University of Delaware Athletics
A Look Back At Delaware's 1970 College World Series Team
6/11/2020 10:00:00 AM | Baseball
Mother Nature, as she often does, was threatening to ruin a perfectly good day of baseball.
The night before the University of Delaware baseball team was set to host Bucknell in a doubleheader in late April of 1970, it had rained torrentially, soaking the field. When it looked like the games would be cancelled, that's when the Blue Hens players got to work raking the field and pouring gasoline on puddles to burn them off. Bob Hannah, the head coach who was in the early part of his legendary, decades-long career as the Delaware skipper, even called in a favor to get a state police helicopter to hover above the outfield to dry it off.
Come Hell or high water, this doubleheader was going to be played.
To understand why the Blue Hens wanted face the Bison so badly, you have to go back to the end of the previous season in May of 1969. On the final weekend of the regular season, Delaware traveled to Lewisburg, Pa., for a doubleheader against Bucknell, needing just one win to qualify for the postseason.
Bucknell took the opener 5-2, setting up a winner-take-all second game. In a seven-inning contest, Delaware fell into an early hole, allowing 11 Bison runs by the end of the fourth inning. But the high-powered Blue Hens offense sparked a rally and Delaware held a two-run lead, one strike away from completing the comeback win. A hit batter, a fielding error and a walk-off Bucknell home run in the bottom of the seventh slashed Delaware's hopes and ended its season.
"I think that was the foundation of our season the next year," Dave Yates, Delaware's all-star second baseman, said.
With the field ready to play and a burning desire to avenge the losses from the previous year, Delaware blew the Bison away in the 1970 series, sweeping the doubleheader with wins by the score of 19-7 and 6-0.
The 1970 squad achieved much more than just exorcising their Bison-sized demons, though. Fifty years ago this month, a determined group of seniors led the Blue Hens to the College World Series, the only time a Delaware squad has made it to the pinnacle of amateur baseball.
The offensive firepower carried over from the 1969 team and was the basis for the Blue Hens' success. The heart of the Delaware order was made up of Yates, a speedster who stole bases at will, left fielder Bruce Fad, who hit .350 for his career and right fielder Dave Klinger, the team's biggest personality.
[Fad tells the story of how Klinger, convinced the 1970 Bucknell doubleheader would be cancelled due to poor field conditions, took a trip to the shore that day with a girlfriend. When he called his roommate and shortstop Willy Miranda and learned that the doubleheader was, in fact, being played, he raced back to Newark and arrived in the second inning of the first game, grabbing Miranda to play catch and warm up as if nothing was wrong.]
Fad and Klinger were two out of a handful of athletes that played both football and baseball, playing for both Hannah and Tubby Raymond, arguably the two most significant head coaches in the history of Delaware athletics.
"For me, it turned out great because my time was budgeted for me," Fad, who played safety on the football team, said. "In those years, you couldn't play varsity sports as a freshman, so I had three years of varsity baseball and football and in those three years, I only had nine school days in that entire time where I didn't have practice or a game."
That prolific trio was supplemented by catcher Dave Willard, a stellar defensive player behind the plate, Ronnie Klein, who split time with Miranda at shortstop, Jimmy Robinson, a co-captain at third base, Joe Flickinger at first, and Freddy Bloom in center field.
Hannah knew that with the wealth of offensive talent, the addition of quality pitching would make the Blue Hens something special. A pair of aces in the form of juniors Teddy Zink and Doug Hopper provided exactly that, as Delaware compiled a 19-4 record in the regular season. Even with a schedule about half the length of a modern college baseball slate, a third starter was still needed to be successful in the postseason. Delaware got that from Glen Hinton, a third baseman that Hannah had converted into a pitcher who excelled at locating his pitches, despite not having the same velocity as the other two.
Even with all the right pieces, a successful team still has to put them all together. The 1970 team had the right chemistry.
"It was a very different kind of group than we had had in the past few years," Hannah said. "They came in at a time where we were not permitted to play freshmen. So we knew the group was there as the freshmen were put together, but we knew once we got to their sophomore year that we had something special."
"A lot of baseball guys who knew how to get under each other's skin, and we wouldn't hesitate to do that, just to try to keep things loose," Fad said. "It worked really well, we got along really well."
In addition to good team chemistry, Delaware benefitted from exemplary leadership from Hannah, and both Yates and Fad have experiences that stick with them today from playing for the Hall of Fame coach.
