Stanford baseball helped groom John Lynch for 49ers GM role

Long before he became the surprise general manager of the 49ers, John Lynch was a legitimate two-sport athlete, a popular teammate and a bright student at Stanford University. And yet he harbored a dark secret.

Lynch was hopeless when it came to music.

“If I wanted to make fun of him about something,” noted Rob Robbins, a Cardinal infielder from 1988-1991, “I’d say he wasn’t a very good dancer.”

Lynch’s vocal talents might have been worse.

“He’d sing along to the radio on the way to practice,” said Tony Detter, who played the infield at Stanford from 1989-1992. “I would say John certainly knows less than half of the words he sings along with. So while singing, a lot of the time he would just jumble words together in a way that didn’t make sense.”

If you think that’s unfair, consider the “Diamonds and Pearls” episode. Prince’s album of that name came out in October of 1991, when Lynch was starting his junior year on The Farm. It included a song with the same title, and toward the end of that song backup vocalist and keyboardist Rosie Gaines repeats the line, “D to the I to the A to the M … ” You know where she’s going. Lynch apparently did not.

“I don’t know if you remember, but cassettes used to come with lyrics sometimes, like folded up on a sheet in the cassette,” said David Holbrook, Stanford corner infielder from 1989-1992. “So John’s singing the lyrics while looking at the sheet, and he’s repeatedly singing ‘D to the One to the A to the M.’ He didn’t notice it was supposed to be an I.”

We dredge up these stories not to embarrass Lynch, but to provide a weak attempt at balance in a profile of his diamond days at Stanford. Beyond his musical disability, former Pac-10 baseball teammates paint a picture that is almost syrupy in its praise.

“I’m going to try not to sound like a billboard for John Lynch. But John is one of the best people I’ve known in my life,” Detter said while waiting for a taxi in Tokyo, where he was doing business for Asurion, a company that provides services for wireless carriers. “John wouldn’t count me as one of his best friends; we’re not close in that way. But he’s kind and generous and authentic to everyone. I root for him to do well in everything he does, because he’s such a good person.”

As Dave McCarty, a first baseman who was a year ahead of Lynch, put it: “He’s one of those guys who walks into a room and everyone likes him. He just has that personality.”

Lynch made his fame as a hard-hitting NFL safety, for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and later the Denver Broncos. For most of his time at Stanford, though, it wasn’t clear which sport he would follow.

One of the reasons Lynch chose Stanford was the ability to play both football and baseball. He was interested in Notre Dame, for example, but football coach Lou Holtz forbade him from playing baseball there. At Stanford, Dennis Green and baseball coach Mark Marquess both encouraged it. In fact, Marquess (who recently announced that his 41st season in the job will be his last) had also been a two-sport athlete at Stanford.

“Going into my sophomore year, I had a real legitimate shot of being the starting quarterback,” Lynch said. “So Coach Marquess - everyone called him ‘Nine’ - he worked with me. He said, ‘Be at every spring (football) practice, and be with us when you can.’ There are pictures of me with my family in the parking lot, changing from my football uniform into a baseball uniform.”

Lynch was a quarterback at Torrey Pines High School in San Diego, and that’s how he saw himself at Stanford. But he got minimal playing time in Green’s offense behind Steve Smith in 1989 and Jason Palumbis in 1990. He converted to safety as a junior, but didn’t make a huge impact there right away, either.

On the baseball diamond, Lynch played infield and outfield, pitched and took cuts as the designated hitter.

In his three years (1990-92) in stirrups, he hit .244 in 164 at-bats, with six home runs and 29 RBIs, most of it accrued his junior year. Lynch also stole 11 bases. As a pitcher, he went 1-2 in 18 appearances and 19? innings over three seasons, with 24 strikeouts and 19 walks. His ERA was a painful 8.22.

These numbers do not imply greatness. But Lynch admits that splitting time between two sports set him back in both. His old teammates insist he had skills.

“John threw what in baseball we call a heavy ball,” Detter said. “If you played catch with John, it hurt to catch his ball. If you hit against him, when you made contact it hurt. It never felt like you made solid contact. It just felt bad to hit him.”

Lynch’s pitches had good movement, too. Because he had a quarterback’s throwing motion, his fastball tended to sink heavily.

Most important, his velocity creeped into the mid-90s, which was enough to draw the attention of MLB teams. The Twins actually scouted Lynch as a catcher, though he had never played behind the plate.

“I had that short release they like for catchers,” he said.

Instead, the Florida Marlins - a team that had been granted an MLB expansion franchise but was still a year away from taking the field - got him. The first amateur draft pick in Marlins history was 1992 first-rounder Charles Johnson, who would play 12 seasons as a major-league catcher. The second was Lynch, taken as a pitcher at overall selection No. 66 that year - just 11 slots below Todd Helton and eight below Jason Giambi.

Florida’s scouting director at that time was Gary Hughes. The guy liked two-sport athletes. He had previously drafted Stanford legend John Elway and would later select Josh Booty, a football/baseball player at LSU.

