Maybe one of the things that made Duane Filchner the best hitter in Highlander baseball history was his terrible memory.
If you don't remember bad at-bats, it's easy to step back up and hit with confidence.
I remembered to catch up with the "Highlander Hitman" recently after his induction into the Big South Conference Athletic Hall of Fame in February. He became the 12th Radford University athlete/coach/administrator so honored in the league RU helped form in 1984.
Filchner, from his native Pennsylvania home, is still a man who speaks softly, but boy, did he carry a big stick.
"I just don't remember being that good, not as good as people are saying," he said. "I mean I remember loving playing baseball at Radford and having a great time. I knew I was pretty good, but I don't remember being that good."
I, on the other hand, remember a lot about Radford and RU baseball, so let me revise my statement up front: Duane Filchner didn't have to forget about bad at-bats. I don't remember him having very many of them.
"What you have to understand was Duane was the lead guy in our 'army'," said Lew Kent who coached him four years at Radford, including the last as head coach. "He got all the attention from other teams who just didn't want to let Duane Filchner beat them, and he still did. He was such a clutch hitter."
The numbers, one of the many beauties of baseball, bear out this point. RU Hall of Famer Filchner still holds school records for career batting average (.389) and slugging percentage (.639). He also has marks for runs in a season (60) and a career (189), as well as career RBI (181), despite teams playing more games now. He is tied for most home runs in a game (3) and he's on that unicorn list of four-time all-conference players, including winning the 1994 Big South Conference Player of the Year.
Which all begs the question, where in the world did he learn to whack the ball like that?
"When I was growing up, my dad (also Duane) was my baseball coach and he was a dad-baseball coach," said the younger Duane. "He put in the time with me. I don't remember trying to emulate anyone. I just tried to hit it, swing and hopefully don't miss the ball."
Filchner didn't miss the ball – he only struck out 62 times or once every 11-plus at-bats at RU. "If I swung, most times I made contact. I didn't swing and miss too much, but that wasn't always good. If I got fooled, and made contact, I'd hit a weak groundball. More than anything I had confidence."
He had a bucketful of confidence. Dad's pitching ("buckets and buckets and buckets of balls") and mom's (Susan) shagging fly balls built that trait and by the time he got to Radford, Filchner really began to flourish, on and off the field. "I just loved it," he said.
He had attended a baseball camp at Old Dominion and in the over-familiar relationships of college baseball programs, his name landed on a summer camp mailing list. The next summer the dates worked best for him to attend RU coach Scott Gines' "Best of the Mountains" camp in scenic Radford, Va. The Northampton native liked what he saw, and the rest is Highlander history.
"Coastal Carolina was recruiting me hardest and then Coach Gines started, too, after he saw me. I was down to those two and I said whichever one calls me first that's where I'm going," laughed Filchner, sounding like a guess-hitter.
Gines, a gracious master of all things protocol and civility, was on the horn first. And neither the coach, nor the player ever had any regrets. "I loved everything about the whole college atmosphere and playing baseball and being a college athlete at Radford," Filchner said. "When people say college is the best four years of your life, it's true. It was for me. I became really good friends with a lot of the guys I played with, and we were really good back then."
In fact, Filchner's 1995 graduating class was the first in Radford's brief baseball history to post an overall winning record and never suffer a losing campaign. "From the time I was a freshman I remember so many great players so I had to work really hard to get in the lineup and get at-bats," he said.
Filchner completed work on his Interdisciplinary Studies degree, which is a great-sounding pursuit for a conscientious craftsman with a bat. In fact, Filchner studied math and science and had that batting eye on becoming a high school teacher. It became obvious at RU that the math he should pursue had to do with statistics.
The Oakland A's took him in the 23rd round of the 1995 June Amateur Draft. Kent remembers him having a big day at Richmond when the scouts had assembled to watch the Spiders' pitcher. Instead, they put down their speed guns and watched Filchner ply his trade at the plate. "He had two home runs and just turned a lot of heads," said Kent. "Duane always hit better pitchers best. If they had good stuff, he could lock in and go to a different level."
Filchner had a .269 batting average in three-and-a-half seasons at the next level, minor league baseball in the A's organization. He hit .298 his last half season in 1998 for high Class A Visalia, and then famously retired after the midseason California League Class A All-Star game.
"That's a big regret for me now, but I had just got married and had a job offer," he recalled.
