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San Francisco Angels Wood Bat Baseball Team
Winter League 2004
"Enjoy thoroughly the pleasing fruits of the Cycle of Defeat and Victory, for they do not long endure. Yet their sweet taste imprints a clear memory of them. Thusly fortified, withstand with rectitude the sour suffering that returns again for a prolonged encampment!" - Jerome Sanders Dickey |
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"All the News in Fits" |
March 21, 2004 |
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March 21, 2004 Results- Championship (Best of 3) Final: Angels 12 Aztecas 11 Winter League Champions!  Lex Robins Hits Four Homeruns in Winning Effort
An excerpt from our scorebook:
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March 21 Championship Final: Sweet Victory
At left: Last minute photo of the San Francisco Roberto Clemente Winter League Champions as they depart for the transition into spring training.
Left to right: Mike Ryan, Edgard Garcia, Aldo Darce, Travel Director, Lex Robins, William Gomez, Steve Salazar, Jaime Portillo, Roland Nazar, Jason Gallegos. Missing from photo: Bertland Watson, Ari Zagaris, Matt Flaherty, John Nelson, Anthony Urbina. Other Angels contributing to the 11-3 record: Greg Jensen, Ron Arostegui, Thompson Sr. & Thompson Jr., Dan Lepez & his Sonoma Crushers- and that great big loud one, Mr. Ron Mingo. (Photo by Roland Nazar Jr.)
In a contest where every
run mattered, Lex Robins' fourth homerun of the game to lead
off the
top of the 9th inning provided the winning margin for the Angels in
the third game tie-breaker of the Clemente Winter League
championship. The 12-11 win over
It is rare enough to hit four homeruns in a game. To hit them in a final championship game is extraordinary. Robins drove in seven runs with those homers. There were three other long-ball contributions. Mike Ryan led off the game with a homer. Edgard Garcia, batting at the bottom of the order, had a two-run blast in the second inning. Jason Gallegos followed Robins' second homerun in the 4th inning with one of his own.
The Angels' pitching early on was erratic and the defense had some misfortune. Even the offense was on-and-off, with nine infield popouts. But those homeruns!
Click here for box scores and play-by-play descriptions
Weekly Winter League Reports
Rant on March 14 championship games 1 & 2: |
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First the good news: It was a beautiful day for baseball. Bright blue sky, warm temperatures, very light breeze.
Angel second game starter Ari Zagaris follows through
All four Angel pitchers performed admirably. Both starters went deep into the game, giving the Angels the clear advantage in confidence.
The Angels defense was excellent. One error allowed a batter to reach first base, and two others miscues advanced runners, but no one scored. This is Crocker-Amazon, where the gophers own the grass and the infield is full of surprises. Shortstop Mike Ryan made several exceptional plays to keep Aztecas batters off the base paths.
In the first game, Angel pitcher Matt Flaherty allowed two runs on four hits in seven innings in a 7-2 win over a competent Aztecas team.
In the second game, Lex Robins' three-run homer in the 3rd inning game propelled the Angels to a lead that held up for several innings.
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Now the bad news: In the first game, the Angels were tagged out several times on the bases, cutting rallies short. The slumbering lumber of the Angels hitters took their time in the first game to wake up, and the Angels rallied late only with the help of opponents' errors and wild pitches. ←Shown on the right side of this photo is umpire Lawrence Pierson, standing in the same spot the entire second game. He apparently had to pee bad, so he was afraid to move. (Rest in peace, Lawrence Pierson, you know we loved you.) Continued offensive problems helped cost the Angels a 7-6 loss in the afternoon game. Three of the Angels did use wood bats, like they're supposed to do. After all, they are real baseball players. Nevertheless, this is Crocker-Amazon, barely 300 feet down the lines, nice loft into the Geneva Avenue jet stream, a flat mound, a hard infield, so what's not to like? The score of the Clemente League summer league championship here was 15-14.
Starter Ari Zagaris gave up two crucial groundball singles in the bottom of the 8th inning and the Aztecas went ahead.
