Seminoles are perfect guests

By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Columnist

It is altogether fitting that coach Mike Martin and the Florida State baseball team are here tonight for the dedication of Les Murakami Stadium.

For they were there at the College World Series 22 years ago this May for the game that helped launch Murakami's enduring vision toward 4,312-seat reality.

Return with us momentarily to 1980, a time when Murakami, who had taken an orphaned club team and built it into a nationally ranked program, was telling every legislator who would listen — and even several who turned a determined deaf ear — about this plan for a state-of-the-art stadium on campus.

The money was there — remember this was the cash-flush 1980s — but not the commitment that it be invested in a new baseball stadium.

It was the season after the departure of Derek Tatsuno and the rest of the NCAA record-setting 1979 team. And as packed as the old 2,500-seat erector set that was the original Rainbow Stadium could sometimes be, there was healthy skepticism that, without the pied piper that Tatsuno had been, these Rainbows would ever need anything nearly as big as Murakami as proposing.

Then, with a supposedly rebuilding team and its keiki corps pitching staff, the Rainbows went on the most remarkable run of their 31-year all-collegiate history. They roared through their inaugural Western Athletic Conference season and, in an eye-opening upset, beat Texas in an NCAA regional at the Longhorns' ballpark.

Suddenly, they found themselves in Omaha, site of the College World Series, a pinch-me-I-must-be-dreaming moment with a whole state looking on, wondering if it could, indeed, be real.

First up was Florida State, a team in its seventh College World Series with a lineup featuring the sons or nephews of three ex-major leaguers and a batting order whose .340 average hinted at the way it chewed up young pitchers. If there was a moment when the clock would strike "12" on a Cinderella season, this, it was feared at the time, was it.

Not until a prone center fielder Rick Bass squeezed the final out with his glove, raising the ball for the Rosenblatt Stadium crowd and a national TV audience to see, did the Rainbows dare breathe a sigh of relief and claim a 7-6 victory over the Seminoles.

It's a play that Martin still marvels about to this day — "the son of that Rams' running back made an amazing catch" — a sliding grab in the left-center power alley of a two-out, one-on shot that seemed destined for extra bases.

Suddenly, the Rainbows were for real and in the winners' bracket (where they would remain until the championship game loss to Arizona), and several politicians, including the governor, were on their way to Omaha.

A couple of days later, Murakami would confide: "I think we've finally got our stadium."

One that, fittingly, will be named in his honor tonight.