July 2024
It’s his senior season at the University of Oregon in 1967, and Ted Amato (Cleveland, 1963) has spent the first two innings of a game against No. 2-ranked USC in study mode as the top of the Ducks’ order faced the Trojans’ hard-throwing ace, who would soon be drafted and sent straight to the major leagues.
Amato had a theory that any player with enough skills to make a baseball team could at any time take the field and have a career day. “Even role players could go out and have a special day,” was his thinking. And Amato saw himself as the quintessential role player.
He hadn’t been blessed with the size and strength of his teammates and other players in general. Through high school and college, he topped out at 5’-4” and 130 pounds. But that hadn’t stopped him from earning All-PIL honors at second base his junior and senior years at Cleveland or hitting .379, good enough for third in the league, his final season. Nor did it keep him from winning two letters in basketball, playing on a PIL-championship team and earning All-PIL honorable mention as a junior.
“From Little League on, I always had the distinction of being the smallest guy on the team,” Amato says. “I knew I had to be good at some of the finer points of the game that would keep me on the field and help our team. Fortunately, I always had coaches who played a big role in helping me be able to play as I hoped I could play.”
Amato had done well enough to become the Ducks’ starting second baseman, and in this first game of a doubleheader against the Trojans was hitting eighth in the lineup. As he prepared himself mentally to face the Trojans’ ace for the first time, he thought back to what his coach at Cleveland, Jack Dunn, had taught him a few years earlier.
“This guy threw so hard that I knew I was going to be swinging late, so I decided, why fight it,” Amato remembers. “I was going to approach it the way Coach Dunn taught me to execute the hit-and-run and try to drive the ball to right field.”
Lesson well learned. In his first at bat, Amato doubled to right-center field. Next time up, he tripled, again to right-center. Amato singled up the middle in his third at bat, the last time he got to swing that game. By the time Amato came up a fourth time, USC’s legendary coach Rod Dedeaux had seen enough of him.
“That was the first time I had ever been walked intentionally,” Amato says.
It wasn’t the last. After Amato got another hit in the second game, Dedeaux gave him another free pass but that didn’t stop the Ducks from sweeping the mighty Trojans. At the end of the year, the team finished surprisingly close to the top of the Pacific 8 Conference, and Amato wound up hitting .306, good for ninth in the league.
But for Amato, that one career game embodied so much of what he loved about sports – succeeding against the odds with sheer determination and fueled by coaches building your knowledge, skills and self-confidence along the way. That point was driven home in a Eugene Register-Guard article recounting the Ducks’ wins against USC in which the reporter referred to Amato and Oregon’s shortstop as “one of the best double-play combinations in the conference.”
“I immediately thought of what I had learned in my very first meeting with Coach Dunn,” Amato says.
More on that soon but, first, Amato’s love affair with sports started on the playgrounds and backyards of his childhood neighborhood near Reed College. “There were four of us from the neighborhood who were always outside playing,” he remembers. “Whatever the season, we were out there playing.”
At least they were out there until the networks started televising sports in the mid-50s. Then Amato would watch as much major league baseball (and his idol, the late, great Willie Mays), NBA basketball and NFL football as he could. After the games ended, it was back outside with the guys or, if they weren’t around, he’d practice alone, fielding balls ricocheted off the side of the Amato’s brick home or shooting baskets in the driveway.
Amato’s athletic pursuits were always supported by his parents, Ralph and Mary, both avid golfers, and his older sister, Pat.
“It all got started with me playing catch with Dad,” he says. “My sister, who was six years older than me, probably would have been a pretty good softball player had there been any opportunity for her to play. We used to coerce her into helping us practice baseball because she could hit such good fly balls.”
Amato attended Woodstock Elementary School and played both Little League and basketball. All those hours shooting hoops in the driveway would pay off when The Oregon Journal newspaper sponsored a citywide free throw contest for eighth graders. Amato won it, earning a spot a few weeks later in the statewide competition held at Oregon State. He won that, too, which got him a trip to watch the Beavers play at Stanford and California.
Winning that competition was among the first of several confidence boosters Amato would enjoy over the course of his sports life. Another came shortly after it as he prepared to leave Woodstock for Cleveland.