A base-running blunder ended the game. The Angels had the tying run at second base in the top of the 9th inning, when the runner, centerfielder Anthony Urbina of Mission High School, either decided that he was invisible or that the umpires weren't blind. On a routine grounder to third base, Urbina took off from second when the third baseman threw to first for the second out. |
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The first baseman threw back to third but Urbina slid onto the outfield side of the bag and might have gotten a safe call if there was an umpire in the vicinity who didn't need a seeing-eye dog's bark to tell him that an Angel player is safe. No dogs were barking at Crocker Amazon field that day.
But it's the runner's blunder: On an optional play, it's not enough to be actually safe in your mind, you have to be called safe. Safe for all to see. Don't give the umpire an excuse to call you out.
What was that kid thinking?
Speaking of blundering fools and incompetence, the doddering Travel Director botched the lineup in the second game, so the second baseman Aldo Darce batted twice before anyone realized that he wasn't in the lineup. When the screw-up came to light in the 4th inning, your typical Clemente League discussion ensued. The umpire and the commissioner decided to penalize the Angels with two outs for the whole chain of undiscovered batters out of order. This cut short a potential rally. And Darce was banned from entering the game legally. Score two mulligans for the Aztecas and schedule more brain surgery for the Travel Director. Subtract two points from team confidence. The Winter League championship continues next Sunday at noon.
The Travel Director's skull would make a nice vase.
Click here for box scores and play-by-play descriptions
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"The humiliating aspects of the game are intensified during winter baseball." - Jerome Sanders Dickey
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Report on March 7 playoff game: The Angels finished with 8 wins and 2 losses, first in its division, so they skipped the morning playoff game on Sunday May 7. In the afternoon, they played the morning winner Royals for the division championship and beat them 17-4. The final league championship is a best-of-three series starting Sunday March 14, 9:30am, at Crocker #1.
Managing the Angels in the winter, the Travel Director had Matt Flaherty and Ron Arostegui lined up to pitch for the single elimination division championship at Crocker #2. Neither showed up. Arostegui was caught up in family matters while Flaherty had hurt his shoulder in a brawl between friends at a local purveyor of adult beverages. So Willie Gomez pitched again and gained another win by going five innings in the 17-4 rout over Steve Reyes and the Royals. Gomez was followed on the mound by J. Nelson and Mike Ryan for two innings each. Ryan struck out five of the seven batters he faced.
Lex Robins and Jaime Portillo had three-run homers again. Aldo Darce hit only a two-run homer, and so was removed from the game. It should be noted that Crocker #2 has a short fence all around and all three homeruns barely cleared it. But the Angels scored multiple runs in every inning after the 2nd. They were facing long-time Clemente League opponent and former pro player Steve Reyes, making his first appearance of the winter, despite the rule that says participants in playoff games must have played three games during the regular winter season. The Angels did not dispute Reyes taking the mound for the Royals because who wants to try to invoke a rule that the Angels themselves violate. The Angels did make a lame attempt to defend teammate Edgard Garcia's use of a 32inch - 24 1/2 ounce bat, illegal outside of youth baseball. The bat was taken out of commission mid-game by the Commissioner. Edgard's teammates were pleased that Edgard, who is 35 years old, now has to swing an adult bat.
Reyes held the Angels down for a couple of innings, but then the popup homeruns and Royals' errors did him in. His successors on the mound suffered even greater harm from their team's defensive bumbling, which by the end of the game became embarrassing for all participants in this playoff contest. The umpires even conferred with each other in the hope they could conjure up an excuse to leave, but this game was scheduled for a full nine innings without time limit, so they suffered through the death throes of the game as quickly as could be managed short of putting gloves on to help the Royals' defense.
Click here for box scores and play-by-play descriptions
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Want to play baseball in Nicaragua? An "All-Star" team of players will eventually travel to Nicaragua for games against professional teams there. If the entire Angels squad wishes to make a mid-September trip, then the entire Angels squad will go to Nicaragua. Please update your passports! Contact Marvin Gutierrez (415-309-8976) or the Angels' Travel Director for more information. For information regarding the Nicaraguan professional baseball league, click here.