"He was off the charts as a coach," Yates said. "He set the example; he never got too high or too low. He's what you want as a coach."
In the fall of Yates' sophomore season, Hannah came up to him and told him that he had the green light to steal whenever he wanted to in their upcoming scrimmage that weekend. With Delaware up 20-1 in the eighth inning, Yates got his fourth hit of the day and promptly stole both second and third base. Hannah, who always valued playing the game the right way and who was coaching third base, informed Yates that after the game he would be apologizing to the opposing coach for disrespecting his opponent by stealing in a blowout.
"This is 54 years later and I remember the conversation verbatim," Yates said. "It was a lesson and I never did it again."
While the valuable life lessons stood out for Yates, for Fad it was the love and commitment Coach Hannah put into the program for his players. In 1969, the Blue Hens played in a premier tournament in Riverside, California, facing elite teams like Indiana, UCLA, BYU, USC, Illinois and Cal Riverside, something that would typically be beyond the budget of the team.
"Everybody else who's coming from out of town, they're staying in hotels and stuff. We're staying in people's houses…and I'm sure Coach Hannah had to arrange that, and I'm sure he probably had to arrange for some sponsorship for the airfare for us to get out there in the first place," Fad said. "You really want to put out for somebody that cares about you that much."
"I think I was a nurturer for them, trying to help them grow in every way I could possibly manage," Hannah said. "They were in and of themselves very competitive, so I didn't have to drive the train for them. They were very capable."
The 1970 Blue Hens hit their stride in the postseason. The bats came alive in a 14-10 win over West Chester to claim the Middle Atlantic Conference Championship. Delaware punched its ticket to Omaha with a dominant performance in the District II championship, winning all three of its games in the double-elimination tournament in Princeton, N.J.
It was starting pitching that stole the show for Delaware that weekend. The Blue Hens opened with a 7-1 win over Penn State with a complete game from Zink, and followed that with a 5-1 win over Seton Hall with a complete game from Hopper. They clinched their spot in the College World Series with a 4-0 win over the Pirates behind a complete game shutout from Hinton.
While the Blue Hens' time at the CWS was short, losing both games, Delaware still made an impact and rubbed shoulders with the game's top players. In the opening game against top-seeded Texas, the Blue Hens faced Longhorns starter Burt Hooton.
Hooton went on to be the second overall pick of the 1971 amateur draft, making his major league debut with the Chicago Cubs that year without spending a day in the minors. He threw a no-hitter in his fourth career game, and in 1981 was an All-Star and NLCS MVP as he won the World Series with the Los Angeles Dodgers. He was inducted into the College Baseball Hall of Fame in 2008.
But in 1970, Hooton was still a college pitcher who had thrown a complete game in every start of his collegiate career, rarely conceding even a run. Already down 4-0 in the third inning, Fad came to bat with two outs and the bases loaded. Hooton was struggling to locate his knuckle curve, and after initially falling down 0-2, Fad was able to work the count full. Knowing that he likely wouldn't risk walking a run in on the knuckle curve, the right-handed Fad guessed fastball and drove a ball to the opposite field for a bases-clearing triple, knocking the formidable Hooton out of the game.
Delaware eventually lost to Texas 12-4, then ran into the eventual CWS champion, USC, in the first loser's bracket game. The Trojans were one of the favorites in the tournament, but lost in the first round to an Ohio team that featured Hall of Famer and Philadelphia Phillies legend Mike Schmidt. USC eliminated Delaware with a 7-1 win, but the Blue Hens had still made their mark on the national stage and made memories for life.
"Just getting there was a real thrill," Fad said.
"It was a tremendous experience, no doubt about it," Yates said.
"It still remains to this day one of the major accomplishments of my coaching career. I'm sure in the minds of the players, they remember it fondly in terms of being something that was special to them and their athletic career," Hannah said. "It's a difficult thing to achieve."
Beyond the memories of Omaha, the bond that the members of the 1970 team built has stood the test of time. Unfortunately, many players have died in the 50 years since that College World Series, but the surviving members still regularly keep in touch with each other and with Coach Hannah.
"This group has been particularly close and they've included me in many of their get-togethers. So when we haven't been in quarantine here recently, we get together with a few guys pretty much monthly," Hannah said. "As I've gotten older, that's been particularly enjoyable for me to be able to involve myself with guys, and those guys now are in their 70s."
"To me, that's the greatest thing I got out of sports was the ability to share experiences, and the opportunity to get to know people and learn from them about how to live your life the right way," Fad said.
