San Francisco Angels

 Wood Bat Baseball Team

Historical Narrative

(93.6% accurate)

"Honesty in the present is no guarantee of honesty about the past."   

                                                                     - Jerome Sanders Dickey

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"All the News in Fits"

 Twenty Years & then we stopped counting    

Blasts From the Past

Friday-Sunday, June 27-29, 1997

At left: Dave Dietry practices his tai chi kickboxing batting technique on Saturday morning before the continuation of a game at Grossmont College near San Diego. Catcher Brian Ashley wonders what he's doing in the desert.

Temperatures hovered around 100°. The game was the continuation of a Friday twilight game at Balboa Park in San Diego, postponed by darkness, tied at 7-7. On Saturday, the Angels went on to lose that game 13-12 in 11 innings to scout Mickey Deutschman's San Diego Stars. The actual game lasted more than five hours!

The Stars players looked abnormally strong; they appeared to be experimenting with performance enhancements!

At left:  Pitcher Benny Razzo works out his rubber arm, Orlando Cano repairs his watch, Mike Jackson sits smiling while waiting to hit more long bombs, and a talented lefty pitcher yawns- he joined the Angels' Phantom All-Star Team before we could remember his name. View of dugout.

The Angels pounced on the Stars in the next game, 12-4. The second scheduled game for Saturday started late in the day and then was continued into Sunday. The Stars and Angels battled again all day Sunday. The Stars won the continuation game 21-13 and the next game 9-8 in 11 innings.

At left:  Longtime Angels volunteer Jack Wolf puts on his jacket, catcher Brian Ashley puts on his shin guards, and slugger Lonnie Jackson puts on his strut.

The fifth game was cancelled since the Angels had a flight home. That was a tough opponent in marathon games under the hot sun. Mickey D. took two Angels, Lonnie Jackson and Mike Jackson, with the Stars to Wichita in August where they finished 5th in the NBC Summer World Series. From there, Mike Jackson signed on with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, but his pro career was shortened by a knee injury.

At left:  Before the marathon games against the Stars, the Angels took a side trip to the San Diego zoo. Later, batboy Omari Gamboa chills out at Universal Studios.

On the next visit to San Diego in 1998, the Angels stayed at a motel closer to the beach, going inland to play the Stars at their new field on the Barona Indian Reservation. The two teams fought using wood bats only; scores were reasonable, wood bats sedated Star steroids. At the beach, some of the Angels surfed the modest waves, some pretended to; everyone stayed cool.

SF Angels Stats from the Spring of 1984:

Most of these players were local San Francisco residents. Hard-throwing pitcher Al Ritt was a transferred Southerner living in Cupertino. During Wednesday night practices at Potrero Hill, he shagged down balls in the outfield wearing a shirt emblazoned with the Confederate Flag, but the local boys playing football nearby would throw the ball onto the street if Al didn't get there right away.

Al's stats improved in the summer, going 5-4 with 7 complete games. Al stood a big 5'11, a bulldog with long blond hair which hung below the cap he always wore since he was going bald fast. He had just gotten married and worked as a computer programmer. He threw a wild 90 and had a very hard curve he threw with a light grip off a small hand. He regularly struck out more than ten per game, and walked or hit as many. Working on the mound, Al had a bad temper. It was hard to remove him, so the first visit to the mound was crucial for the conveyance of great alarm over the chaos yet with the reaffirmation of confidence that the pitcher will get the job done.  The end of an Al Ritt game was typically a nail-biter, a 5-4 game with the bases loaded on walks and hit batters, and a 3-2 pitch with two outs in the 9th.

The Angels didn't play that well in the spring of 1984, losing their first seven games. Twenty seasons later, they almost succeeded at being a premier baseball team.

"But where was Manager Nazar? What about that ageless Willie Gomez?"     Future Manager Nazar allegedly was engaged in continuous unprotected sex with his future wife in a dorm room at Chico State University. Longtime Angel William Gomez, who today still plays softball and baseball six times a week, was a recent immigrant to the U.S., having left his two wives and seventeen children in the city of Granada, Nicaragua.

Thank Goodness they are both now morally upstanding adult citizens!

"Well, that's okay for a start. But what is the real story? What really happened on the San Francisco Angels team?"

Nothing really happened. It was a baseball team, that's all. It was an outgrowth of the San Francisco Senators black baseball team that later turned into a traveling college baseball team. Charles Hiroshi Pruitt quit coaching the Senators and formed the San Francisco Angels with the help of the Travel Director. Nobody knew his middle name was Hiroshi but you scrape away that black skin and he looked a lot like Emperor Hirohito of Japan. Besides, even though he could mix it up with Kevin Watson every time he had to pull that overweight but very angry pitcher from the mound, most everything he did was well-considered, despite the heavy self-medication which continues to this day. Charles had been a djay on a jazz station in Monterrey, and had a tall athletic white girlfriend, and carried about himself as a kind of Duke Ellington of baseball coaches.

