A lot of folks have one question about the firing of University of Hawaii baseball coach Mike Trapasso:
“What took so long?”
One guy even said it should’ve happened after his first three years on the job.
Well, let’s see …
Trapasso started at Manoa in 2002, and that quick an ax would’ve sent him packing after the second of five consecutive winning seasons. They included 2006, when the Rainbows went 45-17 (17-6 WAC), earning the program’s first NCAA regional appearance since 1993.
He had already ruffled feathers in local baseball circles, partly for not doing things anywhere near the same way as his legendary predecessor, Les Murakami. But you can’t very well fire a national coach of the year, can you?
Local baseball fans grumbled that he didn’t recruit enough local kids. Trapasso said many of the best didn’t qualify academically.
As usual, the truth is somewhere in the middle.
And, as it turned out, he got the one guy he absolutely had to get.
In 2010, UH made the NCAAs again, and in 2011 the Rainbows won the WAC regular-season championship. These were the Kolten Wong years, and the stage whispers were that the clutch hitting of the All-American from Hilo saved Trapasso’s job.
Be that as it may, two NCAA regionals in 10 years was a long way short of the glory years under Murakami. But it was also better than the dearth of success of the mid to late ’90s.
And something exciting seemed to be on the horizon.
I was of the mistaken belief that when UH entered the Big West in 2013 it would be a great thing for the baseball program. Better competition and most of it based in southern California would lower most of the road games to sea level and elevate the level of recruiting — especially pitching, Trapasso’s specialty.
But Hawaii’s dead bats made me dead wrong.
UH has managed winning percentages of just .408 overall and .448 in the Big West in its nine seasons of membership.
In 2013, they went 16-35 while batting .239 … with four home runs all season. Losing is bad enough, but this was losing without it being the least bit interesting and pretty hard for even die-hard fans to take. A coaching change had to be in the works, right?
And it happened; pitching coach Chad Konishi was let go. But I still can’t quite figure out how firing the pitching coach helps a team hit better.
That was seven losing seasons ago (not counting last year’s pandemic-shortened slate).
And that nagging question remains.
“What took so long?”
If winning games and popularity with the baseball fans of Hawaii were the only factors, Trapasso would have been long gone.
But, he was very good at other parts of his job — some would say the most important ones. Trapasso recruited kids who stayed out of trouble and graduated nearly 100 percent of them.
If college coaches are teachers, in a perfect world preparing their student-athletes for the next phase of their lives is enough to keep a job, right?
But there’s more to it than that — especially for a baseball team that was once among the crown jewels of the university’s and state’s sports programs, skippered by a living legend. You’ve got to win, and win consistently.
Murakami did it. So why couldn’t Trapasso?
It’s easy to forget, but just a quick look at the record book reminds us that the program’s downward arc started in the 1990s, before Trapasso’s arrival.
New rules, like limiting the number of games a team could play and how early the season could start, had taken away some of Hawaii’s unique advantages for baseball. The power conferences started throwing bigger chunks of their insane TV revenue into facilities and coaches’ salaries for “minor” sports like baseball.
With all that being said, Hawaii is still a great place to play baseball and home to plenty of talent. Is there a coach out there who can make magic happen like Murakami did, given today’s realities?
Reach Dave Reardon at dreardon@staradvertiser.com.
