OT: Your Baseball Playing Days

[MooseDog]

Grew up in Oakland in the 1970s with its great history of baseball. I was a terror in the local Japanese baseball league but also a bit of an outcast since I was only 1/2 Japanese. For some reason my parents didn't get me into the local Babe Ruth league where everyone else in the city played.

Had to try out for the high school, and made the team as a pitcher. Coach years later confided that he figured with my control I could throw batting practice, which is what I did pretty much my sophomore season.

We had a very good high school team. In my soph season I only got in 7 innings, usually when we were way ahead and coach didn't want to waste any of our "real" pitchers. I had great control and a Barry Zito curve but probably wouldn't have hit 90 on the radar on a good day with a fast gun and the wind behind me. Luckily our catcher was an extremely smart dude and knew most everyone's tendencies. He basically told me what to throw and where to throw it so I did. He knew how to work the strike zone too. I can't tell you how many guys we struck out with pitches a foot off the plate because of his ability to "frame" the pitch.

I remember one game against Oakland Tech I struck out the side in the last inning and it was their three best hitters, one of whom was a guy named Rickey Henderson, yeah that one.

That summer, my coach convinced the guy who ran the best summer league team for high school age players to take me on. While he did, he never intended to let me play and I never got to play all summer until our elimination game in the State Championships when we ran out of pitching. I think he was hoping I'd quit but I loved baseball too much and was learning a lot just being around all that talent.

Of the 20 players on the team, two signed and left during the season (Henderson and his best friend Fred Atkins - if you saw Rickey's HOF induction speech he credit's Fred for keeping him real), and 7 others eventually signed pro contracts with two ultimately having MLB careers - Henderson and Lloyd Moseby (Blue Jays and Japan).

In my Junior high school season I was slated to the be the 2nd pitcher and probably start against the two weak teams in our league. However our star pitcher ran into "academic difficulties" not to mention being out of shape. Coach asked our catcher if he thought we could get by with me and he said yes. Eventually the star pitcher ran out of chances and got kicked off the team. We easily won the league that season and I made the all-city team. I won 11 of the 15 league games (2 losses) and had a one-hitter to boot.

Senior year didn't go so well as my catcher had graduated and we couldn't find anyone to replace him. I mean, it was bad, guys who couldn't even catch the ball let alone throw anyone out. The only two decent games I had were when Moseby volunteered to catch. I did manage to hit a HR, my only one in high school, in our last game.

Something happened to my shoulder when pitching to kids during my summer job and it was never the same, so that was that.

Started coaching and won two city championships with mostly kids from my neighborhood and their friends. Moved up to summer league high school and formed a traveling team. Had some success and one player made it up for a cup of coffee with the Giants and is in the 1993 Topps set. Could never get a sponsor for the team though, and by the mid-1980s I was broke, unemployed and dealing with depression so I stopped.

It was all great fun though.

PS. The Rickey story always brings a "yeah, right" from most people. I used to have the scorebook from that game as proof - I asked my coach (I later became assistant baseball coach at the high school) if he still had the book from that year when Rickey got called up by the A's - but in one of my many moves it got lost.