Sunday Morning Chat: Belen Jesuit Manager Jerry Albert

Rick: Give us a time where you blew up on an umpire during a game and then realized after the game that you were wrong. Wait, has that ever happened to you?

Coach Albert: That’s a pretty funny question.

Rick: Yeah, I was going to say, I don’t know that you’ve ever blown up on an umpire!

Coach Albert: Oh brother. I try not to worry about them. I try not to worry about them. When I do get annoyed, I think we know already, there have been some circumstances… there was a time once in a regional where they actually had Broward County ups umping our game against Cardinal Newman. A tremendous game. A one-run game and the ump made two tough calls to swallow. But, you know, you’ve gotta maintain your cool. This is what I always say, the minute you lose your cool, your team is out of it because they are going to focus on the ump rather than the game. So, that particular game I remember thinking to myself, wow, this could have been a riot. Because our fans are going nuts. There were two of the wackiest calls I had ever seen. And there was a Broward crew, they’re not supposed to do that game up there, and they were doing the game against Cardinal Newman. And you know what’s funny, and they were excellent umpires, I knew all three of them. So I was like, ‘holy cow, I can’t believe this is happening’. And a one-run game where we should have scored two runs that inning, we came out of it, it was still a one-run game afterwards. They took two runs off the scoreboard on us.

I refuse to go crazy. I don’t think that’s the way it’s supposed to be done. If you can go out and have a conversation with somebody and get them to ask for help, or get them to rethink the rules, or the call, that’s one thing. But if they’re going to tell you that’s their decision and that’s their judgment and that’s their call… What the heck is yelling and screaming going to do about it? You’re going to just make yourself look like a fool. I’d rather just maintain my composure and really for the sake of the team maintaining their composure. There are games where things are getting a little out of hand and some wacky things going on. The ump will make a call that you couldn’t dream of making. Sometimes they do some wacky things but you just kind of ride though it and you realize that going nuts isn’t going to help the situation.

Rick: I’ve seen it with you. You always keep your cool.

Coach Albert: The thing is, if you maintain your composure, your team will maintain their composure. That particular game sticks out in my head because there were two really, really wacky calls in that game. There were things I had never seen before like taking runs away from a team. I couldn’t believe they made the call. It was heated. It was intense but I didn’t really… once you get their explanation and then you go on and get the next guy up at the plate trying to get the run across. And then you think about various things, you’re dealing with sixteen, seventeen-year-old kids, if they get emotional they’re totally out of the game. But we’ve got to maintain our composure so we don’t lose staying with our game and they stay within their game, so to speak. So if you stay cool then the team is going to stay cool. The two games that stick out in my mind, we won both games.

Rick: That’s what I was going to ask you. Did you end up winning that game?

Coach Albert: That game we won 3-1. It was tight. Recently there was a real wacky game. Again, we were losing that game but we just maintained our composure and just let it go. You’ve got to just let it roll right off your back and get on with it. And hopefully the team does the same. I think we have to exemplify it when we expect it out of the kids. You don’t want a kid to go ballistic after he gets a call against him. You tell him that he can’t act like that. He’s got to just shake it off and get off the field. You’ve got to do the same. You’ve got to maintain your composure and discuss it in a normal tone, in a normal manner, and then get on with it.

Rick: And I remember last year, Mater and you had that epic 1-0 game into twelve or thirteen innings. I don’t remember any, ‘oh, what was that call the umpire made moments’, but it was a very tight game. It was scoreless into the tenth inning and that was one of the things I remember was the composure your team showed and as you said, it exemplifies from the top and goes down. They showed it… the crowd was passionate and that was a big, big game and a big moment.

