Ralph Rago: A baseball coaching lifer calls it a career after 61 years
Ralph Rago is 87, but you might do a double take if you look at him and think about that.
His voice booms. He has a sore back but is otherwise sound. He can talk baseball by the hour with remarkable attention to detail. He credits “my good Italian genes and good Mediterranean diet” of vegetables, fruits, nuts and whole grains for the longevity.
Baseball has sustained Rago for as long as he can remember. It’s not true that he sleeps with a fungo bat near the bed, but there might be an old mitt stashed under a pillow.
The sport has inspired and defined Rago since his youth on dirt lots in Los Banos, through his college days at Fresno State, over 35 combined coaching seasons at Davis High School and UC Davis, 17 years as a Major League Baseball envoy across the globe, and the previous 10 seasons coaching with another ageless wonder in Guy Anderson at Cordova and Capital Christian high schools. Rago’s career, so vast, included induction into the American Baseball Coaches Association Hall of Fame in 2013.
The coronavirus pandemic that halted seasons near and far has stalled Rago’s momentum of 62 successive seasons as coach and sapped a bit of his enthusiasm. There are no teams to coach, no kids or collegians and professionals to mentor.
So he’s retiring from the sport with a résumé that drops to the floor with no regrets and the sound of pride in his voice.
“I’m not worried about my health in this pandemic, for some reason — maybe the genes — but this just felt like the time to step away,” Rago said. “I’m at peace with it. I’ll miss it. I’ll still watch a prospect at a camp if a coach needs me to.”
Rago’s coaching pal Anderson is rolling right along at 87 himself and six months older than his decades-long friend. One of the winningest head coaches in national prep history has no intention of stepping down as an assistant any time soon. Anderson always referred to him and Rago as, “old and older.”
“I tried to talk Ralph out of retiring,” Anderson said. “(My wife) Karen and I have him over every Saturday for dinner, and yes, we talk some baseball. He’s a great coach, a great man. Loved working with him. He never lost that fiery Italian spirit. I think he’s still a part of the Mafia somewhere.”
Sport soothed personal losses
Rago said baseball is more than wins and losses. It’s about how players learn and develop, how one overcomes a sport heavy on more failure than success, where a 1-for-4 game at the plate is blah, despite that home run.
Baseball helped keep Rago focused amid the two most crushing losses of his life. In the early 2000s, Rago’s wife Charlotte died of brain cancer at 62. A few years later, their daughter Jania Beth died of the same disease. She was 42.
“Doctors said it was genetic,” Rago said, adding that his son Mark, whom he coached at Davis High, has been tested for the disease and is OK. “That was a hard time. I got through that time with baseball. I needed baseball then more than ever.”
The son of Italian immigrants, Rago’s determination kept him in baseball when it nearly ran him out.
At 13, in the mid 1940s, Rago tried out for the American Legion team in Los Banos. He didn’t get a uniform, meaning he didn’t make the team.
“I rode home on my bicycle, crying,” Rago said. “I still went to every practice, and after three weeks, Carlisle Lofton, the coach and my idol, told me I was on the team. It made my life.”
Rago played outfield and utility on Los Banos High baseball teams, playing other small towns where sports towered big in Gustine, Le Grand, Mariposa, Newman and Patterson. As a halfback, linebacker and cornerback, Rago was on Los Banos football teams that enjoyed a 32-game winning streak.
Games were played on Friday afternoons, before lights were installed.
“The whole town would shut down, with all the dairymen coming to watch, then they’d go milk their cows after the game,” Rago said. “What a life.”
He added, “I couldn’t imagine not being able to play youth or high school or college sports, like what this pandemic has done. Kids need sports and activity. We all need it.”
Davis era, fence story and snowbank dive
Rago graduated from Los Banos High in 1951 and Fresno State in 1956. He landed his first coaching job at Roosevelt High in Fresno in 1959. He was hooked.
At 28, he arrived in Davis when the town was small the campus housed some 300 students. It is now a large town with a massive high school enrollment of 3,000.
Rago taught physical education for 28 years, retiring in 1991. He coached the Davis High baseball team from 1968-88 and was an assistant coach in football. He had stints as a swimming coach and a tennis coach in an era when coaches worked all seasons.
Rago at Davis High in the early 1970s coached an eventual Major Leaguer in Steve Brown, who attended UC Davis. Brown, still living locally, recalled how Rago could intimidate with the glare or bark, but he admired the man for “being such a good coach.”
And there’s the old fence story.
“Once at Davis, a guy who struck out and he threw the helmet into the fence in frustration,” Brown recalled. “Ralph didn’t like that. He said, ‘Hey! They helmet didn’t strike out. Next time, throw yourself into the fence.’ I used that line as a coach. Made total sense.”
Brown said Rago was firm but fair. He insisted his Davis players be in time, pay attention and hustle. And to not ski during baseball season.
“So one time a friend and I saw Ralph in a parking lot at Alpine Meadows, and we dove into the snowbank so he couldn’t see us,” Brown said. “I’m not even sure it was him, but we dove.”
Brown said he marvels at how his old boss ages, and he can understand why Rago would retire from coaching. Baseball is about rhythm. There is no rhythm when there are no seasons amid the COVID-19 cloud.
“I remember 25 years after playing at UCD, I’d go to a UCD event, look over at Ralph and think, “the guy hasn’t changed since I was 15 years old!’”
Outlasting his own players
Rago coached so long, he outlasted two of his better Davis High players from the late 1970s/early ‘80s.
Dan Ariola and Rob Rinaldi went on to have enormously successful careers as high school coaches, Ariola at Davis and Rinaldi at Woodland and Pleasant Grove. They have since stepped away from high school coaching. Rago assisted Ariola in the 2000s, including the Sac-Joaquin Section championship 2004 team.
“Coach Rago had a great love and passion for the game and the relationships that came with it,” Ariola said. “What a career! He touched so many players at so many different levels and locations.”
Rago never wanted to stop. He found joy in his assistant coaching roles and coaching abroad, including as that MLB envoy in England and Africa, where some kids didn’t have a field or much equipment but found a way.
The Los Banos kid within Rago made sure of it.
“Kids need direction, anywhere,” Rago said. “Baseball has changed with more analytics. But it’s still about throwing strikes, and you still have to field the ball and make the throw.”
As for the sign-stealing scandal that has sullied the major league game in recent years, Rago offered an interesting, old-timer view.
“Even way back when I was a kid in Los Banos, you try to steal signs from the catcher, but you don’t go banging on drums or trash cans or whatever some of those big-league guys were doing,” Rago said. “I’d tell the kids to watch the pitcher and see how he grips the ball. That’s how you do it. Don’t cheat. Do it the right way.”
Or the Rago way.