Following a strong seven-year career, associate head coach Troy Buckley is leaving Long Beach State baseball to take a position as the minor league pitching coordinator for the Pittsburgh Pirates organization.
“We will miss him deeply,” said Dirtbag head coach Mike Weathers on Monday night in a statement released by the LBSU athletic department. “He will always be a part of the Dirtbag family, and we wish him nothing but success.”
Buckley leaves behind some large cleats to fill. Since 2001, the Dirtbags’ pitching coach has groomed three Big West Pitchers of the Year (consecutively, 2001-2004), a National Player of the Year in current Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim right-hander Jared Weaver, and has seen 35 of his pitchers drafted.
Buckley’s pitching staffs have ranked in the top-30 in team ERA, including the nation’s leading 2.53 ERA in 2005, in each of his six years at LBSU. Three of Buckley’s six pitching staffs have been ranked in the top five nationally as well.
Last season, Buckley took a staff largely made up of underclassmen with just one returning weekend starter, and coached them to the 16th best ERA in the country and in LBSU history.
Although Buckley said it saddens him to leave the Dirtbags behind, the position with the Pirates is an opportunity for him to get back into the professional ranks he started in 11 years ago when he was a coach in the Montreal Expos organization.
“It was a very difficult decision because of the history and feelings that I have for this university and program,” Buckley said. “It was one of the hardest decisions of my life. At my age, the opportunity to enter into an arena which I started from, professional baseball, made it really hard to pass up.”
Although Weathers is now left with a huge vacancy in his coaching staff just two months before the 2008 season opens, he is well aware of the fact that positions like the one offered to Buckley don’t come along every day. But LBSU will undoubtedly feel the loss of Buckley, who is widely regarded as one of the top collegiate pitching coaches.
“For an organization to take a college pitching coach and give him the responsibility of overseeing their complete minor league pitching staffs, and coaches, has been unheard of and something Troy could just not turn down,” Weathers said. “As tough as it is to lose Troy, especially with the hope that he might someday take over the Dirtbag program, I have to agree that the opportunity the Pittsburgh Pirates are giving him is unprecedented.”
The Pirates organization is completely handing over the pitching reins to Buckley, as he will oversee the development of the organization’s pitchers and pitching coaches, an extremely high-ranking position to be given to a college coach. Buckley will remain based out of Long Beach, developing the arms of minor leaguers to eventually pitch at the major league level.
Weathers named Buckley as pitching coach in 2002, after taking over the program at the helm of Dirtbag founder Dave Snow. Buckley has become an integral part of the Dirtbag program, continually turning out some of the nation’s most promising pitching prospects and inking top high school and junior college recruits yearly.
Prior to his arrival at LBSU, Buckley was an All-American catcher at Santa Clara University. Named one of the 40 best players in West Coast Conference history, Buckley was drafted by the Minnesota Twins in 1989 and spent three years in the organization before beginning a two-year coaching stint with the Expos organization.
Buckley also served as the hitting and third base coach for AAA Ottawa and as the pitching coach of the rookie league Expos of the Gulf Coast League in West Palm Beach, Fla.
It didn’t take long before Buckley – one of the greatest catchers in the Broncos’ history – returned to his alma mater to serve as hitting coach, pitching consultant and recruiting coordinator. He spent three seasons with the Broncos before being taken under the wing of Snow at Long Beach State.
