When Oregon brought back baseball in 2007 and hired George Horton away from Cal State Fullerton, they sent a message to the Pac-10 and the country that they planned a quick rebuild and contention for a College World Series sooner rather than later. Now with Horton’s contract set to expire next month and both sides at an impasse, the Diamond Ducks are in danger of putting their rise in jeopardy.
Since the team began playing games in 2009, Oregon has gone to NCAA tournaments, led the Pac-10 going into the final week of the season and been within one game of the College World Series. That’s an impressive rise, no matter the sport – the Arizona Diamondbacks won the World Series four years into their existence, fastest in history. Horton is responsible for much of the comparable rise at Oregon, and if he were a football coach, his contract would have been extended long ago. Baseball is a different playing field, and the Ducks are at a crossroads that will play a role in Oregon athletics for years to come.
“There are no more than a dozen college baseball programs that actually turn a profit, and those tend to be the ones that pay the highest salaries,” wrote Aaron Fitt, national writer for Baseball America, in an email. Oregon is not one of those programs, reporting an operating deficit of over $1.5 million in 2011. However, Horton’s previous contract paid him a base salary of $450,000, which was believed to be highest salary in the conference. Horton’s agent has asked for an increase to $600,000, an amount evidently hard for the athletic department to justify when the program loses more than twice that.
But baseball is a key component of the new Pac-12 Network and having a team fall into mediocrity on national television isn’t the best promotional move. What’s amazing about Horton’s accomplishments in Eugene is that he’s done it in a town where it rains nine months of the year, and people wear more football jerseys to the baseball field than anything else. He’s made April baseball as relevant as spring football practice on the campus of a top five football team, and he deserves a standing ovation for his efforts.
Athletic director Rob Mullens has two options as the clock ticks towards September: Pay one of the best coaches in baseball what he’s worth on the open market, or play hardball and risk losing the architect of his baseball program. Neither is a particularly enticing option and the end result will impact athletics at Oregon for years to come.
When then-athletic director Pat Kilkenny reinstated baseball in 2007, adding women’s competitive cheer and cutting the wresting program, not everyone was on board. Kilkenny was involved in some of the biggest expenditures in the history of Oregon athletics during his two year tenure and publicly said baseball would turn a profit in Eugene, something that hasn’t happened and isn’t likely to.
That’s not to say it should be of major concern that the baseball program doesn’t break even; football and men’s basketball are the only ones that do at many Division-I NCAA schools (It’s unknown whether other Oregon programs turn a profit). The question is whether Oregon can justify spending the kind of money required to produce a high-caliber team with football ticket prices continuing to rise and fans beginning to draw a line in the sand, and so far, the only championships won in the high-profile Matthew Knight Arena are by acrobatics and tumbling.
Oregon is more likely than Horton to blink first, as it’d be embarrassing to invest millions to restart baseball to see the Ducks play .500 ball. It’s nearly impossible – even with the donors Oregon has – to sustain high levels of competition at every sport though, and a high-powered basketball team stands to make more than a championship baseball program ever could.
“It just depends whether the program thinks it is a worthwhile tradeoff to lose money on a program in the short term, in the hope that the program continues to compete at a high level, which in turn leads to better ticket sales and more revenues in the long term,” Fitt wrote.