Lynch signed with the Marlins and spent parts of two minor-league seasons with the Erie Sailors of the Penn League and the Kane County Cougars of the Midwest League. In fact, he is often credited with throwing the first pitch in the history of the organization as he took the mound for the Sailors in Erie, Pennsylvania, against the Jamestown Expos on June 15, 1992.

Could Lynch have been a major-league hurler? We’ll never know, thanks largely to Bill Walsh.

The great 49ers coach returned to Stanford in 1992, and shortly after arriving he called Lynch into his office for a conversation. Lynch estimates he had played about 40 percent of the snaps at safety as a junior; his future seemed to be in baseball. Walsh thought otherwise.

“Bill said, ‘I watched the film, and you’re our best defensive player. If you consider coming back, you’ll end up a Pro Bowl safety,’” Lynch recalled. “He showed me tape, me making plays and then (NFL superstar) Ronnie Lott making plays. I wouldn’t be here, I promise you, without Bill Walsh. Otherwise, I’m signing with the Marlins and playing baseball. And through that process, I learned football was really my passion.”

Lynch had a breakout season in the secondary as a Stanford senior and was recognized as a first-team All-Pac-10 pick and a second-team All-American. In April of 1993, the Buccaneers drafted him in the third round. He would become one of the best defenders of his era, driven by an elevated work ethic.

Holbrook, now a mortgage broker living in Orlando, remembers that discipline from their Stanford baseball days. He and Lynch lived in connected rooms in the Delta Tau Delta fraternity, the population of which Detter described as 50 percent football players, 30 percent baseball players and 20 percent wrestlers.

Lynch and Holbrook were thrown together because both were early risers. Holbrook didn’t know quite what he getting into, though.

“I still give him a hard time about his stretching,” he said. “Every morning when he got up he’d go through a 30- to 40-minute stretching routine. He was way ahead of the curve, like you hear now about core workouts. He was doing that when we were all bench pressing and squatting.”

The only thing Holbrook couldn’t understand is why Lynch insisted on waking him up by doing his stretches in the former’s room rather than his own.

Most of all, Lynch’s former baseball teammates talk about his contagious enthusiasm.

They describe him as down-to-earth, loyal and quietly charismatic. Detter said the football players living at Delta Tau Delta seemed to hold Lynch in similar esteem, even when he was a backup quarterback.

“From the time John got to campus, the offensive linemen would follow John around to make sure no one messed with him,” Detter said. “He was the guy everyone wanted to play for.”

Nate Olmstead, who was a year behind Lynch and played a little bit of everything for the Cardinal, called Lynch a “unifier” in the clubhouse and dugout.

“As an upperclassman, he was really quick to come over and introduce himself and say welcome to the team,” Olmstead said. “He was kind of a big shot because he was a two-sport guy. And quarterback is a high-profile position. He was just really warm and welcoming when I joined the team, this nervous kid out of high school.”

Many of Lynch’s old baseball pals still live in the Bay Area, and they are thrilled that he has returned in a most unexpected role. Lynch had never worked in personnel full-time, and had spent most of the previous decade as a TV analyst for Fox. And yet the alumni of early-’90s Stanford baseball have no doubt that Lynch can make the GM job his own.

“Putting my corporate hat on and looking at it that way, I’d say he’s a good listener,” said Olmstead, who is a Palo Alto-based CFO for Hewlett-Packard. “He’s a very balanced guy, kind of the same guy every day. He certainly could play with a lot of emotion, but he’s not a guy who was unpredictable.

And the way his career developed in the NFL, coming in as a third-round pick and having played himself into a legitimate Hall of Fame career - those kinds of people have great perseverance.”

Holbrook acknowledges that Lynch is at a disadvantage filling the general manager’s office with little prior experience. He also points out that his friend has adapted before. Lynch came to Stanford as a quarterback and discovered himself as a safety. He joined the baseball team as a third baseman, shifted to the outfield and became a pitcher in hopes of getting more playing time.

“I would argue that even the announcing gig was against his nature,” Holbrook said. “Being in front of the camera couldn’t have been easy for him. Now, being knowledgeable about football was a huge strength. But trying to get him to talk throughout a game is not something that came naturally.”

As Holbrook notes, Lynch did not initially get rave reviews as a broadcaster. Over time, he and play-by-play man Kevin Burkhardt and sideline reporter Pam Oliver became Fox’s No. 2 team, after Troy Aikman, Joe Buck and Erin Andrews.

If Lynch can make similar strides in the role of general manager, it will do more than solidify his reputation as an achiever. It will lift the spirits of an entire fan base.

“Growing up a 49ers fan in the East Bay, it’s pretty exciting,” said Robbins, who was raised in Moraga but now works outside of Chicago. “I’m looking forward to him getting this team back to where it was in the 1980s.”

You can reach staff writer Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com. Follow him on Twitter: @Skinny_Post.