Coach Albert: Yeah, yeah. That’s the goal. We try and do things with a level head. I don’t like to lose my cool over anything. I think we’re adults. We’re all passionate about baseball. We all want to win the game and we all want the call to go our way. Sometimes a call is made that you totally disagree with. The umps got a tough thing too. They’re in the middle of these games too. They’ve got everybody breathing down their neck. And here, especially at Belen, the crowd is so close to them so they’re right on top of them. And they understand the magnitude of the games also. They take their jobs seriously and they try very, very had to be as professional as possible. Which is all really any of the coaches expect out of them. Just be professional about it. Get on with it, you know.

Rick: With your guys, the same thing. I’m sure it’s got to be a great feeling as a coach to know that the kids are listening and follow that lead. Again, going back to that Mater game, keeping that composure and really representing themselves, their school, the program, everybody, the right way.

Coach Albert: That’s the goal, that’s what you want to see happening, you know. I don’t remember, I think we’ve had one kid ever, thrown out of a game. I’ve never been thrown out, but I’ve had one kid thrown out in twenty-five years of this. That’s a good thing because that means you’re teaching the kids the right way. The kids aren’t going to do what you say, they’re going to do what you do. They’re going to take your lead. You could tell a kid he’s got to control himself but then you’re going ballistic, he’s going to do the same thing you’re doing. He’s going to ride the tails of your emotion. Show a kid how to maintain your composure and they say, Ok, that’s the way we’ve got to be.

Rick: Have you ever apologized to a player? Was there a situation where something happened?

Coach Albert: I don’t think we’ve done anything to apologize for. We don’t really get into them too much. I might tell him if he gets thrown out somewhere at a base, I might tell him, ‘That was on us. We brought you on that. Don’t worry about it. That might have been a mistake’ . Or we sent him on that and our thinking was this and that’s why we do it, but we still get thrown out doing it, or something. We’re trying to explain the situation to the kid on what our thinking is and teaching him the game. We make mistakes sometimes on where we send the kid or hold the kid up. But there’s always a thought process behind it. It’s usually thought out well ahead of time on what you’re going to do. I’m trying to teach the kid the situation that way. I don’t really blow up on kids. It’s the same thing with the kids. We speak to them with respect. You know, we’re stern with them, we’re disciplined with them. We emphasize things as far as the importance of the things we’re trying to teach them in various situations.

I don’t really know if there was ever anything that we felt we lost our cool. Sometimes you forget the age of some of the kid that you bring up and we tell them, ‘Well, we probably shouldn’t yell at you because you’re so young’. We make a little joke about it. We coach them in a certain what that there’s a lot of respect around here. You could watch every-one of my practices and there’s no foul language, there’s no, anybody screaming at anybody else. The only time we raise our voice is to get somebody to hear something if he’s far away. We’ll emphasize something during the drills if he keeps botching something. They get it. They understand if they’re being coached to get to a certain level and the way to get him there. But we’re also going to treat him with respect all the time. We really love the kids that we coach and we try and get that point across in the way we do it. We talk to them a lot about their families or their schoolwork. But more than anything we want them to understand what we’re trying to teach them is to get them to be as good as they can be. Down the road, they’re dreaming about moving on from here. We’re going to do everything we possibly can to get them to a place where they can go and play, if that’s their goal. They kinda see the whole family aspect of it. The longer they’re here, the more I’m here, the more they’ll get that. I think people get it. I think the parents get it because they see the work you’re doing with their kids. Especially their junior to senior year as they see all the work we do with them to get them set up for school somewhere.

Rick: That kinda goes right into the next question. Having seen a bunch of coaching styles, give us the one coaching style you think works best with today’s players.

