It is appropriate that Max Salas is joining Stan Sanchez as an inductee into the Colorado State University Pueblo Athletics Hall of Fame on October 4.
“The hardest working man on a baseball field I’ve ever seen and I’ve been in the business for 48 years,” said Stan Sanchez said about Salas in a July 2018 article in the Pueblo Chieftain.. “I’ve never seen a more driven individual to work with kids to get better.”
The Chieftain article noted that “when Sanchez first became the head coach of the revitalized CSU-Pueblo baseball program in 1994, one of the first people in line to help build the program was Salas. Observing Salas coach and push his players showed Sanchez just what kind of man he was dealing with.”
In the article, it said “Salas did it because he loved his home of Pueblo. Seeing a successful college baseball program in his town became his main objective. Assisting Sanchez, the ThunderWolves are one of the top programs in the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference and NCAA Division II.”
Sanchez then offered that Salas “was a very proud Pueblo man, he had this kind of this steel-man mentality. We were in the World Series in three years, and much of it was due to his drive to get our program on the map.”
In 2007, at the Runyon Sports Complex, a softball field was named in honor of Salas. In the Chieftain article, then-RSC director Dave Dudley said, “What Max did was just help a lot of kids. He was just a guy who loved baseball and gave it all of his time. Never took a penny for any of it and just helped out, a labor of love.”
When talking about his father, former Pack shortstop John Salas: “For Dad, the actual baseball games were anticlimactic. What he loved was the grind, the repetitive rhythms of the game, the preparation of the field, the endless ground, and the soft toss.”
John Salas, who is retired and living in Loveland near his grandchildren, remembered a moment in the 1990s when the then-University of Southern Colorado was bringing back baseball.
“It had been almost a week since I’d seen or heard from my dad, Max, and mother, Gloria. When I finally reached Mom by phone, she excitedly told me about the old college baseball field Dad was reclaiming from the weeds and the snakes.
“A few days later, I got a call from Dr. Robert Shirley (then school president). He was aware of Dad’s offer to reclaim the field in exchange for the opportunity to use it to practice with a team of local boys. Dr. Shirley got the college grounds crew to extend water to the field and encouraged them to lend a hand when possible. But Dr. Shirley’s motives went much more profound than a summer reclamation project. He was determined to return college baseball to the campus after nearly a decade.
“The rest of the story is a remarkable tribute to the many Puebloans who rallied to the cause, built Rawlings Field, and witnessed the program’s return in the spring of 1994. Dad was one of the first to welcome coach Stan Sanchez to Pueblo. He continued to prep the field for practice and would stay late for extra groundballs or soft toss for those players who asked for it. His growing bond with Stan and the players lead to an assistant coaching position and some of the most satisfying years of his life.”
Max Salas was born in Des Moines, N.M., on Oct. 30, 1930. He was one of 12 children whose family moved to Pueblo in the 1940s. After graduating from Central High School, Salas worked at the CF&I Steel Corp., and he retired from the mill after 37 years, including a long stint in the 25″ Rolling Mill.
Starting in 1958, Max Salas devoted his time, talents, and heart to teaching baseball to hundreds of boys and young men for over a half-century. He served as an assistant coach for Sanchez and was a member of the ThunderWolves’ team that competed in the NCAA Division II World Series in 1996.
Max Salas was an assistant for the South-Central League Champion Central High in 2000 and was the head coach of the Babe Ruth Bambino World Series entry from Pueblo that electrified the entire city in the summer of 1991.
After Max Salas’ passing on May 25, 2008, “Max’s Last Baseball Rendezvous” was held at CSU Pueblo’s Rawlings Field.
“It was fitting to honor my dad’s passing with a service at Rawlings,” said John Salas. “The return of baseball to the Belmont campus was in many ways a tribute to his love for baseball and his dedication to the university, Stan and the players.”
As Sanchez said in the Chieftain article, “He (Max Salas) told me the first time I met him that he would do whatever he could for the CSU Pueblo baseball program. Max had a major impact on how this field got started from a facility standpoint. He was there going shoulder to shoulder with everybody digging trenches. He moved a lot of mud to help make (on campus) Rawlings Field such a nice place.”
