Sept. 1, 2009
This story originally appeared in the Summer 2009 Edition of the Clarion & Beyond Magazine. For more sports stories from the magazine click here.
NEW YORK - It's Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, N.Y., with 56,000 fans watching live and millions more on national television as the New York Mets take on their heated rival, the New York Yankees.
The Mets' superb, young leadoff man, Jose Reyes, has just reached base in the top of the first off the great Randy Johnson, and all Guy Conti ('65), normally the Mets bullpen coach, can think of to tell Reyes is "don't get picked off."
That's because on this day, Conti finds himself coaching first base for the Mets, a moment he considers one of the highlights of his career, a career that has had one of the most interesting, winding journeys of any coach in professional sports.
"Here we were playing the Yankees in Yankee Stadium on national TV," Conti, who served as the Mets bullpen coach from 2004-2008 and is now the team's Pitching Rehabilitation Coordinator, recalled recently. "Our GM calls me out in the bullpen before the game and says `Guy, you have to come in and coach first base.' Our third base coach had to go away, and our first base coach was moved to third. So they needed me to come in and coach first. There I am in Yankee Stadium, and Randy Johnson is on the mound for the Yankees. Reyes gets a hit leading off the game. I looked at Reyes and said `you better not get picked off because I am scared to death.' I didn't know Randy Johnson's pickoff move or anything."
What Conti probably wasn't thinking that day in the "House that Ruth Built" was about the journey that had taken him to the pinnacle of the sports world. A journey that saw him follow a dream, a dream of making it to baseball's grandest stage.
It was a dream that started when he was growing up in Freeport, Pa., in the 1950s. It was a dream that took him on a path to Clarion State College, a dream that saw a shoulder injury end any hope of him making it to "The Show" as a player. It was a dream that found him on long bus rides throughout Pennsylvania as a coach at Edinboro State College, and a dream that led him to become like a second father to one of the best right-handed pitchers of all time.
Conti was a fine athlete at Freeport High where he was teammates with future Clarion Hall of Fame football coach Gene Sobolewski.
But while Sobolewski was being recruited by Pitt to play football, Conti was on his way to Clarion.
"I had a couple of buddies going to Clarion, and I thought it would be a good chance to play both football and baseball," Conti said. "I wanted to do both, and the Clarion coaches had seen me in high school and knew who I was. So that is basically how I ended up at Clarion."
Conti became the rare freshman at the time to see varsity football action after an injury forced him into the lineup, but it was really baseball where he excelled. He excelled so much for Ernie (Turk) Johnson's Golden Eagles that professional teams started calling after the season.
"There were four or five teams looking at me," Conti said. "I had a pretty good freshman year, and teams started to take notice. Houston offered me a contract I couldn't turn down. I pretty much knew what I wanted to do, so it wasn't a hard decision."
Conti's playing career didn't go as he had hoped. The shoulder injury forced his release at the end of a season, and, eventually, he knew he had to get on with his life's work.
"The passion was still there, but I had a couple of kids and needed to work," Conti said. "So I came home and finished my education."
Conti came back to Clarion to finish his degree, and while not eligible to play any sports - in those days a professionally signed contract in any sport made an athlete ineligible for all sports - he stayed involved with athletics as a student coach with both baseball and football.
"The people at Clarion had a real impact on me," Conti said. "After I got released, I knew I couldn't go back and play. But guys like Turk Johnson ('47), Al Jacks (the football coach) and Frank Lignelli ('50) (wrestling coach/ assistant football coach) kept me involved," Conti said. "They let me coach and help out. They really helped me a lot, and they were there with letters of recommendation when I graduated."
Those letters helped Conti land a job at Albion High School (now Northwestern) near Erie where he taught and coached both baseball and football for a mere $333 a month.
Conti eventually left Albion to become the baseball coach, then assistant football coach and eventually the head basketball coach at Edinboro. He enjoyed great success at Edinboro and is the third all-time winningest men's basketball coach in school history (.588) while being elected into the school's Hall of Fame in 1997.
In the 1980s, Conti was hired by the Pittsburgh Pirates as a part-time coach during the summer, and that led to a full-time job with the Dodgers.
While with the Dodgers, Conti met Pedro Martinez, the younger brother of Dodgers pitcher Ramon Martinez, who would go on to become one of the most dominant pitchers in baseball history.
"Mr. O'Malley (Peter O'Malley, the Dodgers owner) wanted me to go to the Dominican Republic and look at Ramon's brother," Conti recalled. "I went down, and there were 30 young Latin American pitchers there. If they hadn't told me who Pedro was, I wouldn't have known. He was like 5-10, 150 pounds. His brother was 6-4, and here was this short little skinny kid."
It didn't take Conti long though to realize Pedro was something special. "He got up on the mound and threw two pitches," Conti said. "I could hear his fastball coming off his fingers. At the time, there had only been one other guy whose fastball I had heard and that was John Smiley when I was with the Pirates. Since then, there has only been one guy whose fastball I've heard and that is Scott Kazmir."
Martinez and Conti hit it off right away.
"Pedro wanted to learn everything he could about baseball and he wanted to learn English," Conti said. "He found out my wife (Janet) was a librarian at a local school and started to go to school with her. She would give him two or three words every morning and by the afternoon he had learned them. Our relationship was built in the early years."
Martinez credits Conti with helping him develop his changeup, a pitch that made him so dominant.
"I changed his changeup grip," Conti said. "He was throwing Ramon's changeup, which was basically a batting practice fastball. But I don't think I'm the reason he's had so much success. He perfected the pitch, and he is the one who can command it on both sides of the plate."
Conti's relationship was such with Martinez that when both were with the Mets, Martinez bought Conti a Denali SUV to show his appreciation.
"We were in spring training a couple of years ago," Conti said. "Pedro comes in with this gift bag, but I didn't have time to look at it. Eventually, I am out on the field conducting drills, and Pedro's wife asks me how I liked the gift. I told her I hadn't had time to look at it yet. She told me I better look at it, so I went into the clubhouse, opened the bag and there was a watch box in it. I opened the watch box, and a set of keys were inside. I actually gave the keys to one of our other coaches and told him to go out to the parking lot and hit the button. He came back in and told me Pedro had gotten me a SUV Denali. I gave it to my wife for my appreciation for all of her support of my career."
Conti's career with the Dodgers ended after the 1998 season when the team was sold, and he moved onto the Mets organization first as a minor league manager, then a minor league coach, then the minor league field coordinator and finally as the bullpen coach under manager Willie Randolph.
"Willie knew me and saw the work I was doing," Conti said. "He offered me the job of bullpen coach. It was unbelievable. The experiences I had in the major leagues were unbelievable."
Conti recalls a game in Pittsburgh where a lot of his fraternity brothers from Clarion (Alpha Gamma Phi) all bought tickets next to the Mets bullpen at PNC Park.
"Here I am in the bullpen and all these fraternity guys bought tickets right by the bullpen," Conti said. "We talked to those guys all game long. That was really nice."
During the middle of last season, Randolph was fired by the Mets, but Conti had a chance to stay on as the bullpen coach. He asked, however, to be reassigned as the pitching rehab coordinator because of some personal reasons.
"I went to (Mets general manager) Omar (Minaya) and requested a change in position," Conti said. "My mother is down here (in Florida) and really needs help. It was hard to do that with us in New York eight months out of the year."
Conti, though, hasn't ruled out a return to the Major Leagues someday.
"I'm interested in getting back into it," Conti said. "I'm not done with it yet. The whole experience was great."
