Editor’s note: In the Colorado Classics series, The Denver Post takes a weekly look at individuals who made their mark on the Colorado sports landscape and what they are doing now.
At 73, Sam Suplizio doesn’t look at it as a baseball midlife crisis.
But he’s back in uniform at a time when most of baseball’s senior citizens are content with staying in touch with the game from a shady seat in the grandstand or in front of a television.
Instead of watching, Suplizio has joined the Seattle Mariners organization as a special outfield instructor. He’s back in baseball after a four-year absence to recover from a stroke.
“I had about 20 outfielders in spring training,” Suplizio said. “I worked some with the big- league team, but mainly with the Triple-A and Double-A guys.”
Suplizio, whose legacy in Colorado includes helping land the Rockies franchise and a stadium that bears his name in Grand Junction, has made spot visits to the Mariners during the season, his last in late June and early July when the Rockies were in Seattle. His work has made an impression on his young students.
Adam Jones, one of the Mariners’ outfield prospects who switched positions during the offseason, wrote on his website that things were going well, adding: “I have learned a ton of information from Sam Suplizio. Sam has more information than anyone that I have ever been around. I just try and pick his brain about any info about baseball. I will get his number and keep in touch with him.”
Mariners general manager Bill Bavasi said Suplizio was asked to join spring training to help a first-year coach.
“His main duty was to use his intellectual library of outfield drills to help the coach,” Bavasi said. “Sam always has been a good sounding board for young players.”
Suplizio’s work with the Mariners is taking place quite a while after the previous time he was in front of a team’s prospects. During a spring-training session in 2002 with the St. Louis Cardinals, he became ill.
“I had about 30 outfielders in front of me,” Suplizio remembered. “I started wobbling and the players said that when I talked, it sounded as if I was under water.”
Suplizio was rushed to the clubhouse, where he says by “a stroke of luck” there were team doctors from the Cardinals and the Los Angeles Dodgers ready to help.
“That’s when I first learned I wasn’t bulletproof,” Suplizio said. “It was life- threatening. I was paralyzed on my left side. They said they could give me something, but it might kill me. I said to give it to me.”
After a tough first year, Suplizio hit the gym and now is back at work with no serious aftereffects.
As a player coming up in the New York Yankees organization, he watched Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris ahead of him and calls them the best two athletes he ever saw on the same team. The best outfield he coached was Garret Anderson, Jim Edmonds and Tim Salmon with the Angels, but not far ahead of the group of Robin Yount, Charlie Moore and Ben Oglivie with the Brewers.
Suplizio made it to the World Series as a coach for the Brewers in 1982 against the Cardinals. And he once coached first base while with Milwaukee in a regular-season game in New York at Yankee Stadium, a place he didn’t enter as a player.
“It took me 30 years to get to Yankee Stadium,” Suplizio said. “That’s paying your dues. When we took the field and they played the national anthem, I had tears in my eyes.”
Suplizio also has made a lasting mark on baseball in Colorado.
He first became a fixture in Grand Junction, playing for and then managing the semipro Grand Junction Eagles for 17 years. Suplizio, Bus Bergman, Dale Hollingsworth, D.S. Dykstra and Jay Tolman were instrumental in bringing the National Junior College Athletic Association baseball tournament to Grand Junction in 1959. It’s still there.
His scouting work brought Tippy Martinez of La Junta into the majors, where he became a prominent pitcher for the Baltimore Orioles. Suplizio also directed scouts to Joe Strain Jr., an infielder from Denver who played for the San Francisco Giants and Chicago Cubs.
But Suplizio stepped into the big leagues in 1989 as co-chairman with Larry Varnell of the Colorado Baseball Commission. The commission conducted the successful election campaign that authorized a sales tax increase to fund a new stadium if Denver received a big-league team. The Rockies and Coors Field followed.
“Our commission was made up of outstanding individuals,” Suplizio said. “At first, the situation seemed stacked against us. The commission members believed in the effort and they just kept plowing away. When we needed help, Pete Coors and Bill Daniels stepped up.”
Although once an aspiring outfielder in the Yankees organization, Suplizio found his mark as an instructor.
“My strength was in teaching, coaching and building players,” Suplizio said. “I found out I could inspire young players.”
Suplizio divides his time among Grand Junction, Florida and South Carolina. Wherever he is, he’s always in touch with baseball. And he has his uniform ready to put on.
Staff writer Irv Moss can be reached at 303-820-1296 or imoss@denverpost.com.
