Rice coach Wayne Graham just keeps on winning

Wayne Graham turns 77 in two months. The only retiring he looks forward to is his Rice pitchers sending opposing batters directly back to the dugout.

In 32 years as a college baseball coach, including 21 with the Owls, Graham has amassed 1,527 wins, including a College World Series championship.

They didn’t even count the 10 seasons prior as a high school coach or his credentials as a major league player while inducting him into the College Baseball Foundation Hall of Fame last year.

“That was surprising, but gratifying,” Graham said. “It’s rare you get to enjoy something like that while you’re still active.”

That activity continues through at least 2018, as Graham signed a five-year contract extension last season with a year remaining.

As he prepared earlier this week to bring his team here for a four-game series against Hawaii that starts tonight, Graham said he hopes his longtime friend Les Murakami joins him in the Hall soon.

“He certainly deserves it,” Graham said. “He is very much responsible for the endurance of quality college baseball in Hawaii. Getting that stadium built was a huge thing.”

A stadium now named after Murakami, whose legendary coaching career ended after a stroke in 2000.

“A really nice man, I hope to see him while we’re there,” Graham said. “I had a chance to stay a few days after a series once, and Les took me out for a round (of golf) at Waialae Country Club.”

Graham doesn’t play golf anymore, but he still loves to visit Kaanapali on Maui and Princeville on Kauai. Even though his team hasn’t been here since it left the WAC in 2005, Graham and his wife, Tanya, are annual visitors.

MURAKAMI AND Graham are the same age and shared some commonalities in their coaching style, their teams always adept at the small-ball style of offense (while providing for the occasional exceptions when they had big bashers like Glenn Braggs and Lance Berkman, of course). They generally did things a base at a time, bunt, hit-and-run, steal, while relying heavily on pitching and defense. As does current UH coach Mike Trapasso.

So you might figure Graham loves the recent trend of low-scoring games in college baseball, brought on largely by equipment changes.

But that would be as wrong as grooving an 0-2 pitch down the middle. He’s actually an outspoken critic of what he calls the current “deadball era.”

“Weak bat and weak ball. I don’t think they’ve achieved a balance,” Graham said. “Home run production has been cut in half. Look at (UH’s) series against Oregon. One home run, total, for both teams. We play Stanford three games and there’s just two (both by Rice’s Michael Aquino). That’s not enough offense.”

Rice baseball will be fine either way; the Owls will always be at or near the top of Conference USA and a fixture in the national rankings for the foreseeable future even if they used whiffle bats and 16-inch softballs.

“I don’t have an agenda. We won the College World Series with pitching and defense. For winning and losing, what we have now is better for us,” Graham said. “But it is not in the best interest of the game. Historically, it’s 100-percent proven that fans prefer higher scores. Why did major league baseball look the other way on steroids? Because home runs bring in the fans.”

Graham doesn’t advocate returning to the “trampoline bat” that made college baseball scores resemble those of football games by the time you got to the third game of a series.

“Change the ball,” he said. “That’s all you have to do.”

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Reach Dave Reardon at dreardon@staradvertiser.com or 529-4783.