Coach Albert: Well I think you just have to be yourself. I think that works best with any day’s players. I can’t be something I’m not. I’ve got to coach the way that I feel, my personality. I can’t be trying to emulate someone else if they do a great job with the way they do it; I have to do the best job the way that I do it. I like to do everything in professional manner. That’s my thing. I like to be professional about it. I realize the age of the kids we’re working with, they make a lot of physical mistakes, they make a lot of mental mistakes. You can’t coach them all the same way. We don’t coach all our kids the same way. We don’t have, ‘Here’s our ten rules’. If you miss a practice, there’s a repercussion for it. If you are late for a practice there’s a repercussion for it. I’m human with them. Take each situation, that’s ok. This is what he did, the kid came late to practice. If the kid was getting a ride from his grandmother, and his grandmother is taking him here, you’ve got to understand little things like that. Discipline wise, we don’t have any problems here with anybody. You realize that too. Once you set the tone of discipline, everybody understands how to be early to practice. Everybody understands how to dress for practice. Once you set that tone it just feeds off itself and it’s easy. But each kid has a different personality. There are some kids you can put a little charge in them because maybe that’s how they respond. There are other kids if you try to put a little charge in them they go into a shell so you have to coach them differently. And that’s definitely the case with kids now. You really have to watch and learn what works for them. Not that you really have to change who you are, but you’ve got to learn what works best for that particular kid. How to get that kid along.

Rick: Speaking of the dress of the practices. The uniform style is always something that changes from generation to generation. Is there something that the kids do with today’s uniforms that drives you crazy?

Coach Albert: We don’t let them. That’s why we wear the high pants. The pants have to be up and that’s why we went with the stirrups and the sanitaries this year. That’s what baseball is supposed to look like. And I can’t stand, well, the low pants is ok, it’s comfortable for sure but it goes too far with the extreme. I can’t stand the pants that go underneath the spikes, that drives me nuts. That’s a pet peeve I have. I don’t like that sloppy look. I don’t know where it started but I definitely can’t stand it. I like the uniform to look like it fits. There’s a lot of programs that wear the long pants and it looks neat, if they get them fit correctly at the bottom. I like the pants up. I like the pants to be worn correctly. I don’t mind the solid sock but we figured this year, lets give the stirrup a shot. We were able to find a nice, clean stirrup. And I think our teams look terrific. We did it organization-wide. Kind of like the Cardinals do with their minor league teams.

Rick: I kinda remember. I think when we came for our Fall Classic was when you were unveiling them, if I’m not mistaken. I remember noticing it and commenting on it with you.

Coach Albert: I’m not sure, I’m not sure. Yeah. I’m not sure, I don’t know if we did it in the fall. But I know that it was definitely our intention to get the right thing going in the spring. I think the kids like it too. I think they like wearing their pants up, but now they think they’re going throwback. So now throwback is in style, so now they’re a throwback team.

Rick: I think we touched on this a little bit but, how hard is it not to take the emotion of the game home with you at night.

Coach Albert. That’s tough, yeah, that’s real tough. But it’s a discipline, just like anything else. And you can’t, you cannot bring the game home. I was watching the UConn coach, he made a great comment on ESPN on Mike and Mike in the Morning, a couple of years ago after his team won the national championship, Geno Auriemma. And he said, ‘I came back to earth really fast when I went home and I realized, I might be on top of the world but she still runs the place’, talking about his wife. I said, ‘That’s funny’. But it’s good. You realize, you may have just won a big game; you had a thousand people at the game and everybody’s going nuts. You’re riding this great wave of emotion. But you better remember where your priorities are when you get home. Your wife is still your wife, your kids are still your kids. There are a lot of issues at home that have to be a priority as soon as you step in the door. So, they’ve got to know that they come first in your life as soon as you step foot in the door. We do what we do because we love it. We are the most blessed people in the world because we do what we love doing everyday. You chose a job you love and you never work a day in your life. The famous quote. Well, we get to do that and that’s fantastic. You’ve got to remember, once you step foot in the door there are a whole bunch of other things that might be going on with the girls.

My girls need my time too. And that’s hard because there are only so many hours in the day. I have two daughters; one is a senior in high school graduating form McCarthy this year and my other one is a seventh grader, twins with little Armando here. Those girls need your time they need your attention. They need your listening too. I want to know about what’s going on in their lives. I want to know what happened in their day. I’ve got to really focus on them and it’s a discipline, a discipline, but it’s a worthwhile discipline. It’s not like a chore by any means, because I love finding out about what’s going on in their day. I love talking to my girls. I love talking with my wife. I want to know what the heck is going on when I’m not home. It’s a discipline but you don’t want to be so old and exuberant that you just come into the door spilling off everything that happened in your day. You go home and see what’s going on in their day. Eventually they’ll get around to asking you about yours.