At left, Charles Pruitt is on the far right. The clown Basque shepherd in the middle is a Basque shepherd clown from the Mission, Jimmy Gracia, the first Angel to have two girlfriends show up at the same game. Peering from the left is infielder Joe San Juan, now a Mission mafia don, a very respectable businessman. Below right: Linda Brown Olmos secretly provided crucial financial support for the Angels.

Now those Senators, whoa! That was a crazy team! Felix the Cat couldn't be a mascot on that team!

..[By order of the 9th Circuit Court, in the case of The People vs. Web Intern, an ellipsis has been inserted in place of the scurrilous text]

As part of a settlement with the federal Office of Homeland Security & Defense of Morals, Web Content Section, Western Regional Office, we insert here the widespread quote from California Supreme Court Justice Janice Brown, whose nomination to a federal appeals court position is currently being blocked in the US Senate by Democrat Diane Feinstein:

Where government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates, and our ability to control our own destiny atrophies. The result is families under siege, war in the streets, unapologetic expropriation of property, the precipitous decline of the rule of law, the rapid rise of corruption, the loss of civility and the triumph of deceit. The result is a debased, debauched culture which finds moral depravity entertaining and virtue contemptible.

With so much moral depravity going on, it's hard to tell a good story these days.

At right: Angels team photo, circa 1989

At left: This lineup from November 1990 had recent KC Royals ex-pro infielder Javier Alvarez as leadoff hitter, former UCLA pitcher Mike McCrady as starting pitcher, pro Gary Chaverria behind the plate, black hippy surfer Tony King in the 3rd spot. King was a great player but was heavily involved with the hard task of ensuring the continuation of life on this planet, so at times it was necessary to physically pull him from his moorings on Sunday mornings, in flagrante delicto.

While Tony was attending to his job, the Travel Director was busy organizing activities for all that teeming life. The Angels' schedule began expanding in the early 1990s to include overnight trips to play the best teams on the West Coast.

Sometimes that meant sacrifices to ensure a full team. Orlando Cano took the late July 1993 weekend trip to Fresno and San Luis Obispo with an eyepatch on, having failed to screw in a lightbulb a few days earlier. Cano was the only catcher left when Nelson Gonzalez was dropped off at the Greyhound station Sunday for a trip home after his wife threatened to kill him for leaving. Gonzalez, an accomplished amateur boxer who occasionally gave ad hoc demonstrations to passersby on 24th Street in San Francisco, knew his wife well. Rolling pins were successfully banned in 1994, a victory for harried men, but the child support issue went to the women. "Victims" are the best perpetrators. (Obsessed "victims" are the worst perpetrators.) One-eyed Cano successfully caught two games that Sunday, including Jaime Portillo's no-hitter.

At right is outfielder Warren Wilson, who, along with James Walkvist, is one of the all-time greatest players to ever wear a San Francisco Angels uniform. Unfortunately, in both cases their greatness was not displayed in Angels uniform and their sport was basketball. Walkvist (6'9") did play baseball at Canada College but had a pro hoops career overseas, while Wilson became a C.P.A. with a Big Eight Six Four firm. At left: A photo of James Walkvist was not available, but you get the picture.   One winter, Jerry Fontanetti required the Angels to make up a tie game with his Whacks team by coming down the day after Christmas to Blackford High School for a full game. Many of the players felt that this was an unreasonable requirement even by Jerry's standards, so while the Angels brought a decent pitcher and infield, the three outfielders were not quite off the egg nog. In right was the Travel Director, known for his unusual "drop-to-the-knees" dive for a misplaced fly ball. In center was Roland Nazar, always in need of vision correction. In left was the indomitable Warren Wilson, standing a tall 6'7" ready to slap down all flyballs. Their amazing talents were on clear display in that loss to the Whacks that cold December day. Wilson pretended he was defending the basket and would just raise his arms up. A bullet would fly past Nazar, who then reacted to the screams of the other players. The Travel Director lined up the fly balls and then fought them hard to the ground, where they bounced away. Never again were those three unusual talents allowed to play outfield at the same time.