"We're teammates," Yates said. "We're teammates forever."
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The night before the University of Delaware baseball team was set to host Bucknell in a doubleheader in late April of 1970, it had rained torrentially, soaking the field. When it looked like the games would be cancelled, that's when the Blue Hens players got to work raking the field and pouring gasoline on puddles to burn them off. Bob Hannah, the head coach who was in the early part of his legendary, decades-long career as the Delaware skipper, even called in a favor to get a state police helicopter to hover above the outfield to dry it off.
Come Hell or high water, this doubleheader was going to be played.
To understand why the Blue Hens wanted face the Bison so badly, you have to go back to the end of the previous season in May of 1969. On the final weekend of the regular season, Delaware traveled to Lewisburg, Pa., for a doubleheader against Bucknell, needing just one win to qualify for the postseason.
Bucknell took the opener 5-2, setting up a winner-take-all second game. In a seven-inning contest, Delaware fell into an early hole, allowing 11 Bison runs by the end of the fourth inning. But the high-powered Blue Hens offense sparked a rally and Delaware held a two-run lead, one strike away from completing the comeback win. A hit batter, a fielding error and a walk-off Bucknell home run in the bottom of the seventh slashed Delaware's hopes and ended its season.
"I think that was the foundation of our season the next year," Dave Yates, Delaware's all-star second baseman, said.
With the field ready to play and a burning desire to avenge the losses from the previous year, Delaware blew the Bison away in the 1970 series, sweeping the doubleheader with wins by the score of 19-7 and 6-0.
The 1970 squad achieved much more than just exorcising their Bison-sized demons, though. Fifty years ago this month, a determined group of seniors led the Blue Hens to the College World Series, the only time a Delaware squad has made it to the pinnacle of amateur baseball.
The offensive firepower carried over from the 1969 team and was the basis for the Blue Hens' success. The heart of the Delaware order was made up of Yates, a speedster who stole bases at will, left fielder Bruce Fad, who hit .350 for his career and right fielder Dave Klinger, the team's biggest personality.
[Fad tells the story of how Klinger, convinced the 1970 Bucknell doubleheader would be cancelled due to poor field conditions, took a trip to the shore that day with a girlfriend. When he called his roommate and shortstop Willy Miranda and learned that the doubleheader was, in fact, being played, he raced back to Newark and arrived in the second inning of the first game, grabbing Miranda to play catch and warm up as if nothing was wrong.]
Fad and Klinger were two out of a handful of athletes that played both football and baseball, playing for both Hannah and Tubby Raymond, arguably the two most significant head coaches in the history of Delaware athletics.
"For me, it turned out great because my time was budgeted for me," Fad, who played safety on the football team, said. "In those years, you couldn't play varsity sports as a freshman, so I had three years of varsity baseball and football and in those three years, I only had nine school days in that entire time where I didn't have practice or a game."
That prolific trio was supplemented by catcher Dave Willard, a stellar defensive player behind the plate, Ronnie Klein, who split time with Miranda at shortstop, Jimmy Robinson, a co-captain at third base, Joe Flickinger at first, and Freddy Bloom in center field.
Hannah knew that with the wealth of offensive talent, the addition of quality pitching would make the Blue Hens something special. A pair of aces in the form of juniors Teddy Zink and Doug Hopper provided exactly that, as Delaware compiled a 19-4 record in the regular season. Even with a schedule about half the length of a modern college baseball slate, a third starter was still needed to be successful in the postseason. Delaware got that from Glen Hinton, a third baseman that Hannah had converted into a pitcher who excelled at locating his pitches, despite not having the same velocity as the other two.
Even with all the right pieces, a successful team still has to put them all together. The 1970 team had the right chemistry.
"It was a very different kind of group than we had had in the past few years," Hannah said. "They came in at a time where we were not permitted to play freshmen. So we knew the group was there as the freshmen were put together, but we knew once we got to their sophomore year that we had something special."
"A lot of baseball guys who knew how to get under each other's skin, and we wouldn't hesitate to do that, just to try to keep things loose," Fad said. "It worked really well, we got along really well."
In addition to good team chemistry, Delaware benefitted from exemplary leadership from Hannah, and both Yates and Fad have experiences that stick with them today from playing for the Hall of Fame coach.
"He was off the charts as a coach," Yates said. "He set the example; he never got too high or too low. He's what you want as a coach."
