"The Duck" officially joins the team.

Byline: Ron Bellamy The Register-Guard

When he was 5 years old, Joe Giansante says, he dreamed of playing baseball at the University of Oregon. When he was in eighth grade, the Ducks cut the sport, and Giansante was crushed.

He wrote a letter of protest to the Oregon athletics director. He drew a picture to go with it, the Duck holding a baseball bat.

He went on to be the catcher at Forest Grove High School, and played a year of club baseball at Oregon, and never got baseball out of his blood, or got over the fact that the school he loved didn't have it.

In recent years, on trips as the Oregon TV broadcaster for football and basketball, Giansante would visit college baseball stadiums, examining how they worked, learning what they cost.

He began making an intense study of the sport.

"Some people make train sets," he said. "Some people play golf. I studied baseball. ...

"It became kind of an obsession for me, a passion for me, to learn about the sport: The TV exposure on ESPN. The revenues that teams generate. The sponsorship and the marketing opportunities. The interest level for high school players around the Northwest and the West.

"I studied it all."

In March, when the Oregon men's basketball team was in Spokane for the NCAA Tournament, Giansante and athletic director Pat Kilkenny got to talking about the new baseball facility at Gonzaga. Giansante mentioned his research and asked to make a presentation.

A presentation about baseball, the sport the Ducks had cut in 1981, and its place at Oregon.

"It was never just about baseball," he said. "It was about my passion for Oregon.

"I've always believed that baseball makes you whole."

So Giansante gave his spiel, ending it by placing in front of Kilkenny a page of this newspaper, with a photograph of three baseball players, stars at Sheldon High School. All Eugene kids. All committed to going to Oregon State.

"I said, `This is never happening again,' " Giansante recalled.

The Ducks, of course, are now reinstating baseball, and Giansante has become more than simply an advocate, but a member of the team.

Over the summer, he resigned his position with Chambers Communications and began working for the athletic department in a six-tenths position (at $60,000 per year) as director of community relations and special programs, of which baseball, right now, is the most special.

He's actively involved in Oregon's search for a new coach; his cell phone gets 50 calls a day, its message capacity consistently maxed out.

In a separate contract, he will continue working for the Oregon Sports Network as the Ducks' TV broadcaster, beginning with Saturday's Oregon football opener, televised live on KEZI.

In calling games as an athletic department employee, Giansante's in the same boat as radio broadcaster Jerry Allen.

He figures his style won't change. The kid who once drew a picture of the Duck mascot in that plea to a former AD, the college student who actually became the Duck mascot, is now, at 40, officially a Duck.

"Everybody kind of knows me as the Duck anyway," he said.

"I can't live it down. I've tried for 20 years to put out of people's minds that I wore a goofy Duck outfit, but I haven't been able to get away from that, so I might as well embrace it."

In his role as the athletic department's director of community relations, Giansante hopes to be an ombudsman, reaching out to Duck fans in general admission and beyond, hearing their concerns.

Meanwhile, he'll also be raising money for the new baseball program. He expects the Oregon program to hire a coach who can get the Ducks to the College World Series. He expects that Oregon's baseball stadium will be the best in the Pac-10. He expects to create "a culture of Oregon baseball."

"Nobody is going to out-Duck me," he said.

Never a doubt of that, and especially not now, since the Duck and his sport have come home.