LJ baseball: 'I could hit the ball out of Lane Field'

Dave Jordan, just graduated

from La Jolla High, playing

for the Stockton Ports.

(Courtesy photo from

Dave Jordan)

By Ed Piper

"I could hit the ball out of Lane Field," says Dave Jordan, a former La Jolla High baseball star in the Class of 1955. "Lefty O'Doul's players couldn't."

Mind you, Dave Jordan was a pipsqueak prep player at the time, acting as batboy, then clubhouse boy for the San Diego Padres, a minor league team who played at the downtown ballpark. Lefty O'Doul, the Padres' manager, had won two National League batting titles and went on to great success coaching minor leaguers.

"He taught me how to hit," Jordan assured me as he sat in my living room. Jordan, a lefthanded hitting first baseman and outfielder, apparently could crush the ball, and O'Doul, adept at sizing up talent, helped him develop that difficult skill--as Ted Williams later assessed it, "hitting a round object with a round object" (a baseball bat).

O'Doul, who took the young Jordan under his wing as a junior high student out of Pacific Beach and took him out to dinner with Joe DiMaggio and his moviestar wife, Marilyn Monroe, twice, asked Dave--his first name Willis--to pitch batting practice.

Dave made a deal with his mentor: he'd pitch batting practice, only if he himself could take swings as well. That deal stuck, and O'Doul over-ruled his pro players on the team, who objected that a little kid was taking up their time during valuable batting practice.

Jordan could throw well enough to make it worth the minor leaguers' time in practice.

Over two or three years, O'Doul helped the young Viking improve his swing. This is the period when Dave said he could hit the ball out of Lane Field, the Padres' first field on Broadway, famous for the fog rolling in later in the evening and making it difficult to see in the outfield.

Jordan tells a funny one about the fog: Players would take a ball out with them when they played the outfield. With it so difficult to see during the fog--from the stands as well as on the playing surface--they might just throw the ball hidden in their uniform in to the infield, and let the other one roll toward the fence.

To pitch morning batting practice, the mischievous Jordan would ditch school and cadge a ride down to the ballpark.

But there was a price to pay: with Pacific Beach and La Jolla being much less populated in those days, "When I did something wrong, my mother knew about it before I got home." The Jordans lived on Hornblend in Pacific Beach.

In those days, the Vikings played in Edwards Stadium on the high school campus. "We thought it was a great place to play," he beams. The field was situated under the concrete stands near the corner of Fay and Rushville, and right field was in the direction of the tennis courts.

The powerful Dave, who was good enough in high school to be signed to a minor league contract by the Orioles organization at the age of 18, pulled home runs toward the tennis courts. Right field was the only area with a home run fence. Center and left field were open, because track athletes trained there. That posed a situation where track runners working out could be hit by batted balls.

That only ended decades later when the Vikings' present ballpark was constructed up the hill on the Muirlands campus.

O'Doul's careful eye, and hitting acumen, had finally passed on its wisdom to the young Dave Jordan. Jordan played five seasons in the pros, starting out with the Oakland Oaks.