At the Top of Today’s News: Brandenburg Gets Time Stolz Didn’t

N ews Item: Jim Brandenburg gets a one-year extension that will carry him through 1992-93 as San Diego State’s basketball coach.

Fine. Nothing wrong with continuity in a program.

But an observation by SDSU Athletic Director Fred Miller falls comfortably under the heading of amusing little twists of incongruity.

” . . . it takes time to restructure a basketball program,” he said. “But we’re long-haul people.”

That’s right. That’s what Denny Stolz was telling me.

Stolz was fired as football coach after three years in which his teams won 45.7% of their games and made SDSU’s only post-season bowl appearance as a Division I team.

Brandenburg’s third year could end as early as tonight, when SDSU’s basketball team faces Air Force in the “excuse me” showdown of eighth place vs. ninth place that annually opens the Western Athletic Conference tournament.

Going into tonight’s game, SDSU basketball teams have won 42% of their games in the Brandenburg era.

Presumably, basketball programs are tougher to build and require more of a “long-haul” approach.

Right, Denny?

N ews Item: The Padres cancel their scheduled 10-game spring training trip to the Phoenix area.

This is getting to be an on-going scenario, this piecemeal process of canceling baseball games. A game goes here, a series goes there, and now an entire trip is wiped away.

I fear that it will be announced in early July that the Padres were canceling their 11-game trip to Pittsburgh, Chicago and St. Louis.

Actually, trips in July shouldn’t be concerning Padre fans as much as home games in April.

Should the start of this season be delayed, the Padres will be very big losers. Though they are scheduled to open the season with a four-game series in Los Angeles, 18 of the next 23 games would be in San Diego.

No, no, no way any fan in his or her right mind should be concerned about how much money will be lost in gate receipts and players’ salaries. Far from it. A schedule this attractive simply gives the local heroes an excellent opportunity to get off to a fast start, for a change.

N ews Item: Sockers trade Zoran Karic to Cleveland for Paul Wright.

This one is a plus all the way around.

Karic is an experienced but rather one-dimensional player, meaning the concept of defense eludes him. In basketball parlance, he would be known as a gunner.

The 20-year-old Wright, meanwhile, is a bright prospect who happens to be from Grossmont High School. The Sockers were stunned, in fact, when Cleveland took him in the expansion draft. They must have hoped that the Crunch would mistake him for a water boy or autograph hunter and pass him up.

Alas, the Cleveland exile was reasonably brief, and Mr. Wright is back with a chance to be Mr. Right. He will play both offense and defense, and he has the speed to neutralize the mistakes a kid his age is bound to make.

Another plus, from management’s point of view, is that Wright makes $30,000, and Karic makes $50,000.

In the MISL, a difference of $20,000 is a very big deal. In major league baseball, there will come a day when $20,000 will buy a pair of season tickets.

Believe me.

N ews Item: Roberto Alomar signs a one-year contract with the Padres for $390,000.

This was interesting.

Alomar, you see, is a two-year man. This whole labor skirmish is over two-year men. The players want two-year men eligible for arbitration and the owners want to keep arbitration eligibility at the three-year level.

So here is a youngster of 22 who has had two nice years in the major leagues, and he will play the third for a salary of $390,000. If he has a nice third year, he might well play his fourth year, at the age of 23, for more than $1 million.

After all, Benito Santiago hit . 236 in his third year and won an arbitration settlement for $1.25 million.

And so this is the essence of why places such as Yuma and Vero Beach are ghost towns and the opening of the major league baseball season is being threatened. What we’re talking about is whether some kids get their first million-dollar contracts at the age of 22 rather than 23, or 23 rather than 24.

In truth, if Alomar had been able to go to arbitration this year as a two-year man, he might well have been awarded close to a million dollars. If guys are going to be making that much that quickly, why don’t the players just go ahead and ask for a million dollars as a minimum salary?

(See above on future cost of season tickets.)