Getting Spainards Ready for Games Is No Easy Task : Baseball: USD assistant Jake Molina is manager of Spain’s amateur team.

SAN DIEGO —  Jake Molina’s baseball team won only three games during its recent 18-game road trip, which took it 6,000 miles away from home and matched it against U.S. college teams.

Despite a record that would prompt wholesale lineup changes on most teams, Molina instead found a silver lining.

“We only got blown out twice,” Molina said. “We played well, considering.”

This was not another U.S. college team on a barnstorming tour. Molina, an assistant coach at University of San Diego, is manager of the team sponsored by the Real Federacion Espanola de Beisbol y Sofbol.

This was Spain’s national amateur team.

Overall, his team played competitive baseball, he said. This was not a small feat for a group of Spanish kids who were reared on soccer, basketball and bull fighting in a country now being force-fed the American game so it can field a team for the 1992 Olympic Games, which will be in Barcelona.

Molina, a native San Diegan, has managed Spain’s national amateur baseball team for the past two years.

Because his Spanish team spends most of its time in Europe, Molina might be the only baseball manager ever to be separated by an ocean from his players. His numerous inter-continental flights require him to spend almost as much time in airports as he does in the dugout.

Although Molina, 43, said he is not disappointed by the Spanish team’s progress since he became manager, leading an inexperienced club can be a trying experience for a man who has largely known success as a player and coach.

Molina was a standout third baseman in the mid-1960s at Clairemont High School and played at San Diego City College before he was drafted by the Chicago Cubs and Baltimore Orioles. At the same time, he was being recruited by Arizona State, the University of Arizona, UC Santa Barbara and UCLA.

“I had an opportunity to sign (for pro ball). I wanted to sign and I didn’t. My parents wanted me to go to college, so I ended up at UCLA, where I had two good years,” Molina said.

In 1969, he was a member of the only UCLA team to play in the College World Series. Later in the year, Molina played in the Alaskan League for the Anchorage Glacier Pilots, who won the 1969 National Baseball Congress tournament.

While at UCLA, Molina roomed with Chris Chambliss, who later played for the New York Yankees and Atlanta Braves. Molina eventually earned a master’s degree in physical education from UCLA.

Between 1981 and 1983, Molina coached the Padre Class A farm teams in Walla Walla and Spokane, Wash., where he helped develop pitcher Mitch Williams, among others.

Molina became manager of the Spanish team through a fluke. In 1988, during a game in Pomona against Cal Poly, he was shown a flyer sent by Spanish officials to various U.S. colleges, soliciting baseball instructors for Spanish youths.

“Since I speak Spanish, I said why not,” he said. “They flew me to Barcelona to work with young kids and, in the summer of 1988, they asked me to work with their national team. I worked with them and went with the team to a tournament in Italy as a pitching coach.”

The club’s Italian manager quit after the tournament and decided to stay in Italy. Molina returned to the United States. One year later, the Spanish team was scheduled to play in an international tournament in Wichita, Kan., and the Spanish federation “called and asked if I would manage the team.”

But the arrangement with the Spanish team is not without problems. Molina spends most of his time in San Diego, 6,000 miles from the club he is molding for Olympic competition. Baseball will become a medal sport for the first time in the upcoming Olympic Games.

While Molina works at his jobs as assistant coach at USD and physical education instructor at San Diego City College, he relies on four coaches--one American and three Spaniards--to work with the team in Barcelona. He spends much of the summer, and any other free time he gets, working with the players in Barcelona or accompanying the team to tournaments in Europe, Asia and the United States.

The Spanish team’s recent tour against Southern California collegiate teams, including San Diego State, UCLA and UC Irvine, did not discourage Molina. He saw the games as an opportunity for the fledgling Spanish team to gain some valuable experience.

“It was the first time that they had to play every day,” Molina said. “Our top players got better. You could see their concentration and confidence improve with every game.”

Although the Spaniards were at the receiving end of two blowouts, they were also able to earn some respect. Pitcher Manuel Jimenez pitched a five-hitter against SDSU before losing in 10 innings.

Later this summer, the federation that sponsors Spain’s Olympic team will invite the country’s top 80 players to a tryout camp. Molina and Spanish officials will use the tryouts to pick 22 players for the national team.

“It’s not hard to round up the top 80 players in Spain, and it will probably be easier to pick the top 20 or 22 players from that bunch,” Molina said. “Baseball’s popularity is growing in Spain, but it’s not nearly as popular as basketball or soccer. It’s a funny feeling to be in a country where baseball is so little-known and not the top sport.”

Italy and Holland are the baseball powerhouses in Europe. But Spain, with only 26 semi-professional teams, managed to finish third in the 1987 European championship games. Realistically, Molina said, the country’s program has a long way to go before it can compete with Olympic teams from the United States, Cuba and Japan.

“I’d say that our club is on the same level as a collegiate team and, at times, on the same level as a good high school varsity team,” he said. “We know how to do the fundamentals. Whether we execute them is another thing.”

The main problem with the Spanish players is that they often are unable to react instinctively on some plays, Molina said, such as throwing to the right base or hitting the cutoff man, he added.

“Balls hit in the gap bring out our inexperience. I’ve seen our kids handle the ball three or four times on one play without getting anybody out. These are the things we’re trying to correct . . . I coach them like I would an American team. You can see that when we play the European teams. But it’s a long, slow process,” Molina said.

Spaniards are not setting their hopes high for the 1992 Olympics. Federation official Ricardo Coria was quoted as saying that his group would consider Molina’s efforts a success if the Spanish team advances to the second round of play.

Getting players to put the bat on the ball--not an easy task even for many U.S. major leaguers--remains a big problem, he said.

“Batting is the most difficult for us,” Coria said. “We have nothing in our sports that is similar to hitting.”