Ducks baseball coach burns for an appearance in Omaha

I asked Mark Wasikowski how his summer went.

The Oregon baseball coach looked at me with an expression that read, “What summer?”

See, it’s been three months since the Ducks’ season came to an end in the Regional round. It’s the second time the Ducks have ended the year under Wasikowski on the doorstep of the College World Series.

In Wasikowski’s six seasons at Oregon, the Ducks have won 66% of their games. They’ve made the postseason five straight years, smashed program home run records and have invigorated a fan base that grew apathetic about Oregon’s mediocrity in the years directly preceding Wasikowski’s hiring.

He’s been an undeniable success. But Omaha still looms. Wasikowski has a daily reminder of the tournament’s importance framed in his office – a picture of the one-time Pepperdine third baseman barreling into Cal State Fullerton catcher Jason Moler during Pepperdine’s 1992 College World Series win.

Wasikowski also has what the Ducks are up against right outside his window, with cranes and bulldozers working in unison, building Oregon’s new football practice facility.

Unlike the football program, the baseball team isn’t at the head of the table when it comes to spending. But there are Oregon footballs of the college baseball world – which is why Wasikowski spent the majority of his summer on the road recruiting, to find the right players to come back with him to Eugene in a new era of wild spending in the sport.

I sat down with the 54-year-old last week in Eugene to try and get a sense for what the Ducks are up against, how the team will finally get over the Omaha hump and whose batting stances he used to mimic growing up in Southern California.

(This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.)

Lookout Eugene-Springfield: How do you go about scheduling more than a month on the recruiting trail?

Wasikowski: That’s probably the most frustrating thing for my wife – maybe less so now because she’s been in it for a while, but for a new coach’s wife? It’s chaos. Maybe organized chaos.

You know the general areas where you’re going, but with the transfer portal, you might get a phone call in the morning: “Hey, this guy’s pitching at this field,” and now you’re on a flight in three hours scrambling to buy a ticket. That’s what it is — all summer.

I imagine you have plenty of days where you wake up and go, “Where am I?”

All the time. And if someone were to internally say — and they don’t — “Well, can’t you plan better? Can’t you coordinate travel more in advance?” The answer is absolutely not. That’s totally the business.

Ironically, if you get a call that says a kid is going into the transfer portal today, and he’s pitching at 6, well, when you pull in at 6 you’re going to see Tony Vitello (Tennessee coach) and Jay Johnson (LSU coach). There are active recruiting head coaches and then there are the others — but by and large, the inactive recruiting head coach doesn’t have a job anymore.

How different is that from the pre-portal/NIL days?

The best schools still had coaches who were super active in recruiting. You can run in and get lucky on a class or a pitcher that kinda floats you, and maybe be lazy as a head coach and run into a string of luck on occasion, but … I haven’t had that string of luck yet on the be-lazy-and-run-into-guys program.

You don’t seem like the type of guy who is going to wait around for lazy luck.

It scares the s— out of me. I was an assistant my whole life. I finally got the job I’ve wanted and I’m not going to screw it up. We’re not going to break rules to screw it up. We’re not going to get outworked to screw it up.

If we lose games and we’re just not good enough at what we do, and they want somebody else in here, then go ahead — I’ll be the easiest fire you’ll ever have. That’s what I told (Oregon athletic director) Rob Mullens. But I also said I plan on making a College World Series and hopefully winning a national championship if we catch a break — and you guys having to pay me because we’re doing everything so well. Those are my goals. That’s what I want.

Do you talk to coaches in other sports about recruiting? Can any of them relate to what you face with the MLB draft?

I talk to Dan Lanning a lot about how they do it. I like what he does. He’s super aggressive.

The game is different because none of the other sports have what we have when it comes to the pro draft.

Baseball right now is at a really odd place for administrators because they have to decide: Are you going in? Are you not going in? Some of that decision is made off past success of your program, but not always.

A great example is Kansas baseball right now. For some reason, all of a sudden, they’re in. They’re in (the mix with) some recruits and spending money they weren’t able to spend in the past. That’s a change of direction in a positive way for their program. Others — shoot, Tennessee, since they went in with Tony — they’ve gone full immersion in baseball. They weren’t there before. And others as well.

Is that a program by program thing? Or do you see this as a trend in college baseball?

It’s a good question. It’s (one of the) fastest-growing sports in college sports — so you’ve got that on one side. Clearly, it’s on a growth cycle. The interest is going crazy in college baseball.

