Pat Bailey officially joins Oregon State’s baseball program

By Brooks Hatch
Gazette-Times reporter

At his introductory media conference on Tuesday, new Oregon State baseball assistant Pat Bailey used a vignette from his days as George Fox University’s head coach to illustrate his competitiveness.

He said former GFU president David Brandt once asked him what constitutes a successful coach. Instead of answering, Bailey turned the tables and asked Brandt to answer his own question. Bailey’s reply when Brandt said, someone who wins more than he loses, showed both the depth of his commitment to winning and the real reason he entered coaching a quarter-century ago at Willamette High in Eugene.

“If I was .500, I’d quit,” Bailey said. “I don’t like to lose. But I still think the most important thing in coaching is to have a positive influence on young people’s lives, to be an example-setter for them.

“I consider baseball to be my mission field. I want to help men become the men they’re intended to be: Good fathers, hard workers, good husbands. I see being a coach as a wonderful opportunity to influence people’s lives.

“(But) I love winning. I’m very competitive. My wife leaves the room when my daughter and I play cards because we get after each other.”

Bailey, 51, never finished less than 10 games over .500 in his 12 seasons with the Bruins.

At OSU, he succeeds former associate head coach Dan Spencer, who left OSU earlier this month after 11 seasons for a similar position at Texas Tech, his alma mater.

OSU head coach Pat Casey and the man he calls “Bailes” have known each other for many years and became close in 1994 when Casey, then at George Fox, was recruiting pitcher Andrew Checketts, a star on Bailey’s West Linn High team. That friendship blossomed in the intervening years and came full circle last week when Bailey accepted Casey’s offer to move down U.S. Highway 99W to OSU.

“We’re extremely excited to hire a guy of Pat’s caliber as a person, as a coach,” Casey said. “It’s hard to find a coach who has (Bailey’s) background, experience and expertise in all areas of the game. It’s special for us to have him on our staff and part of our family.”

Bailey was 353-158 at GFU and is 847-396 in 25 years as a college or high school head coach. GFU won the 2004 NCAA Division III national championship and captured eight outright or shared Northwest Conference titles. It advanced to the NAIA or NCAA tournaments eight times.

He won or shared the NWC Coach of the Year award eight times. He never had a losing season, and is the winningest baseball coach in school history.

“He’s all about making you a better player,” said Tim Marshall of Portland, who played American Legion ball for Bailey after graduating from Lakeridge High. “I learned more from him in a week than I did my previous three years at Lakeridge.

“He was willing to spend whatever time it took to make you a better player. More importantly, he cared more about his players off the field than on the field.

“He’s such a good guy to the point when I was still playing at Lakeridge, he pulled me aside as the head coach of West Linn after a game and showed me a few drills I could do to improve my swing. I never thought an opposing coach would offer help to an opponent, but that’s Pat Bailey for you.”

Spencer was pitching coach the past three seasons, and Bailey has extensive experience in that field. However, so does volunteer assistant David Wong so their exact assignments for 2007-08 have not been completely determined.

“We think we’ve got a pretty good game plan laid out and once we’ve had an opportunity to meet as a staff” later this week everything will be finalized, Casey said.

Bailey said he’d have no problem going from a head to an assistant coach because Casey gives his coaches considerable autonomy.

“He’s not a micromanager,” Bailey said. “He hires good baseball people and allows them to do their work. I’m sure Pat’s going to have the final decision on everything we do, but we are going to make decisions together.”

Bailey graduated from Idaho in 1978 with a business education degree; he earned a master of education degree in educational administration from Oregon in 1983. He also played two seasons at North Idaho (jr.) College and then played at Idaho for two seasons.

He’s a native of Moscow, Idaho, and was a three-sport athlete at Moscow High. He and his wife, Susan, have a 24-year-old son, Alex, and a recently-married daughter, Ann, who is a student at George Fox.