Off-Season Baseball and Barbecues May Go on Back Burner

Two baseball teams play a game. Instead of jerseys, the players wear T-shirts. No statistics are kept. No umpires are used. One team has an 11-man lineup with three designated hitters. At the end of nine innings, one team has more runs than the other but they play four more innings anyway. A relief pitcher starts the game and a starter comes in to mop up. After the game, the home team has a barbecue for the visiting team.

The hosts of the barbecue look familiar. They look like the players from College of the Canyons, the defending community college state champions. And the guys walking around a maintenance yard at Canyons, slurping on the barbecued chicken, look like the baseball team from Allan Hancock.

What’s going on here? You have baseball players playing a game that really isn’t baseball. Then you have supposed adversaries mingling around the charcoals exchanging ideas on how to improve split-fingered fastballs, eating baby back ribs. In November .

It’s fall baseball. Winter baseball. Club baseball. It is not the real thing.

“During the real season,” Canyons pitcher Chris Zavatsky said, “you probably won’t find yourself hanging out with the other team after the game.”

Not every team has as much fun with club baseball as Zavatsky and the Newhall Cats.

Although some coaches, like Canyons’ Len Mohney, who coaches the Cats, believe junior college baseball teams playing in the fall under the auspices of a club team is a necessity--others do not. To Butte College Coach Jim Lauer, it is a travesty; players from some Southern California community colleges have an unfair advantage over teams, such as Butte College of Oroville, Calif., which, in many cases, cannot play as many games and do not play against competition of the same caliber that Southland JCs do.

“It has gotten out of hand down south,” said Lauer, who faced Canyons in last season’s state tournament in Long Beach. “They want to battle each other all year, to the extreme end of the scale. The state needs to standardize and set some guidelines and then stick to them.

“I don’t think we should be playing under false names. We should all be in agreement. Maybe I’m just an old country bumpkin, but either we can or we can’t. Either we are or we aren’t. Let’s get out of this gray area and play ball.”

There are guidelines now, according to Walt Rilliet, the athletic commissioner of the California Assn. of Community Colleges, and there are plans for new, more strict rules. The most important of which, Lauer and Rilliet agreed, is the number of games a team can play.

Presently, there are no restrictions on the number of games a club team can play.

Said Lauer: “My biggest gripe is that it takes away the solidity from their education. A player plays all day, all year. Hey, this is taking away from school. Baseball is a very short future for most of them. I really don’t see it as acclimating them to the right way of life because they don’t have good study habits. They have to realize school is more important.”

Zavatsky has a 3.35 grade-point average and works 20-25 hours a week. He was the winning pitcher in two games at the state championship tournament last season.

“The fall schedule has never been a problem for me,” Zavatsky said. “And I don’t think you can say that just because a guy plays a fall schedule he is going to have problems with grades. I think the majority of junior college athletes don’t achieve success in the classroom. Classes would be a problem for some guys whether they played or not.”

But most play. The Newhall Cats, the Butte County Bears and the Southwest Warriors are names of club or town baseball teams that are comprised mostly of players from Canyons, Butte College, and El Camino College, respectively. The teams play during the fall and winter and are not supposed to be affiliated with any college. The teams are supposed to pay to use campus fields, use their own equipment and pay their own insurance. Also, the teams may not use the college’s name or its uniforms.

Mohney goes out of his way to make sure that his team is not affiliated with the school. When a newspaper reported that “College of the Canyons” would play the Nicaraguan national team in October, Mohney was miffed.

“We’re not supposed to be affiliated with the college and we’re going to keep it that way,” Mohney said. “We’re the Newhall Cats, not the COC Cougars. We have our own insurance and our own baseballs. The modern-day catcher has his own equipment and everyone has their own Easton nowawdays.”

Miles away from the post-game barbecue at Canyons, Pierce’s club team, the Woodland Hills Sox, was swinging its Eastons, too.

“You’re kind of trapped into doing it,” Pierce Coach Charlie Williams said. “It’s just a bunch of kids getting together to play, sure, but you have to do it. You have to keep it going so when the season starts, there is the same intensity.”

Mohney said Canyons would barely survive without fall baseball.

“If you don’t have it, you’re behind everybody in the state,” he said. “It keeps the kids in shape. And with our weather, we try to take advantage of it. All the JCs I know do it.”

Stu Van Horn, the publicist for the state commission, is a proponent of more strict guidelines.

“JC baseball is an interesting sport,” Van Horn said. “Where else do you play 80 games before the conference even starts? It’s kind of weird.”

Rilliet, the athletic commissioner, supports fall and winter baseball, but also believes new rules are necessary. Of California’s 96 JCs, 88 field baseball teams. The rules allow each team a maximum of 36 games in the spring.

“We don’t want to curtail them from playing games,” he said. “We just want them to do it under some guidelines. We have drawn these seasons of sport to try and maintain parity and equity. That means Eureka as well as Orange County.

“We think that maintains an equal balance. But whereas Orange Coast can play Golden West by driving for about 10 minutes, Butte can’t very well play Sac City. It’s more than an hour and a half drive.

“It gives people an unfair advantage if we open up and say, ‘Play whenever you want.’ ”

Zavatsky, the Canyons pitcher, disagrees. “The only advantage we have over schools in Northern California, is that we have the luxury of having so many good baseball schools nearby,” he said. “We can play USC, UCLA, Pepperdine, Cal State Fullerton. The schools up there don’t have that. But they can still play and learn, they can still get the basics down. That’s why we play in the fall--to work all those things out.”

Rilliet said the commission next month will meet with coaches to discuss tighter rules for fall baseball. One possible change would limit the number of games that a JC may play before the regular season begins in February. The NCAA limit is 20 games before the regular season. Rilliet would like to see a similar rule for JCs.

“California has opportunities other states don’t have,” he said. “The weather in California is perfect. On the East Coast maybe the only thing they have is a batting cage indoors during the fall and winter.

“Out of this open forum, the commission will try to tone things down here. We don’t want to keep people from playing, but we would rather do it under good auspices. This is a positive. People want to play but they have to go to school, too.”

Rilliet is hopeful that his commission’s forum in January will define fall baseball for good. He may come against heavy opposition because, he said, any one of the coaches can name a dozen players who have turned professional. It’s tough to battle success, he said.

The list of former California JC players in the major leagues includes Doug DeCinces (Angels) who played at Pierce. Terry Pendleton (Cardinals) and Jerry Willard (A’s) played at Oxnard; Kevin Romine (Red Sox) and Donnie Hill (White Sox) played at Orange Coast; Matt Young (Dodgers) and Darrell Evans (Tigers) played at Pasadena City; Eric King (Tigers) played at Moorpark; Jesse Orosco (Mets) played at Santa Barbara.

“Where do we draw the line?” Rilliet said. “California community colleges were not established to provide farm teams for major league baseball.

“We just need to have a balance right now. There is no balance between books and baseball . . . if a baseball player is playing all fall and then 36 games during the season, hey, he still has to go to school. We’re just asking the coaches to look at what they’re doing.”

Until more strict rules are adopted, which may be as early as next month, fall baseball will go on under assumed names and cloudy rules.

“There’s no way you can stop fall baseball,” Lauer said. “They’ll create a way to play.”

Said Zavatsky: “If it was canceled, I’m sure coaches would find another way to do it. But it’s low key, a different approach than regular baseball. And, if it weren’t for winter baseball, I wouldn’t have gotten the exposure I have. We have played all the major baseball schools from UC Santa Barbara to Cal State Fullerton. I hope it pays off.”