In the fall of Yates' sophomore season, Hannah came up to him and told him that he had the green light to steal whenever he wanted to in their upcoming scrimmage that weekend. With Delaware up 20-1 in the eighth inning, Yates got his fourth hit of the day and promptly stole both second and third base. Hannah, who always valued playing the game the right way and who was coaching third base, informed Yates that after the game he would be apologizing to the opposing coach for disrespecting his opponent by stealing in a blowout.
"This is 54 years later and I remember the conversation verbatim," Yates said. "It was a lesson and I never did it again."
While the valuable life lessons stood out for Yates, for Fad it was the love and commitment Coach Hannah put into the program for his players. In 1969, the Blue Hens played in a premier tournament in Riverside, California, facing elite teams like Indiana, UCLA, BYU, USC, Illinois and Cal Riverside, something that would typically be beyond the budget of the team.
"Everybody else who's coming from out of town, they're staying in hotels and stuff. We're staying in people's houses…and I'm sure Coach Hannah had to arrange that, and I'm sure he probably had to arrange for some sponsorship for the airfare for us to get out there in the first place," Fad said. "You really want to put out for somebody that cares about you that much."
"I think I was a nurturer for them, trying to help them grow in every way I could possibly manage," Hannah said. "They were in and of themselves very competitive, so I didn't have to drive the train for them. They were very capable."
The 1970 Blue Hens hit their stride in the postseason. The bats came alive in a 14-10 win over West Chester to claim the Middle Atlantic Conference Championship. Delaware punched its ticket to Omaha with a dominant performance in the District II championship, winning all three of its games in the double-elimination tournament in Princeton, N.J.
It was starting pitching that stole the show for Delaware that weekend. The Blue Hens opened with a 7-1 win over Penn State with a complete game from Zink, and followed that with a 5-1 win over Seton Hall with a complete game from Hopper. They clinched their spot in the College World Series with a 4-0 win over the Pirates behind a complete game shutout from Hinton.
While the Blue Hens' time at the CWS was short, losing both games, Delaware still made an impact and rubbed shoulders with the game's top players. In the opening game against top-seeded Texas, the Blue Hens faced Longhorns starter Burt Hooton.
Hooton went on to be the second overall pick of the 1971 amateur draft, making his major league debut with the Chicago Cubs that year without spending a day in the minors. He threw a no-hitter in his fourth career game, and in 1981 was an All-Star and NLCS MVP as he won the World Series with the Los Angeles Dodgers. He was inducted into the College Baseball Hall of Fame in 2008.
But in 1970, Hooton was still a college pitcher who had thrown a complete game in every start of his collegiate career, rarely conceding even a run. Already down 4-0 in the third inning, Fad came to bat with two outs and the bases loaded. Hooton was struggling to locate his knuckle curve, and after initially falling down 0-2, Fad was able to work the count full. Knowing that he likely wouldn't risk walking a run in on the knuckle curve, the right-handed Fad guessed fastball and drove a ball to the opposite field for a bases-clearing triple, knocking the formidable Hooton out of the game.
Delaware eventually lost to Texas 12-4, then ran into the eventual CWS champion, USC, in the first loser's bracket game. The Trojans were one of the favorites in the tournament, but lost in the first round to an Ohio team that featured Hall of Famer and Philadelphia Phillies legend Mike Schmidt. USC eliminated Delaware with a 7-1 win, but the Blue Hens had still made their mark on the national stage and made memories for life.
"Just getting there was a real thrill," Fad said.
"It was a tremendous experience, no doubt about it," Yates said.
"It still remains to this day one of the major accomplishments of my coaching career. I'm sure in the minds of the players, they remember it fondly in terms of being something that was special to them and their athletic career," Hannah said. "It's a difficult thing to achieve."
Beyond the memories of Omaha, the bond that the members of the 1970 team built has stood the test of time. Unfortunately, many players have died in the 50 years since that College World Series, but the surviving members still regularly keep in touch with each other and with Coach Hannah.
"This group has been particularly close and they've included me in many of their get-togethers. So when we haven't been in quarantine here recently, we get together with a few guys pretty much monthly," Hannah said. "As I've gotten older, that's been particularly enjoyable for me to be able to involve myself with guys, and those guys now are in their 70s."
"To me, that's the greatest thing I got out of sports was the ability to share experiences, and the opportunity to get to know people and learn from them about how to live your life the right way," Fad said.
"We're teammates," Yates said. "We're teammates forever."
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