Pacific Suns Baseball Warms the Heart

August 1961:

A boy with carefully greased Brylcreem hair is goggling around the New York Yankees’ locker room, which he has been given the amazing good fortune to visit. He spies Casey Stengel, the Grand Old Man of Baseball, and approaches, half-sauntering and half-stumbling, for an autograph.

He is careful to not seem too eager, to not seem uncool. “It’s for a friend,” he glibly tells the Grand Old Man.

Casey sees this for the pathetic lie it is. He rips the program from the boy’s hands, lays down a quick, unreadable scrawl, shoves it back, and hisses: ‘Here kid. For your ‘friend.’ ”

May 1998:

Half-stumbling, half-sauntering, a man bereft of both hair and Brylcreem goggles around the Pacific Suns bleachers on a cold, wet Thursday night in Oxnard. In his soggy notebook, he jots down a trifle or two about the Suns, the team that last week ushered in yet another new era of Ventura County minor league baseball.

A boy approaches. His name is Josh Thomas, and he bravely gulps down his disappointment when his mother tells him that I’m not a sportswriter but an ordinary hack.

Even so, he brightens my night:

“Can you autograph this baseball, sir? It would be great to get you, along with some players . . . .”

Sure, kid.

A few minutes later, he is back, with two other boys brandishing hardballs and asking for the same thing. “See?” he says. “I got you some free publicity!”

And you ask if I had a good time at the game.

You bet I did.

I ate a sack of peanuts and heard an old-timer behind me laud pitcher Eric King in the time-honored fashion: “This guy can throw a lamb chop past a wolf!”

In the nearly empty bleachers beyond first base, I chatted about what’s-the-problem-with-kids-today with a salesman named Joe from Bakersfield. He was there because the opposing team, the Chico Heat, had been staying at his motel, and it was a dreary Thursday night in Oxnard, and Seinfeld was not an option--not that there is anything wrong with that.

After a few innings--about as much baseball as I can take sitting down--I headed for the chair massage.

*

This is the only ballpark I know that doesn’t offer beer but does provide therapy. For $5, you can relax for 15 minutes while Mae Branch, a graduate of the Caring Hands School of Massage, digs her fingers deep into your tight back muscles and makes you feel better.

“So many people hear ‘massage’ and they think it’s something sexual, but I’m trying to promote it in a healthy, family way,” she said.

Refreshed, I watched kids of all ages scramble through the park. Boys waited on a trash container just beyond the outfield fence, eager to chase homers and long foul balls. During breaks between innings, kids raced tires around the infield--a promotion for a tire store. Birthday kids got their names announced, including Suns pitcher Ken Krahenbuhl, who was said to be “27 going on 12.”

At the seventh-inning stretch, a knot of kids under 12 got to run the bases and sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” more or less in time with the Balboa Middle School band.

They were led by the team’s mascot, Sunny the Penguin. I asked team officials: Why a penguin?

Because that was the mascot when the team was the Palm Springs Suns. And what can you do with a used penguin suit?

*

The Suns, part of the independent Western League, put on no airs. The players are not tycoons in flannel, but ordinary working stiffs earning what would have been a decent salary in about 1947. The stadium at Oxnard College is not a monument to municipal bonds, studded with sky boxes for car dealers and publishers, but a humble diamond lined with bleachers. The most lavish amenity: portable toilets. On this evening, the lights worked just fine--they failed in the season opener--but in the fourth inning the scoreboard fizzled into digital nothingness, leaving the crowd to guess about such fundamental matters as the score. (In the end, Chico won 5-2.)

But nobody seemed to mind much.

In what turned out to be the ninth inning, the rain picked up. The 990 people who had paid to get in dwindled to a hundred or so. Someone from the front-office--they also sell food--came by in the drizzle urging us to pluck free hot dogs from a pan.

A game last week went 15 innings and lasted 5 1/2 hours. At the bitter end, general manager Mike Begley gave free tickets to the 50 or so stalwarts who had stayed on.

But the batboy that night left a deeper impression on him.

The Suns select their batboys--they can be girls too--from the crowd, or from kids who register at a used sporting-goods store.

*

“When I was a kid, I always wondered how they got these great jobs,” Begley said. “I didn’t know. I still don’t know. I just decided we’d pick ‘em right here. Imagine you’re 12 years old and coming to see the game but then getting to be a part of it!”

On that night, the bases were loaded. The game was well into the extra innings. Only 7 or 8 years old, the batboy scurried across the batter’s circle as Alex Garcia stepped to the plate. The atmosphere was tense, the crowd was silent, and everyone in the stadium heard the boy’s small, insistent plea:

“It’s all you, Alex,” he said.

The Suns lost--but for Begley and the fans, it was a major minor-league moment.