Corradi's 500th win is his own Buccaneer Day at Mass Maritime
April 15, 2009
By Paul Gately, Bourne Courier
CAPE COD - Everybody knew it would come this season; that Massachusetts Maritime Academy baseball head coach Bob Corradi would win his 500th game. Nobody, however, knew when. So the watch commenced.
Corradi notched his pantheon victory against Framingham State last Friday. It came 37 years after he arrived on the canal-side campus and built a baseball program against all odds.
Over the years, he developed scrappy teams. He had seasons of good pitching and talent. He also went through lean times. Every team, however, learned from him and went out into the world with unique views about life and accomplishment.
Corradi has a secure sense of time and place. He understands history. He is as much a coach with awkward, inept and uncomfortable young baseball players as he has been with those listed on MMA's sports Hall of Fame.
The Bucs play the game when spring lags, and warm weather usually arrives when the schedule is done. Hendy Field is an obscure if not unattractive place to play college baseball. Even when the cold lasts well into April. But there is a snap to the season when Corradi's charges take the field.
Many of his MMA wins came there. His first was at Keith Field, down the street in Sagamore village where the coach grew up.
Corradi bleeds Mass Maritime. He loves football and coaches it. But he gets into deep discussion about baseball. It is thoughtful talk. It seems what passes for springtime here can't come fast enough for him.
When the coach logged his 300th victory, he was afforded a cake with 300 candles at the old Dolphin Inn. The 400th win came a decade later. Now the 500th. If it is cake this time, the pastry would be the size of the serving table.
Corradi can be frantic and antic. He is funny and outrageous. Umpires realize he can be mercurial. Away from the spotlight, however, he is sometimes pensive and seemingly distracted. Often the butt of practical jokes inside Alumni Gym, he is the first to laugh when the fun is at his expense.
On the baseball field, however, there are young men to guide, shape and encourage. The Bucs under his tutelage can win games without big hits by simply getting somebody on first base. Then the fun starts. It is usually a portrait of hustle. But sometimes it is amazing what heart can also accomplish when Mass. Maritime dances its way through the innings.
If the Bucs win, there is celebration. If they lose, they assess what they learned. They don't dwell on yesterday's box scores. Along the way, there is association blending with instruction and ultimately with warmth and friendship.
In retrospect, it looks seamless through the decades. There has been Corradi's emphasis on people, representing the academy and the game as he wants it played; not so much the results.
The greater truth is that Bob Corradi's brand of baseball is infectious and diabolical; electric; that it serves a function, that it is the long unfinished story of himself. Much of his adult life is found in sport-pages agate. It is part of a coaching story not yet ended.
Corradi will be and always has been the last to leave the party that is Mass. Maritime baseball; or "Buc Ball" as it is known at Hendy Field and out into the deeper recesses of Division III college baseball where he walks now with others in the 500-victory club.