NORTHERN CALIFORNIA BASEBALL      

                                                                CALIFORNIA BASEBALL HISTORY                                          

Excerpts from The Existential Ballplayer

"The 10 Kʼs were part of 343 amassed in a single year, a Northern California record that stands to this day. Among his 343 strikeouts were 160 compiled that spring while at college, a school record that led all college pitchers in the nation. All toll, the righty had established more than two dozen records in both the hitting and pitching departments, half of which have withstood the test of time and still stand. For his efforts, the lanky twenty-year-old free agent received an invitation to attend spring training with the Minnesota Twins in Melbourne, Florida. The moment he had been waiting for all his life; his childhood abstraction of becoming a big-leaguer was one step closer to actuality ... but he was a no-show and just disappeared. The game that he loved; the game that he vowed to live and die for; his raison d'être ... just died in his arms that day. What the hell?"

The initial season of Northern California’s Class-D Far West League had all the earmarks of a Hollywood movie script with at least two Hollywood Stars listed on her rosters. The 1948 season included former and future major league players; some famous including a future Cy Young Award winner, several ex Pacific Coast League players, a triple crown winner, an impostor, and a suicide victim. Year two included a couple of DiMaggios, a lesser and a major, and a couple of future Major League managers, one of which led his team to a World Series birth and was named Manager of the Year.

"In his back-to-back match-ups with the great Gary Nolan, after twenty innings, there was one run scored and seventy batters had struck out; thirty seven in game 2 with Nolan whiffing twenty five; Northern California records that exist to this day and statistically, the greatest pitching duel of all-time. Never, has thirty seven batters struck out in a game of eleven innings or less."

"Existential Ballplayer: "Ihad never heard of Marysville, California; had no idea that this little town played such a major role in the founding and history of America’s thirty-first state, nor a clue that this little burg was once in line to become California’s State capital. Sutter’s Mill is in the history books as the place where gold was discovered in 1848 that led to the great 49er gold rush, but it was Marysville that became the gateway to the goldfields which lay just a few miles to the east, and most importantly, as far as baseball is concerned, I had nary a clue that Marysville played such an important role in the shaping of California baseball history."

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Bill Weiss: "Among my greatest pleasures was being president of the Peninsula League in the San Francisco Bay Area from 1959 to 1984. The league was organized by a group of major league scouts and financed by major league organizations. The players were young professionals under contract and a few of Northern California’s top prospects -- free agents still in college. The Peninsula League sent several players to the majors, including Joe Morgan, Willie Stargell, Ken Caminiti, Tom Candiotti, and Mark Parent."

In 1922, Bertrand Russell published his Free Thought and Official Propaganda where the 20th-century’s most intelligent being on the planet stresses the importance of unrestricted freedom of expression in society, and the problems caused by the state and political class by interfering through control of education, fines, economic leverage, and distortion of evidence: “it is not desired that ordinary people should think for themselves, because it is felt that people who think for themselves are awkward to manage and cause administrative difficulties. Only the guardians, in Platoʼs language, are to think; the rest are to obey, or follow leaders like a herd of sheep. This doctrine, often unconsciously, has survived the introduction of political democracy, and has radically vitiated all national education.” Critical and independent thinking are getting throttled and not encouraged anymore. They violate the curriculum. Free speech is a one-way street and the “right” way is the wrong way.
(Russell, Bertrand. Free Thought and Official Propaganda. New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1922. Pp. 33,34)

Kurt Russell: "Baseball shaded my entire outlook on life, because that's how I first saw the world. I looked at everything, even today, through what I learned about the game. Like pacing yourself, focusing yourself, preparing yourself for what you want to do, keeping  yourself healthy. I do all that through the eyes of a  ballplayer."

Robert Frost: "Nothing flatters me more than to have it assumed that I could write prose--unless it be to have it assumed that I once pitched a baseball with distinction. They don’t let me do all the things I want to anymore, but if we had a ball, I’d pitch to you a little, and I’d surprise you."

Walt Whitman: "I see great things in baseball. It's our game--the American game. It will take our people out-of-doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism. Tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set. Repair these losses, and be a blessing to us."

