By Mitch Abramson
Cuseta, president of the Bayside Yankees, one of the top amateur baseball organizations in the country and a team that owns a virtual monopoly of the top talent in the area, sat down at a table at the Bayside Diner and glanced over the menu. In that instance, and it was fleeting, Cuseta, arguably the most feared, disliked and most powerful man in youth baseball, looked peaceful as if he had nary a worry in the world.”I'll have a bagel with some lox, please,” he said during an interview Monday.And then as he began to get comfortable with his surroundings and the conversation flowed and turned to his beloved Yankees, Cuseta dropped the act and slipped back into the figure that many coaches and parents in the area regard as public enemy No. 1. It was easy to see why Cuseta, coach of the under-18 Senior Americans team and a man who has won more than 1,000 games in his career, walks around with a bull's-eye on his back, not unlike another feisty baseball owner from the city, George Steinbrenner of the New York Yankees.Cuseta, the son of a musician, is obsessed with winning so much that he will do almost everything within his power and the rules to stay on top.”In a word, my coaching style is aggressive,” he said. “This is an organization that is results-oriented. Everyone who puts on a uniform is accountable for their actions. When a kid makes the same mistake over and over again, they're going to hear it, and eventually they will get replaced. One thing I don't do is lie to the kids. I'm a straight shooter. I don't tell people what they want to hear.”It's this attitude that has made him a favorite among college coaches and players looking for exposure and a chance to play at the elite level in college and in the majors, and it's also this attitude that has also gotten him in hot water with heads of rival organizations and parents who have listened to him chew out one too many players.But college coaches seem to love his win-at-all-costs attitude, and Cuseta, 45, has many of the top managers on speed dial. He lists Tim Corbin, the head baseball coach at Vanderbilt University who he met when Corbin was a little-known coach at Presbyterian College in South Carolina in the 1980s, as his best friend. Cuseta has sent dozens of players to Vanderbilt and Clemson University, where Corbin was an assistant from 1994 through 2002.It's no secret how Cuseta has built up a staggering list of contacts. Every year he travels to the American Baseball Coaches Association's annual meeting in January, a nesting ground for some of the most prominent college coaches and Major League personnel in the country to spread the gospel of the Bayside Yankees. If his cell phone is any indication, then Cuseta, it seems, has the ear of many of them because it never stops ringing.He has found a comfortable landing pad for his players at the University of Miami, where he and head coach Jim Morris have fostered a relationship that is beneficial to both parties. Cuseta gets to brag that his players are on scholarship at a head-turning school, and Morris and other college coaches get to ship their freshmen to the Yankees for some off-season seasoning.Cuseta is known best for his ability to evaluate talent. As was the case with Corbin, Cuseta befriended Morris early on before he became Collegiate Baseball's coach of the year and took the Hurricanes to the World Series. Cuseta met Morris when he was making his name, building Georgia Tech into a respectable program beginning in the 1980s, a feat that would land him in the school's Hall of Fame in 1999.”I know everybody,” Cuseta said. “The college coaches go by what I tell them. If anyone goes to a school of significance, I automatically get a call to cross-check a player if they are from this region. I don't lie to the college coaches. If you don't overblow a player, they will trust you. It seems that a lot of high school and summer coaches don't get this concept.”Or they don't operate like Cuseta, who is not above taking a player from a rival team without notifying the coach beforehand, as was the case when his Under-16 Junior National team used three Midville Dodgers to win the Kings Park regional and advance to the NABF World Series. Nor is he above making a college coach's life miserable.When former Archbishop Molloy standout Nick Derba left the Yankees to play in the celebrated Cape Cod league two days before the Yankees' postseason began, Cuseta unleashed a barrage of venom toward Manhattan College coach Steve Trimper, because as Cuseta explains it, “the coach at Manhattan College influenced him to go to the Cape.” Cuseta, who believes in payback almost as much as he believes in batting practice, vowed never to allow another Bayside Yankee to play for the Jaspers again.”He hurt our chance to go to Farmington, N.M. (site of the Connie Mack World Series),” Cuseta said. “Without Derba, we lost in the regional finals. (In Derba), he took away our No. 3 hitter, our No. 1 catcher and our No. 1 leader. I'm going to bury the guy …. he should have known better.”As word of Cuseta's most recent tirade reached the ears of Bayside's community of baseball parents, some just shook their heads. One parent, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals, wondered how Cuseta has avoided getting physically pummeled by some player's angry relative.”He yells at the kids; he throws things,” he said. “He calls the kids bums. He'll ruin a kid if he has to. People play for him for