Ron Polk takes pride in the fact that when you mention his name and college baseball, you’re probably talking about one of two things – the “Baseball Playbook” or the NCAA “attack dog.”
“I’m not only doing the book publishing,” Polk told the Friends of the Starkville Public Library on Thursday during its monthly Books and Authors event. “I’m coaching baseball, doing camps and clinics and traveling all over the country. I’m fighting the NCAA on behalf of college baseball. Everybody supported me, but nobody could speak up like I did.”
While Polk has become known as the “Father of Southeastern Conference Baseball,” with 60 years of college baseball coaching experience under his belt, he did not get there because he was already a professional ball player, or because the position was handed to him, Polk said.
Polk started out coaching as an assistant coach at the University of Arizona at 22 years old, the first of nine schools he worked for throughout his career. From the beginning, he said, he approached the role with a drive to be the best.
“That’s when I started thinking, maybe this is what I’m going to do,” Polk said. “But I said to myself all the time, ‘If I’m going to do this, if that’s what God has led me to do, I want to be the coach, not a coach.’”
Polk then worked as an assistant coach at two other colleges before he landed his first job as a head coach at Georgia Southern University, he said. He remembers hesitating at first, when he saw the campus and the ballfield at the time. He also remembers the 19-39 record the team had the season before he arrived, which made coming to the university in July a daunting task.
“My first head job, and I’m going to be losing,” Polk said with a laugh. “But we won. And the second year, we took them to the College World Series.”
The playbook
During his time at Georgia Southern, Polk said, he also started writing what would become the “Baseball Playbook,” a 520-page manual for coaches in the sport that covers all the things he wished he knew when he started out in-depth.
“(Student athletes) have textbooks,” Polk said. “And I said, ‘What I’m going to do with my mimeograph machine, I’m going to have not only a practice schedule, but I’m going to tell the outfielders what I wanted, the infielders what I wanted, the pitchers, catchers. And I’m going to give them homework assignments.’”
Polk started collecting those assignment packets into 100-page handmade textbooks for his players, until other coaches at clinics started showing interest in having copies for themselves. After that, he decided to expand the book until he had a version printed professionally.
Polk started selling copies of the book while he was on the road, until eventually, an instructor of a baseball coaching class at the University of Iowa requested a copy of his book. After that, it was off to the races, with more than 450 colleges across the country using the “Baseball Playbook” as a textbook at one time. Over the years, Polk has sold more than 150,000 books, all self-published.
Polk still sells the “Baseball Playbook” through a variety of outlets today, including the Book Mart, Barnes and Noble and Amazon. But he said it didn’t maintain the same popularity after coaching classes ended in universities across the country.
Road warrior and attack dog
While the book went through different iterations and editions, Polk still had plenty to do on the field. He came to MSU in 1975 on an initial head coach salary of $15,000, he said, when the entire athletic department was held in Humphrey Coliseum.
Polk coached at MSU continuously for the next 21 years, before working for Georgia between 2000-2001 and then going back to MSU from 2002-2008, according to a biography on the Mississippi State athletics website.
At that point, he planned to retire, but instead he became a volunteer assistant coach for the University of Alabama-Birmingham. He did that until 2020, when he returned to MSU as the special assistant to the athletic director.
Throughout his career, coaching took Polk on the road often for games, clinics, camps, speaking engagements and more. But it also took him around the world, as he has been to Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Japan, Italy and Sicily.
Polk also served on the coaching staff for two Olympic baseball teams.
“Can you imagine how many hotels I’ve been in in my life?” Polk joked.
Along the way, Polk got to meet famous novelists John Grisham and Stephen King, both of whom turned out to be baseball fans.
“(King is) a baseball fan, too,” Polk said. “We were playing at a regional in Orono, Maine, many years ago, and he came out for the regional and had a lobster feast with all four teams.”
Still, it wasn’t all fun. Polk also became known for standing up for his players in a variety of ways, including against umpires in games.
“I had to go out and defend my players,” Polk said. “Because I had a rule, all my life, even with USA Baseball. No player on my team would ever say one word to an umpire during the course of the game. Never had a kid thrown out.”
Polk has never lost his affection for his players or the sport. Every year, the coaching legend writes more than 2,000 handwritten birthday, anniversary and Christmas cards for all of his former players.
One of his former players, Saunders Ramsey, was in attendance Thursday and said he still receives his cards every year.
“I haven’t been able to read one in about 10 years,” Ramsey joked.
Polk has also left his house and everything in it to the Mississippi State Foundation’s Bulldog Club in his will, he said, in the hopes that it can either be useful to the organization or they can sell the house and keep the baseball memorabilia inside in a museum near Dudy Noble Field.
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Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 39 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
