MOUNT VERNON – When Mandy Craze steps onto the grounds of the Mount Vernon Nazarene baseball field on Tuesday for the Tom Craze All-Star Classic and Home Run Derby, it’ll be the first time she’s attended a baseball game since her husband passed away.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Tom had just taken the job at Logan and Mandy was supposed to be right there with him, but he passed away suddenly a couple of days before Christmas in 2019.
“It’s just really hard to go to a baseball game,” Mandy said last week. “I went to every game. Every game he coached, I went. I was there with my chair cheering on. I think it’s just hard not seeing him. I know he would still be coaching – Logan or somewhere. I think it’s just hard not seeing him on third base coaching.”
A poster that hangs in Mandy’s house lists Tom’s accolades: two-time Central District champion in Division III, Coach of the Year twice by each the Ohio Baseball Coaches Association, the Central District Baseball Coaches Association as well as the Mount Vernon News.
But it’s the last line that sums him perfectly, “Coach to some, friend to all.”
“Coach Craze wasn’t just a coach, he was there any time I needed him,” said Austin Hathaway, who played for Craze and the Freddies until he graduated in 2015. “He always made you feel like he was a really good friend to you. He’s always that guy in your corner that (had) that positive outlook. He always saw the positive in things.”
Hathaway, whose cousin, Ryan, is the current baseball coach at Fredericktown, played at the University of Charleston after high school.
"Family" might be a more appropriate word for a group of Craze’s former players.
Matt Smith played under Coach Craze until he graduated in 2013.
“We knew each just as family friends,” Smith said. “Growing up with Ryan (Logan), Little Kirk, sorry, Kirk Manns – not Little Kirk anymore – Austin, Nash (Cunningham) and all of us. (The Craze’s) were kind of like our second set of parents. We had a really strong relationship.
Smith played baseball at Western Carolina after Fredericktown.
Manns played football, basketball and baseball at Fredericktown until he graduated in 2016.
“Coach Craze and Mandy were like second parents to me growing up,” he said. “Just the relationships he had with each and every one of us was something that – as a player – was really, really special.
“He just had great energy that he brought to games, practices scrimmages; it didn’t matter what it was, he was full go, all the time. He really loved it and it rubbed off on us.”
Manns is now a physical education teacher at Seymour High School in Indiana. He’s also an assistant under his father and former Fredericktown athletic director Kirk Sr., who also serves as the AD at Seymour.
“I just graduated last summer from Indiana University,” the younger Manns said. “Now that I’m out of school and working, showing up every day and working with an attitude of working as hard as I can and doing what I need to do to influence the people around is something that really stuck with me being around (Coach Craze) all those years.”
Logan was destined for basketball and only played baseball his senior year in 2013. He also sees Tom as a familial figure as much as a coach.
“We’ve done everything together,” Logan said. “We’ve gone on vacations and he’s coached me. He’s pretty much a second father figure in regards to growing up. He came and watched me play basketball in college (at Stonehill).”
Logan played in Spain last year and is still figuring out where he’ll go next.
Mitch Sellers, a 2012 graduate, just finished his first year as the baseball coach at Crestline. He finds himself using some of Craze’s mantras during practices and games.
“I’ll catch myself using his mannerisms and all the stuff he used to tell us,” Sellars said. “He’s made quite the impact. He used to yell at us, ‘Hey!’ and point high in the air. So, I’ll do that sometimes. It was just him being a goofy dude. He’s just one of those guys.”
Craze projected an all-business attitude on the diamond. But his players knew better. They knew how to get a rise out of him when the moment called for it.
“When we got a double, we would kind of celebrate and he hated it,” Logan said. “I got a double (in the second game of a doubleheader against Highland) and started doing some crazy gesture and I hear him yell, ‘Stop! Stop!’ and was just going off on me at second base. Luckily (the next) guy hit a double, so I got to run right by him and didn’t have to stop at third so he could yell at me more. I forget what I did – maybe the bow-and-arrow. You gotta have fun sometimes – and we had just got killed the game before.”
“It didn’t help that we were a bunch of knuckleheads and knew how properly get a rise out of him,” Sellers said.
“We were always having fun, but we knew how to turn it on and compete at a high level as well, and he expected that from us,” Smith said.
He had an impact on the opposition as well. Former Mount Gilead coach Greg Gompf, whose funeral home is sponsoring the game, didn’t have the best first impression of Craze.
“My first season at Mount Gilead, Fredericktown was on our schedule as a non-league game,” Gompf said. “They run-ruled us and it wasn’t close. He just went out there and his kids played hard and he didn’t talk to me. I didn’t have a good taste in my mouth.”
Then, Gompf got a text message the next day.
“(He) just let me know that he looked forward to what I was going to be able to do with the program and knew that I would put in hard work and effort to get it back to where it used to be,” Gompf said.
From there, the two became friends. Gompf was young and inexperienced, and Craze was there for advice.
The Home Run Derby starts at 3 p.m. and the game will begin at 5 p.m.
“(The players) just meant so much to Tommy,” Mandy said. “It’s why he truly loved the game of baseball.”