one reason: because it's a very prestigious organization. But with all the stuff he says, I'm surprised some father hasn't just laid him out. He could do so much good if he wanted to because of the position he's in.” Cuseta answers his critics by simply pointing to the staggering number of championships the Yankees organization has amassed since its inception in 1982. When Joe Kessler and the Bayside Yankees Junior Americans won the NABF World Series in Northville, Mich. recently, it was the 16th national title in the organization's 22 years.”While people are talking about me, I'm busy recruiting, making this organization better,” he said. Cuseta, a resident of Kew Gardens, has always gotten in with the right people. Splitting his time between running the Bayside Yankees and managing his own limo service, Landmarc Limousines, Cuseta is the classic overachiever. In his own words, he was a “weak-hitting midfielder” at Hofstra University, but he did make one connection in Hempstead, L.I. that would serve him well in the business world after he graduated. He became fast friends with Jeff Kemp, son of former football great Jack Kemp, who was later appointed to Ronald Reagan's cabinet, and helped steer customers Cuseta's way in the early days when he was still driving his own limo.”I don't drive these days as much as I used to,” he said. Now his customers consist of Republicans and CEOs, a uniform group of sharply dressed businessmen who would find it difficult to imagine that at one time Cuseta sold women's apparel following school. He went to work for Adorence Inc. selling discount gear, and was a success, bringing in $5 million a year in total volume toward the end of his tenure there.But baseball has always been the straw that mixes his drink. In 1990 he worked as a scout for the Chicago Whitesox before a dispute with manager Jeff Torberg over his son, Doug, who Cuseta said wasn't good enough to play for the Bayside Yankees, strained his relationship with the team. He left to scout for the Brewers the next season. When he missed the rush of being on the field, where he could be the judge, jury and executioner all rolled into one, he rushed back to coaching the following year.Cuseta began the Bayside Yankees in the fall of 1981 with his friend Ron Seltzer and they started strong, winning the 16-year-old NABF World Series in 1983, their only team at the time. The next year Cuseta founded the Senior Americans club, and soon the Yankees were off and running with the pedal to the metal and a swagger that rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.”The first time I dealt with Cuseta was in 1998,” said the Midville Dodgers president, Bob Holden, who exchanged a barrage of nasty e-mails with Cuseta when the Yankees used his players earlier this summer to get to the World Series. “We were the new kid on the block and they beat us 7-4. After the game he started yelling at his club how the Dodgers didn't belong on the same field as them and how his team played down to our level. He even protested the game because it had begun 20 minutes late after Christ the King's playoff game – they were playing before us – ran past 6 p.m., which was what the permit was for. His own coaches tell me they try to stay clear of him.”Kessler, who has achieved enormous success as a coach in the Yankee organization, certainly hears the whispers about Cuseta from rival organizations – that he is arrogant and cutthroat in his behavior, but Kessler, while acknowledging that some of it is true, has his own opinion.”Marc Cuseta does a lot of good things for these players if they are loyal to the organization and if they are good players,” said Kessler, who receives a stipend as payment and has spent 10 years in the organization. “Since 1983, when he started coaching here, a lot of kids have received scholarships and gone on to the Majors, and he has gotten a lot of his younger coaches jobs at the college level. “Yes, he's demanding. It's no hidden mystery that his way is the only way. He runs the Yankees like a Major League organization with the teams below him acting like the Minor Leagues. Not all kids can (play in this environment), but he has links to everyone on the college and pro level.” It's a Hobson's choice, as one parent who withheld her name and whose son played for a rival organization, put it: “I didn't want my son to be around him because of the way he acts, but the truth is, if my son had played for the Yankees, he probably would have gotten a lot more exposure and a lot more attention than what he got. I guess that's the sacrifice you make. It's a trade-off.” According to its media guide, the organization has sent nearly 100 players to the Majors.Although observers claim that Cuseta uses underhanded tactics to sign players and some question how he pays coaches and finances his trips (fund-raising and donations from former Yankees in the Majors), Cuseta said he has never once had a lawsuit brought against him nor have any of his teams ever been suspended from a league. So far, the only legitimate attack levied against him that seems to stick is the foul-mouthed manner in which he coaches his team and his vengeful attitude that seems out of place in the mellow backdrop of summer baseball. Cuseta defends his methods by saying that those who can't take his hard-hitting style shouldn't sign up with the Bayside Yankees.Reach reporter Mitch Abramson by e-mail at TimesLedger@aol.com or call 718-229-0300, Ext. 130.
