Youth baseball: Rites of spring

Coaches run prospective players through drills

at tryouts Sun., Jan. 28.

(Photo by Ed Piper)

By Ed Piper

On Sunday (Jan. 28), youth baseball tryouts were held at an area park. That brought back a lot of memories.

Mr. Jochums had a contraption with a rubber web that he hit flyballs to us with at Camarillo Heights Elementary School, so that we could be graded on our outfield skills.

I was only nine years old in March 1964, one month shy of my 10th birthday.

Other stations included being hit groundballs (I was a third baseman then, my older brother a lefty first baseman), and probably throwing to first base so that the coaches could evaluate our arms.

My brother and I were the "newbies" in town, our family having just moved to Camarillo the month before, Tues., Feb. 11 (I remember the exact date). Our first day in school at Las Posas School, where our baseball team would be practicing and playing our games, was Thurs., Feb. 13. (Our big sister got an extra day out of school in junior high until Friday, which we brothers definitely inquired of our parents about. We weren't sure that was totally fair.)

That's mostly what I remember about tryouts. We biked the couple of miles to Camarillo Heights from our newly-built home in Rancho Lomita (the name of the tract of houses) on the far northern end of Camarillo, then a small town of 10,000 on Highway 101 that held an election that April in which the city would be incorporated for the first time and have a mayor and councilmembers.

No parents, unlike the tryouts (all boys) I witnessed Sunday, where mothers and fathers sat behind the backstop in this age when kids are driven everywhere by their parents and supervised by them almost all the time. We weren't. We walked to school in Long Beach, then in Camarillo. No cell phones, no Apple Watches to check in with mom to make sure we make connections for the ride home after school.

We had played "rubber-covered" ball in Long Beach in the Patrick Henry League way across town (several miles of biking together without supervision, there and back). My brother's friend Paulie Bain made fun of us because we didn't play with a hardball, like real Little League.

So this was our first hardball league. We were placed on the Voodoos, which covered the Las Posas School area. The new team was named for a fighter plane at nearby Oxnard Air Force Base, just down Las Posas Road, which goes in front of our tract. One of our assistant coaches was stationed at OAFB.

Our manager was Mr. (Buck) Pena, whose son Nick was a catcher my age and who would be starting catcher my ages 11 and 12 years on the Voodoos, when we made local "fame" (I put that in quotes).

My only memory of the tryouts that triggered this recollection was a view from near the school parking lot next to the field at Camarillo Heights (way up a hill above Camarillo).