Now, do the administrators, ADs, presidents — whoever is making the decisions behind the scenes — do they have the desire to really go all in on baseball, or have their models shown them that’s not what they want? Those are the internal discussions I’m sure are happening at every institution.

It’s just, what do you want to do?

Oregon State’s got no conference — I guess they’re going into a conference soon — so they’ve had that discussion with unique circumstances. We’ve had that discussion with unique circumstances.

Big Ten football, Big Ten volleyball, Big Ten basketball — it can’t get any better. It’s the best conference for those sports anywhere.

Big Ten baseball? Not so much.

Historically, Big Ten baseball is not at the same level as some of the other conferences. Does that factor into an athletic director’s decision on where to allocate resources? I think it’s fascinating decision for those people in the business. Obviously, I’m a baseball coach. I’m biased. I want my bosses to go all in on the sport that employs me.

How does The House Settlement affect baseball? What does revenue-sharing look like for you?

We don’t get any money from revenue-share. Our scholarship limit had been 11.7 — they lifted all scholarship numbers — and they’re allowing us to raise money, but it has to be on an equitable basis with other women’s sports. But in terms of revenue-share and additional funds to the program, it’s unchanged.

When the season ended, I’m sure you and Rob Mullens had a discussion. What did you tell him you needed to get over the hump and make it to Omaha?

It doesn’t have a short answer. The first thing you need is good fortune. Some luck.

These last few years, we’re one of only a dozen or so teams in the country to make the postseason every year, with at least two Super Regionals in that span. That’s great — the sustainability, the good product, the increase of attendance — all of it.

But our recipe for success isn’t LSU’s recipe for success. They’ve got a $5 million budget to retain and acquire players and do their deal. We’re not near that level — not even 20% of what they’re throwing out there.

Editor’s note: Lookout Eugene-Springfield is not able to independently verify LSU’s NIL budget for baseball players. A Dec. 2024 article in The Athletic reported that most SEC schools have an NIL budget of $1.5 to $3 million for baseball, with outlier schools pushing beyond those figures.

It’s a similar question to Major League Baseball. If you’re coaching a team that isn’t the Yankees or Dodgers, what do you need to beat them? The Dodgers and Yankees might have a better player at every position, statistically or historically, in the past. So you’re going to need to do a great job in developing the players you have. You’re going to need to do a better job than the Dodgers and Yankees do, because they can just do free agent talent acquisition.

That’s what SEC schools are doing right now.The SEC schools are just acquiring talent. If there’s a kid that develops slowly or doesn’t become an all-conference player immediately, they’ll just go straight to the portal and replace them. We don’t have the luxury to do that. We’re not going to be able to go up against SEC schools right now and beat them on the high-end transfer portal players that are proven All-Americans.

So yeah — one answer would be to match them dollar for dollar and see if it helps.

Of course it would help.

If you exclude the fiscal avenues, it comes down to developing your talent, your locker room, your culture and continuing to bring in excellent coaches and staff. You want to build one of the best staffs in the country to where everything your student-athletes are getting is unique.

If you’re running a business, what’s your competitive advantage? If you’re running Starbucks, what’s your advantage over Dunkin’ Donuts? Why Oregon over Oregon State or LSU?

Some would say, “To be a top-10, top-12 program over the last five years, it’s remarkable.”

But do fans want to see us get to the College World Series? Heck yeah. We all do.

Does it burn when you’re right there at the doorstep and you get to the Super Regional round and you’re winning conference championships and you can’t get over that hump to get to the College World Series and win that thing? Absolutely. Does it burn when you beat Oregon State four straight times last year, then at the end of the year they play really good for a week or two and the next thing you know they’re in the College World Series? Does that burn? Yeah, that burns.

It burns me on all of them. I want to be one of eight.

When you were a kid, whose batting stance did you mimic?

Whose stance didn’t we mimic?

Saturday mornings you’re watching the Game of the Week with Mel Allen and Bob Costas. You’ve got your baseball cards laid out on the living room floor and you’re mimicking everyone. You played in the streets. You played Hotbox and over-the-line and wiffle ball.

You had Rod Carew leading off, so you had his flat bat and left-handed swing. Then George Hendrick, so you’d close your stance off. You did them all.

It was an awesome time to be a kid. Your parents told you to come home when the streetlights came on. No phone, just a glove on your handlebars, a bat and some balls in the spokes, and you rode around looking for the next game.