RAMANCING THE DIAMOND : Pending Marriage of Coach to Pitcher Will Further Bond Long-Standing Softball Team From Burbank

A summer sunset lights the San Gabriel Mountains, providing a romantic backdrop as J. R. Schwer spends an evening in Izay Park with his fiancee, Robin Smola, a former Miss Burbank. He watches her jog across a field, then admires her from afar. Somebody asks him to describe her at this moment. He thinks, rocks back in his snakeskin cowboy boots and says, “She’s got a great arm.”

There’s more than just love in the air at this park. Softballs are pinging off aluminum bats and one-line zingers are also being launched by the Delta Van Cruisers, a women’s fast-pitch softball team in Burbank’s top league. Schwer, coach of the team along with Mike Mirabel, is standing near the backstop, watching his bride-to-be whip 70 m. p. h. fastballs across the plate.

“She throws harder than most men,” he says.

Schwer, 33, a former minor league outfielder, will marry Robin, 30, on Aug. 12 in Burbank. The wedding will be attended by the other members of the Cruisers, but their presence is no mere gesture of team unity. The Cruisers have played in Burbank Park and Recreation Department leagues since 1978, but the nucleus of the team goes back to Ponytail League and even before.

“It’s like a family,” says Mirabel, who has coached Robin for nearly 20 years. “We’ve managed to stay together.”

The closeness of the team will be cemented even further at the wedding when Schwer officially becomes a member of the family. His sister-in-law will be Rene Smola, 28, who has always been Robin’s catcher. His mother-in-law will be Pat Smola, who recently retired after playing with the Cruisers for nine years. Pat now serves as scorekeeper.

Second baseman Lisa DiOrio also has been involved with the team since her early teens. Back then, the team was known as the Stephen’s Electrons and played in the Ponytail League. After the girls turned 18, the Electrons became the Cruisers and were joined by Betty Harrison, a 5-foot-10 first baseman who was more than twice their age. Harrison, now 53 and a grandmother, still plays one night a week with the Cruisers and three or four nights a week with other teams.

“They tell me they’re going to bury me on the mound,” Harrison says with a laugh.

Stories about coaches who join forces with pee-wee league teams and then stick together aren’t rare--Bob Hawking and his Simi Valley High basketball team is another example--but seldom has there been a relationship like the one between Mirabel and his players, particularly Robin and Rene.

“Mike has been like a father to us,” Rene says.

Actually, Mike almost became their stepfather, too. When Pat moved to Burbank from Minnesota 23 years ago, she was married, and the family used to go to Burbank parks on Sundays to watch fast-pitch softball. “One thing I wanted to do when we moved to California was get the kids involved in softball,” Pat says.

They’d see two games and go out to dinner in between. Even as youngsters the girls, Pat says, had no trouble sitting still at games. They were mesmerized.

In 1971, Pat, by then divorced, started dating Mirabel. He decided to teach the youngsters to play softball. Knowing little about the sport, he attended the best games in the area and studied the best players. When it was apparent that the girls had talent, he sometimes worked with them until 3 a.m. in the back yard of their house.

“Robin was 12 or 13 when I tried to get her on this good Ponytail team called the Dutch Girls,” Mirabel recalls. She was a couple of years younger than the other girls and the team accepted her reluctantly.

“But in her first game, she struck out 21 batters,” Mirabel says. “Nobody could touch her. She had a natural drop ball.”

Robin and Rene--”who can throw people out from her knees,” Robin says--were always two of the stars of the team, a battery with psychic connections. “She knows what I’m thinking on the mound and I know what she’s thinking,” Robin says. Their teams were always among the best in the league--from Ponytail to high school (Robin played at Burroughs) to park and rec.

“We had so many trophies we had to start throwing some of them away,” Pat says.

Mike’s association with the team lasted longer than his relationship with Pat (They went together for seven years and are “still best of friends,” Mike says.). Through the years, “I must have taught 500 or 600 girls to play softball,” says Mirabel, who also paid most of the girls’ fees.

What kept him coaching?

“It’s something I just loved to do,” he answers.

The glory days for the Cruisers came during a five-year unbeaten streak in the Double-A League in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Robin, a league all-star and MVP, once pitched a doubleheader against a touring national championship team, Mirabel says, and won both games by 1-0 scores.

Mirabel, a bus broker who lives in Downey with his wife and 2-year-old son, also became a fair pitcher himself. He was an apprentice of Rosie Black, the star of a barnstorming team known as “The Queen and Her Court.” Black also worked with Robin and Rene.

“I was one of the top pitchers in the B league,” Mirabel says, “but I couldn’t get any faster than that.”

Once Robin began dating Schwer, an assistant baseball coach at Newport Harbor High and a teacher at a juvenile hall in Garden Grove, it was inevitable that Schwer would begin helping Mirabel coach the Cruisers. Schwer was playing in a modified fast-pitch league at Balboa Park when a mutual friend figured that J. R. and Robin, both attractive and athletic, would hit it off, so he introduced them and told Schwer, “You should go out with her,” J. R. recalls.

Schwer, who has been assisting Mirabel for the past two years, runs practice with the precision of a drill sergeant. “Keep the bat at a 45-degree angle,” he instructs shortstop Gwen Indermill as she works on her bunting technique. “Now pull the trigger.” She taps the ball slowly down the third-base line. “That’s the girl,” Schwer says. “Head down and body down.”

During practice and games, the Cruisers, like most women’s teams, have a cheerful rapport with their teammates as well as with opposing players. Even though games are competitive, there’s no sense of the cutthroat play that marks men’s games, Schwer observed.

“Guys are always at each other’s throats when they play,” he says. “They’re always ragging on someone. The women just have a good time. After the game, they go out and have fun. They don’t rehash anything.”

But the once-dominant Cruisers appear to be slipping. They’re playing only .500 ball this season and haven’t won a league title since 1982. “We peaked around 1982 and ‘83,” Pat Smola says. “We were the team to beat back then.” Age is creeping up on them. And Robin and Rene have been playing a long time.

“It’s been our ‘last year’ for the last five years,” Rene says.

“But it’s always been ‘one more season,’ ” Robin says, adding: “We hope we go on as long as Betty.”

If they do, there’s a good chance they’ll have to play without Mirabel, who’s thinking of handing the reins to Schwer at the end of the season. The 45-minute drive from Downey to Burbank is getting to him, he says, and besides, he just bought a 25-foot cabin cruiser.

“I want to go fishing,” he says.