At left: Angels take over the dining room at the Samoa Cookhouse during series with Humboldt Crabs in the mid-1990s. Left foreground are catcher-2nd baseman Jaime Portillo and pitcher Chris Taylor. Taylor became a successful closer for the University of Utah. Right foreground are catcher-dh Orlando Cano and outfielder Maceo Houston. Cano started out as a scrawny 150-lb teenager playing in the Roberto Clemente League. Meals at the Samoa Cookhouse and other dining establishments turned him into a ballplayer of great substance.  Though as a catcher  he began to amble in his retrieval of passed balls and as a baserunner he developed a quite noticeable indisposition toward sliding, his hitting improved with experience. In one summer with the Angels, Cano batted .470. and led the team to a local league championship with a towering 9th inning walk-off grandslam that sailed past the light tower in left-center at Crocker #1when the team was down 12-9.  It was late on a balmy day with the sunset reflecting off the high clouds overhead. The towering blast sailed slowly up and away, a really beautiful sight unmatched except for Maceo Houston's homerun at Crocker #4. Houston, who was a #4 selection by the Chicago Cubs in the early 1990s, was a native San Franciscan with a tremendous hammering left-handed swing that caused spectators to step back in awe. Unfortunately, he liked to swing and jerk his head at the first pitch regardless of location, would get in the hole with bad pitches, and so failed at sustained bat discipline. Nonetheless, at this level, he was a superstar. When Maceo actually got up and went to a game, usually around noon, he lifted the spirits of the team. In that one game at Crocker #4, long-time Angel stalwart Lonnie Jackson, a powerful lefty-hitting outfielder and high round draft pick by the Los Angeles Dodgers, hit a 400-foot homerun to right field. Right field extended endlessly, with the hill closeup in centerfield in deep retreat as it made its way to right. Jackson's homerun was very impressive. So in the next inning, Maceo Houston hit a homerun on the same line to right field, but far longer than Jackson's, easily 600 feet,  the longest homerun in world history, and that's a fact. Above right: Team poses with Clemente League championship and individual trophies. Front row from left: Lonnie Jackson, Harold McCray, Willie Gomez Jr., Adam Gomez, Willie Gomez Sr. Everyone else from left: Jason Gallegos (in red jacket), master statistician John Plummer, Joshua Ruiz, David Dietry, Elias "I Love Myself" Morales, Bertland Watson, Maceo Houston, Manager Roland Nazar, Adrian Knapic, Orlando Cano, Mike Ruane, Tony Polizzi, Jaime Portillo, the Illustrious Travel Director (in sunglasses), and (future cop but former dealer in stolen laptops) Art Tillis. The Angels won several local championships from the mid 90s into the new millenium,  both summer and winter. In a few seasons, they played in two summer leagues at once. The Angels have competed in the Fontanetti Whack League, the Sacramento Rural League (Stan Musial AABC), San Francisco's Roberto Clemente League, and the Bay Area Baseball Association. In recent years, over half their summer schedule has been filled with non-league competition, mostly on the road against top-caliber summer collegiate and semipro teams. Above left: Former LA Dodger minor league outfielder Lonnie Jackson played several years with the Angels, hitting over 100 homeruns for the team. His dedication was complete, sometimes ensuring his arrival at a game by sleeping on the bench at Big Rec in Golden Gate Park after a night shift at a second job. Lonnie also played as a pro in Nicaragua in 1997-99. Strong and fast, shoulder damage cut short his career with the LA Dodgers organization, but he could still cover ground in the outfield at a major league level. Over the years, Lonnie's physical condition would go on a roller coaster. He followed the Rasputin Diet Plan, ascending to Bonds-like conditioning for long periods of time before breaking down into a giant balloon, and then back in shape again. His hitting from year to year also took a radical bounce. One year, Lonnie hit .197 and the team statistician regularly cursed his name (almost under his breath), but the next year he hit .350 with 18 homeruns. Despite the hammer of Maceo Houston, the persistent pull of big bull Lonnie Jackson, the wild power of Mad Al Carpenter and others, the best display of power in a single season was the sweet sweep-swing show put on in 2003 by Brad Shannon. The statistics are incomplete, but Shannon hit wood bat bombs to all fields. Only the tendency to sweep at too many low pitches kept him from perfection. If a pitcher wants to walk you, let him.  (click here for photos at Wenatchee) At right, from top: Andrew "Tex" Oksen pitched the Angels to the 1999 U.S. Open championship. He's been pitching in the low minors ever since. Brian Ashley both caught and pitched. Amador Solis was a hitting machine with pro skills. On the road, outfielder Jose Pena visited several emergency rooms. At left: Top-fielding first baseman Tom DiTaranto. A native New Yorker, Tom was a devotee of Keith Hernandez. He even worked as a director of the Boys and Girls Club of South San Francisco in order to be closer to where Keith Hernandez grew up. Tom's wife even complains about the Keith Hernandez poster on the ceiling above their bed. She doesn't bother complaining about the shrine in their bedroom. Tom was the first SF Angel to hit homeruns in double digits (12 in 1990). At least that's what the stats say. Of course, Tom kept the stats. Tom is now married with children. Tom was never bashful with women. He is another player who had two girlfriends show up at the same game. He was a volunteer entertainment director on road trips, helping the players socialize with the natives. For someone who used to fall asleep to Tony Robbins' videos, Tom has never been opposed to self-promotion. But during his years with the Angels, he was a devout baseball nut who instigated the team's expanded schedule and summer travel ambitions.

 Contest on field at UC Santa Barbara, June 2004