Chambers right man for job

No matter what his owners say, Don Logan is one of most astute baseball men in Las Vegas. So it was no surprise that UNLV would contact the 51s general manager before naming the sixth baseball coach in its history Friday.

What was a surprise, Logan said, is that he felt he had to sell the Rebels' athletic brass on the idea that Tim Chambers was the right man for the job.

Unless one of the candidates was Tony La Russa, it shouldn't have mattered.

Even then, it shouldn't have mattered. To my knowledge, La Russa has never raised more than $3 million to carve a ballpark out of desert scratch, doesn't know the way to Shadow Ridge and Silverado and Sierra Vista and Faith Lutheran and all the other local high schools that produced the talent that helped Chambers turn the College of Southern Nevada into a nine-headed monster that rarely missed the cutoff man for more than a decade, doesn't know that when resources are limited, sometimes you have to beg, borrow and ... well, let's just leave it at beg and borrow them.

Tim Chambers might not bat his pitchers in the No. 8 slot, but he is the right man for this job. He was the right man last year and the year before that and the year before that, even if then-athletic director Mike Hamrick kept giving Buddy Gouldsmith one-year contract extensions for being a nice guy whose teams showed improvement in the classroom but not a whole lot of it between the lines.

Chambers was probably the right guy 11 years ago, too, a proven winner at Bishop Gorman High before he was Gerry Fausted right into the juco ranks. That's what I call it when these Division I schools won't consider a guy for a head coaching job because he has never done it at the college level and therefore could not possibly know the first thing about hitting the cutoff man.

Somehow I don't foresee Tim Chambers trying to salvage his coaching career at Akron when he's finished here.

"I've never really concerned myself with the decisions other people make," he said about previously being passed over for the UNLV job like the bridesmaids at six big, fat, Greek weddings. "I'm the kind of guy who lives in the now, and the now for me this year was awesome."

The now was Chambers getting to coach 17-year-old Roy Hobbs Jr., aka Bryce Harper of Las Vegas High. The two nearly combined to bring CSN a second national championship.

"Timing is everything, and this is the right time for Tim Chambers and the right time for UNLV," athletic director Jim Livengood said in one of those statements that sounds cliche but, in this case, suggests Livengood has been doing his homework.

Perhaps he and his minions wanted to be absolutely certain before handing Chambers the fungo bat and a yearly salary of $110,000 for the next three years after Gouldsmith was paid $86,000 annually. But say this about Livengood: He is batting roughly 1.000, at least on paper, when it comes to hiring new coaches and making other decisions of consequence since he arrived from Arizona. He must also have a hat deeper than Lance Burton's, because other than the Wisconsin football game, I don't see where all the money to make all these UNLV teams competitive is going to come from.

Chambers might be able to manage John McGraw under a table, but without resources, the road to Omaha and the College World Series, where UNLV has never been, is pie in the sky with an infield fly. But if it comes to it, this is a man who made chicken salad out of a chicken-wire backstop at CSN, a man who carved a mountain of victories and a billiard-table smooth infield out of a molehill of donated dirt. Tim Chambers can raise his own money, if that's what it takes.

The first time we met, he looked like Pig-Pen from the Charlie Brown comic strip. When he left, the dust of ancient civilizations followed him right out the door to the donated batting cage, donated grandstands and donated scoreboard.

"You've got to get down there and get your hands dirty," Chambers said Friday when reminded of that. "We'll do the same things here."

Speak confidently, carry a big shovel, recruit local kids, raise money, hit the cutoff man, win baseball games, build a program. This could really be the start of something.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352.