Whatever Ray Birmingham is, it can be argued that he’s not just a baseball coach.
Maybe a bit of heavy-handed hyperbole, Birmingham is more a dreamer and a creator. There’s a reason the UNM head baseball coach will be inducted into the New Mexico Junior College Hall of Fame, and it has much to do with the fact that he’s the architect of New Mexico Junior College baseball.
There, he compiled a 765-255-2 record and guided the Thunderbirds to six conferences titles and two NJCAA JUCO World Series appearances. Years of repotting baseball programs at Mayfield High School, College of the Southwest and NMJC has burnished him a reputation for turning fixer-uppers into neatly groomed powerhouses. As for the hall-of-fame honor, he said it’s humbling. Then again …
“All it means is I’m old,” he said.
Old? Maybe. Will he win a Golden Glove? Probably not, but that doesn’t mean Birmingham’s itch to coach hasn’t endured through the golden years.
In coming to New Mexico, he did something he wasn’t supposed to do.
Birmingham was never destined to be the UNM baseball team’s head coach.
Finishing up his final tour of duty at NMJC, Birmingham said, the time had come for him to explore other career options. In his time coaching, the work hadn’t weathered his spirit so much as it didn’t fertilize his financial garden.
After 19 seasons at NMJC, the program was where Birmingham wanted it, and he was ready to hand over the keys to someone else. He had another gig lined up in Texas, as a sales director at a heavy equipment company.
There he’d make “a lot more money” selling bulldozers and backhoes, and a cache of other new and used gargantuan gizmos.
Then, in late May 2007, the phone rang. Tied up at the NMJC national tournament, Birmingham couldn’t answer. It was Athletics Director Paul Krebs. Searching for a replacement for Rich Alday, Krebs called Birmingham to gauge his interest in the opening. Playing phone tag, neither one could seem to get a hold of the other. Finally, the two hooked up and hashed out a meeting date.
“I came and interviewed, finally,” Birmingham said, “and I’m on the way home from the interview, and they say, ‘Why you going home so soon?’ And I said, ‘Because I promised a bunch of 10-year-old kids that I would have a baseball camp for them, and it starts at 2 o’clock this afternoon. Can’t break my promise.’”
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Right then and there, Birmingham said, New Mexico offered him the head coaching vacancy. Passion tugging at him, Birmingham knew this was a steal. Yet he hesitated and asked for 24 hours to mull over the prospect of re-entering coaching. It was the ultimate professional pickle for the Hobbs native: Go to Texas and never worry about his financial well-being, or stay home, take a pay cut and callous his hands rebuilding an unkempt program brick by brick.
The next day, Birmingham phoned.
“Yeah, I’ll take it,” he said.
And take it to places it has never been is what he’s done. Just a pipe dream a few years ago, the Lobos are fresh off an NCAA tournament appearance. That’s not where the catalogue of accomplishments stops: UNM took two of three games from No. 1 Texas in 2010. Under Birmingham, a slew of players has been taken in the MLB draft, most notably Brian Cavazos-Galvez.
As he looks back on the journey that led him to the destination, he fondly remembers all the people along the way. There were also the pit stops — and the starting point at Mayfield High School, where, he said, the Trojans won the state championship his second year there. The 1981 title was the Trojans’ first state banner. From there, he bolted to NMJC to be the public relations director.
“I went to junior college to get out of coaching,” Birmingham said. “I was working too hard at it, and my wife asked me to get out. She said, ‘You’re gone all the time.’”
Little good that did.
He wouldn’t be out of baseball for long. Noticing Birmingham’s charisma, yet sternness, with the basketball players, the NMJC athletics director asked Birmingham in 1983 to become an assistant coach and offered to pay him about $2,500 more. Birmingham obliged. Coaching basketball eventually led him back to the diamond, and he took over at College of the Southwest, Hobbs’ other higher education institution. The baseball team was in dire financial straits.
“There was no grass in the outfield, and one of the dugouts was blown up,” Birmingham said about the school’s ballpark. “I had to lay block, weld bleachers. I did all that stuff. Drove the bus.”
In 1989, the College of the Southwest won 33 games and broke into the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics’ top 25. Two years later, Birmingham walked back across the street to NMJC to lead its start-up program. The Thunderbirds went 22-30 in Birmingham’s first year, but went on to have 17 consecutive winning seasons.
In his fourth year at the University, Birmingham has already laid a blueprint for success. For the last two years, Birmingham has tried to dredge up support to revamp Lobo Field, much like he did in his two previous coaching stops. And all for what? One goal: to get to Omaha, to the College World Series.
Birmingham talks about it like it’s one of his last missions in life.
“I want to get this thing going, make it something that we’re all proud of it, that we can hang our hat on,” he said.
Only then will he be able to hang up the hat. And after that?
“Maybe I’ll be an entrepreneur,” he said.
Some would say he already is one.