The other part of the equation was that Oakland was loaded with young players in the outfield. Ben Grieve had just gone to the Bigs in '97, and Ryan Christianson followed Grieve that season. Filchner wasn't sure he had a future in the game that always came so easy for him. "I was older than these guys, a solid hitter and an average defensive player," he said. "I might have had a chance with another organization looking for a bat, but I didn't think that way then."
Filchner is thinking a lot about college and college athletics these days. He has a daughter, Drew, at Bucknell and his son, Nick, is a 6-7 sophomore on the Division I Merrimack College basketball team in Massachusetts. Proud papa plans his Amazon work schedule around getting to Warriors games.
He rattles off Nick's basketball statistics like a sports information director and Filchner stays in touch with his own college teammates. He needs to with that shoddy memory of how great he was in the Radford red, blue, white and road gray.
"I remember the people more than the games we played," he said. "Radford meant a lot to me."
Extra Innings
My favorite story to tell about Filchner is from a "flood" of memories.
Filchner played from 1992-95 and was the best hitter I ever saw day-to-day. I've been to big league games, tons of minor league tilts and seen lots of stars but covering college baseball at Radford, Virginia Tech and Maryland, Filchner was the best hitter I got to see regularly.
Among Filchner's 34 career home runs, one came on a dreary day at what we used to call Dedmon Center Park (now the plush Carter Memorial Stadium). It was one of those springs when the New River claimed back much of the Dedmon Center grounds. The river came over its bank and covered the lower soccer/field hockey/lacrosse field beyond right field.
That was an unfortunate rite of spring where the lower Dedmon Center parking lot often flooded, too. In fact, as I told The Roanoke Times, "I heard the Dedmon Center was built on a 100-year flood plain. If that's true, I've worked here 700 years."
When the upper field was dry enough to play, teams from Ohio, New York and all over the Northeast came south for their spring break to play at Radford, which always seemed silly but was a nice way to get the Highs some early-season home games.
On this day, the New River was visible flowing just beyond the fence, almost all the way up the hill. We always had a good time on those days (in the warm press box) – between innings, playing songs about floods, rivers, and water.
Filchner took one of his picturesque, pulled-from-instructional-video swings and deposited a ball over the right field fence into the drink.
At the time I didn't realize what a gift No. 21 had given this sometimes-snarky sports info operative. But in subsequent years when an opposing player happened to bash a ball deep, deep, and I was asked where that homer ranked among the all-time longest shots at The Park, I was able to say, "Oh, Filchner hit it in the river."
They would gaze to a dry lower field, its width bounded by a running trail and then the elevated bank and THEN the river. (Oh, and for the record, Filchner-fellow Hall of Famer Travis Morgan hit one over the stand of trees in deep center field for the longest homer I can recall. Kent reminded me of one I must have missed, a shot by first baseman Jeff Dean in the mid-90s that "plugged" in the middle of that lower field.)
As for Filchner, he's on the Big South 90s All-Decade Team and is currently eighth all-time in league history with that career batting average. He graduated as the BSC career leader in runs scored, hits and RBI.
Baseball is something in the which the Big South has never fooled around. The league has historically been among the best conferences nationally in the sport, including then-long-time league member Coastal Carolina winning the 2016 national championship. A southern-based league, other rivals are playing and practicing outdoors year around, which is not the case in Radford. That has made the program's burgeoning success even more impressive the last decade.
Filchner's bat in the heart of a hard-hitting Highlander lineup was a vital key in the early 90s, including the first 30-win season in school history in 1995; a run to the conference tournament championship finals in 1993, and another just-miss in 1995, a loss on the final day of the season costing RU a trip to the NCAA Tournament.
He was the first player in the Big South to lead the conference in batting average back-to-back seasons (.399 in 1994, .389 in 1995), and consecutive years in RBI (57 in 1993, 53 in 1994). He remains the only player to lead the baseball-bully-filled league in hitting and RBI twice.
And did I tell you about the time he hit it in the New River?
Mike Ashley '83 was a national award-winning writer and columnist ('Sidelines') for the Radford University student newspaper The Tartan as an undergrad. Then Radford and the University just couldn't get rid of him. He worked in sports information for the Highlanders 1983-85, and again 1987-97, after two years at Virginia Tech. He has been a freelance sportswriter in Fairfax, Va., the past 25 years, still covering Radford and the Big South, along with other less important college teams for several national publications and online services.
Ashley will write an occasional column for the Radford website to share his recollections and hopefully, some entertaining info for Highlander fans.