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Report on games of February 29: The Angels scored in only six of the day's eighteen innings, but managed a sweep, winning 10-7 and 7-4 with the help of four three-run homers. In the first game, the Angels and the Titans battled past the usual three-hour time limit, with the deciding three-run blast coming off the bat of Angels catcher Jaime Portillo, earning the Angels a win in the 9th inning. Jason Gallegos had connected in the 1st inning, and William Gomez in the 3rd.
Matt Flaherty started
for the Angels, going three innings. He was followed by Rich Salvatto,
who also went three. William
William Gomez
With the outfielders playing very close in, and much expectation of a Titan victory, Gomez got one batter to pop out, struck out the next one after a series of bunt attempts which almost succeeded, and then struck out the final batter to keep the game tied.
The umpires agreed to an extra inning, and then accepted donations to officiate a second extra inning. Gomez picked off two Titan runners to quash a threat in the 8th, and had an easy 9th to seal the victory, after Portillo's homer in the top of the inning. |
Gomez then proceeded to pitch a complete game victory in the afternoon against the Tecanteros team. Two wins for the day for William. And one blown save.
Gomez is familiar with digging himself into a big hole and then climbing out of it. We don't know the deeper causes (probably similar to Jason Gallegos below), but he works as a building contractor to fill the time between games, and learned his trade from watching those instructional videos made by The Three Stooges.
The Angels fell behind 4-0
in the second game, finally scored two in the 5th inning, and then
five more in the 6th. In that 6th, Jason Gallegos hit his second
three-run homer of the day.
J Gallegos
Gallegos helps coach the perennially-successful Lowell High School baseball team, which competed in a tournament in Hawaii the previous weekend. At Crocker, J wore a deep tan and appeared disoriented in the City's colder climate. "What am I doing here?" he asked to no one in particular. Despite being in the best shape of all the players on the field, Gallegos moans constantly about his ever-growing list of nagging injuries. His six pack strained on him, his shoulder hurt, he twisted his back, he said his ankle hurt when pointing to his thigh. For J Gallegos, life on the baseball field is like The Passion of the Christ. In seven games at Crocker, Gallegos has 5 homeruns and 16 rbis. It's a Passion Play every week. |
"With sporadic games sprinkled among the rainouts, even the most experienced player haphazardly reacquaints himself to the demands of a day on the field. Mistakes are made, and repeated. Injuries are slow to heal in the bone chill, and new ones emerge. Self-loathing bursts forth. But this inspires the effort toward renewed health and improved performance!" - Jerome Sanders Dickey
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the Aztecas team was
punctuated by a total of seven Angel homers. Willie Gomez got
credit for his 5th Winter League victory, and Mike Ryan saved
the game with a quick 9th inning.
Gomez
entered the game with a 7-5 Angel lead in the bottom of the 7th inning. William's intention
was to grab a one-inning save as the time limit neared. Instead he
immediately allowed a triple, double, and two singles, giving the Titans
an easy shot at scoring a walk-off victory with nobody out, two runs
already in, and runners at first and third.
But the Angels were down 10- 3 in the 7th, when Jason Gallegos
sparked a 10-run outburst with a three-run homer. Later that inning, he
singled in two runs. The Angels won 13-10 in 8 innings.
heroic
was his first appearance on January 25. He was so excited about playing
baseball that he came to the game without his baseball shoes. A player
lent him an extra pair. Robins trouped through the outfield and around the
bases all day, a big man with size 13 feet in size 9 shoes. After three
outs were made each inning on defense, he would walk off the field in his
bare feet. When the Travel Director, coaching third, alertly held him up
after rounding third, he dutifully stopped, grimaced, grunted, returned to
the bag, smiled a smile of Christian charity at the Travel Director and
said in a soft voice, "I wish you hadn't done that."