David Nemec. The Beer & Whiskey League -- Baseball's Renegade Major League: "I have always been more fascinated by how and why things happened than by what happened. Consequently, much of this history of the Beer and Whiskey League dwells on the volcanic relationships and interactions among the characters who were part of its making."

Jimmy Quinlan: "The most difficult task in all of sport is to strike a round hardball solidly and with authority using a rounded club, especially when the ball is traveling ninety-plus miles per hour; all-the-while wobbing, sinking, cutting or sailing; not to mention trying to hit a curveball, slider, splitter, spitter, knuckler, change-up, forkball, screwball, or God only knows what else; and if that’s not enough, there's the fear factor, whether conscious or subconscious, of the brush-back, high-and-tight-one, or the beanball, intentional or not, that can bruise, break a bone, or even kill you. Ah yes, baseball, the non-contact sport -- good for the soul but tough on the body."

                                  Late summer, 1970 -- San Mateo, California -- The Peninsula League

The Daly City Phillies were running away with the pennant for the second year in a row. Ace pitcher Bob Wilson

was nearing the end of his first year as a professional and was projected to be a starting pitcher for the Walla Walla Phillies of the Class A Northwest League the following spring. He was working on a two-hit shutout when San Mateo Twinsʼ number three hitter stepped up to the plate. San Mateo teammates began howling and taunting the fireballing pitcher: Throw him a fastball! Throw him a fastball! after three consecutive curveballs bounced in the dirt before reaching home plate and sending the count to 3-0. Get that fucking pitch over the plate where I can get at it, grumbled the batter as the next pitch harmlessly sailed up and away for ball four. Previously, the hitter had doubled off the wall and launched a screaming frozen rope into the left-centerfield alley for another two-bagger, the Twinsʼ only two hits of the game. A week later, the San Mateo right-hander took the mound and struck out ten while tossing a nifty three-hit, 2-1 victory over the South San Francisco Giants.

So, there he was, standing on a corner, on his way back from the local Dairy Queen with a copy of Russell’s History of Western Philosophy tucked under one arm, all the while, munching on a cherry sundae parfait while he waited as traffic went by. He considered Russell’s History a crutch and often leaned on that large tome; leaned on that book like a Christian monk clutching his bible. It would be his fourth reading. Odd, how he must have appeared in this small midwestern prairie-town which seemed to have gone back in time; unusual-looking while wearing his back-home California attire: faded Levis with a hole in one knee, plain open-collared shirt with sleeves rolled up, untucked, and Converse tennies ... no socks. He wore a single-stranded leather anklet while a few curly locks protruded from under his college ball cap.

The content of northerncaliforniabaseball.com is provided by Baseball Almanac, baseball-reference.com, annuals published by the National Baseball Congress, past newspaper articles stored digitally at Newspapers.com (Sacrament Bee, Appeal-Democrat, San Francisco Chronicle, Fresno Bee, Oakland Tribune, and the Times Standard); also on microfilm at local Nor-Cal libraries. Other content is provided by goodoldsandlotdays.com, Jay-Del Mah’s Western Canada Baseball, quotes from well-known authors, and first-hand knowledge. The Existential Ballplayer (highlighted red/black buttons) is a philosohical-historical baseball novel that goes beyond statistics, exposing the humanistic causes behind the actions of a Northern California ballplayer’s quest to become a professional.

Jim Bouton: “I believe that, foolish as it is, Stan Musial has more influence with American kids than any geography teacher. Ted Williams is better known than any of our poets, Mickey Mantle more admired than our scientists... A ballplayer spends a good piece of his life gripping a baseball, and in the end, it turns out that it was the other way around all the time." (Ball Four)

Jimmy Quinlan: "As far back as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by how an athlete competes while under duress; reacts when the crowd’s screaming at the top of their lungs; how a ballplayer performs when the game’s at stake; when the championship is on the line; when the count is full with the bags loaded in a game that’s all tied up with two outs in the bottom of the ninth -- how a single choice that someone makes can alter not only the career and course of their own life, but that of others as well."