Rick: Eventually you get your moment.

Coach Albert: Yeah, yeah. They’ll tell me, ‘That’s cool, Dad’. Then they go into their room.

Rick: [laughing] Lets finish with a game. I’ll give you a word or a phrase and you give me the first word that comes into your mind. Belen Jesuit…

Coach Albert: Fantastic school.

Rick: The Marlins.

Coach Albert: A lot of promise.

Rick: Adam Sandler.

Coach Albert: He’s a pretty funny guy although some of his stuff is a little too close to the edge for my liking.

Rick: Umpires… come on, say the first thing that came to your head it’s alright.

Coach Albert: Ah, I’m just kidding. They work very hard at what they do. They try very hard. I have a lot of respect for them, I really do. And I don’t think they get paid enough in Florida. All around the country they get a lot more than they get here.

Rick: The best current coach in Miami-Dade County.

Coach Albert: There are a lot of really good ones. I have a lot of respect for guys… I know Fred Burnside down in South Dade does a fantastic job… Joe Weber at Columbus, outstanding… Angel Herrera at Killian is fantastic… Eddie Doskow, my friend down in Southridge is terrific. Those are four that pop into my head right away.

Rick: You could really just keep going down the list.

Coach Albert: I’m sure there are a lot more really good ones, yeah. But there’s a lot of really good passionate coaches down here that work their tails off for the kids.

Rick: Ok, here’s a good one for you. The designated hitter.

Coach Albert: We were just talking about it yesterday. It’s either got to be yes, or no. Enough of this, half the darn major league still has it, and half that doesn’t. Do it, or don’t do it. One or the other. I have no problem with it. It’s ridiculous right now. You take a guy that’s been pitching for five years in the American League and he came up, lets say with Seattle. He makes it to the majors and he plays five years. And then he moves over to the national league and they tell him he’s got to hit, every fifth day when he hasn’t done it for ten years. It’s ridiculous. It’s not right. It’s got to be one or the other, yes or no.

Rick: Alex Rodriguez.

Coach Albert: You know what an interesting person because he is such a great guy one-on-one. It’s such a shame about all the negative stuff that comes out. Left or right, whether what’s true or not true. The one thing I’ll tell you, and I’ll mention my high school coach. When Archbishop Malloy came down here for the Alex Rodriguez basketball classic, Coach Curran coached basketball and baseball for 55 years up there. Put guys in the NBA, put guys in the Major leagues. He put each one on the highest level. When they came down for the A-Rod Classic, maybe about six years ago, Alex came in and spent a good amount of time with the teams. And Coach Curran could not say enough good things about him. How down to earth he was, how pleasant he was, how humble he was with the kids, the great talk he gave to the teams and even how he and Alex were kidding around about what Coach Curran would have thrown him if he was facing him. Little banter like that. So, he couldn’t say enough great stuff about him as far as how great he was with the kids and the team when he came down to the tournament that was hosted by Columbus. It’s easy to throw stones at people and shoot arrows in their back and kick them when they’re down but, people are people. You’ve got to look at the good part of people. Not just what you might think is the negative or what you hear about the negative.

Rick: Ok, one last one. A state championship.

Coach Albert: Yes. [laughing] That’s our goal every year and we fully expect to win every time we step foot on the field. We’re expecting to win that game and every season we go into it that’s what our goal is. We definitely think we’re going to get one, get a couple. Get as many as we can, that’s our goal.

Rick: Well Coach, I thank you for your time and I wish you the best of luck and that this year will be the one to get you that goal.

Coach Albert: It was really good talking to you. Thanks a lot Rick.

Rick: Thank you very much, I really enjoyed that.

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