“Before I left, I had a coach sign my yearbook and he wrote, ‘Woodstock’s loss is Cleveland’s gain’,” Amato remembers. “That really helped my confidence as I headed to high school and the PIL.”
That fall, he was still settling in at Cleveland when he got another important contribution to his mental and physical development as a player.
“I got a note telling me Mr. Dunn wanted to see me in his classroom after school,” Amato says. “When I walked into his room, he flipped me a baseball and said, ‘OK, show me how you take the double play.’ I’d never met him before, but he spent the next 30 minutes showing me how to turn a double play. I walked away knowing that, for the next four years, I was going to have the good fortune of being under his tutelage. I told myself, You have to listen to what he is saying, concentrate on understanding it and obviously work hard to be able to perform it.”
Amato says he had always been a “decent hitter” who seldom struck out, but he was prone to hitting ground balls instead of line drives. But by following his coach’s advice to concentrate on driving the ball up the middle, things started coming around for him.
“It took a while but, by the time I was a senior, things really fell into place,” Amato says. “He had converted me into a pretty good line-drive hitter, which was important then and obviously would be later in college.”
Amato began at UO as a walk-on, playing for longtime coach, Jefferson High graduate and PIL Hall of Fame member, Don Kirsch. After he performed well during a two-week fall practice his freshman year, Amato would get yet another healthy shot to the self-esteem administered by yet another coach.
“Coach Kirsch wasn’t a very big person either,” Amato recalls. “During fall practice, I noticed there were three or four returning varsity players who were on the small side, so I thought at least the coach was giving little guys a chance. Then after fall practice, there was a dinner that the players’ dads were invited to. When I introduced Coach Kirsch to my dad he said simply, ‘Ted can help us.’ The coach was a man of few words, so when he said something, it had impact.”
Ted did help the Ducks. After playing as a freshman, redshirting his sophomore year and sharing second-base duties early in his junior year, Amato finished that season as the Ducks’ full-time starter. That gave him another confidence boost. Enough of one, in fact, that after the season he decided to ask Kirsch if there was any scholarship money to be had.
“I didn’t figure there was because baseball didn’t get a lot of money and I was playing alongside guys who already were on full or partial rides,” Amato says. “But I asked the coach and, assuming I already knew the answer, was kind of half out of my chair heading toward the door when he said, ‘How would tuition and books be?’ I about went through the roof. Just the idea that he once again had confidence in my ability to help the team and was willing to do that was another big motivator for me.”
It was one that would pay dividends Amato’s senior season, when everything would come together for him and when a legendary USC coach twice decided it was better to give the undersized giant killer a free pass rather than risk letting him swing a bat.
When he graduated and headed off to his future, Amato again relied on lessons he’d learned from coaches to help shape it. He started working in commercial real estate sales before finding his way into the construction business. In the 80s, Amato and a partner identified a new niche market and started what was one of Portland’s first row house development companies. He built his last home in 2008.
“A lot of the things I learned on the field served me well in business. Things like being able to compete and persisting through tough times,” he says.
Married since 1970, Amato and his wife, Gloria, raised a daughter, Ashley, and son, Gavin, and there was never a doubt that, if his kids were going to play sports, he was going to be involved.
“I definitely wanted to pass on to them and other kids the lessons I had learned from my coaches,” he says.
Amato wound up coaching baseball and softball for 15 years, with Gloria usually alongside keeping score. He calls those years spent with his family “as special as anything I’ve ever been part of.”
While Amato says he was humbled and honored to be inducted into the PIL Hall of Fame in 2012, he also admits he wasn’t sure he deserved to be there alongside other higher-profile inductees he didn’t consider himself “in the same league with.”
“It was an honor just to have been on the same field playing with or against some of these guys,” he adds. “I was grateful just for that.”
But, of all the wisdom he had gained from sports and the “outstanding coaches and truly great men” he’d played for, Amato was forgetting the valuable lesson he had taught himself. The one about any team’s success being dependent not just on its stars but also its role players.
If he remembers that, he’ll know the Hall of Fame is exactly where he belongs.
Do you know Ted Amato? If you’d like to connect with him, he can be reached at [email protected]
Photo Note: Click on a photo to see its caption.
~ Profile written by Dick Baltus (Wilson, 1973)
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