All the good-natured jabs about his being the old guy on the panel left baseball head coach Mark Marquess feeling "a little shook up."
But that didn't stop the 53-year-old former first baseman from pulling out his granny glasses -- to admiring chuckles -- to read stats off his note cards as he answered questions from sportswriters at the annual Bay Area College Baseball Media Day, in January.
Standing at an improvised podium in the Adventure Room of San Francisco's Planet Hollywood, where he had to compete with framed action shots of Sylvester Stallone and Tom Selleck, Marquess, '69, was the center of attention.
"We're very young but talented," he told reporters about this year's team. "If we can keep our heads above water, we can become a pretty good team toward the second half of the season."
If anyone can rebound from last season's loss of six starting position players and three starting pitchers, it's Marquess, the winningest coach in Stanford history. At the beginning of his 25th season with the Cardinal, he was only five victories short of 1,000 career wins. Three-time NCAA Coach of the Year and eight-time Pac-10 Coach of the Year, he has taken Stanford to two NCAA titles and 10 College World Series appearances.
Marquess played minor-league ball with the Chicago White Sox and he coached the U.S. team to its first gold medal in baseball at the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul. But when he talks about how his freshmen may perform, it's likely that he's drawing on his own undergraduate experience on the Farm, when he was a three-year starter at first base and also played three years of football.
"You never know with freshmen how quickly they're going to make the transition," he told a reporter. "We've got a couple, like Carlos Quentin, who are going to be outstanding college players, but I'm not sure they're going to be outstanding as freshmen. Will they hit 10 home runs? Will they hit 15? I don't know."
Quentin's response? Two days later, the powerful outfielder slammed a three-run homer off the top of the scoreboard in his first collegiate at-bat to give Stanford an 11-9 victory over Fresno State in the second game of the season.
Marquess may want to retire the bifocals and hold onto his cap for the ride to come.
