stays connected, the game still going for almost 60 years now. It keeps going, extra innings and more extra innings, baseball yesterday and today and tomorrow, over the next horizon, always another game.
