West Bones Up on Hitting in Mystic Meeting

YOUNTVILLE, Calif. —  Sometime about 11 p.m. on a dark and quiet Sunday here, the Woodland Hills West American Legion baseball team gathered in a circle on Borman Field.

If you find that strange, you don’t know the half of it.

It’s what they were doing that was really strange.

“We were getting the hex off of our bats,” explained first baseman Ryan McGuire, who called the impromptu meeting.

But just settling for that explanation wouldn’t be right either. The complete story goes something like this:

After two games in the state tournament here, Woodland Hills had scraped together just nine runs in 18 innings--well below average for the heavy-hitting team. McGuire figured something drastic had to be done to the bats if the team was to come up with two big wins on Monday against San Leandro and Napa.

“I went down to the restaurant in town,” McGuire said, “and asked them if they had a spare steak bone lying around, for my dog, I said, and they said no. So I asked them for a chicken bone, or anything and they said they didn’t have anything. So, I went to the store and bought a (plastic) doggie bone.”

Still baffled? Catcher Bobby Kim was, too.

“Someone said that Ryan wanted to have a meeting outside,” Kim said. “We didn’t know why.”

Once outside and all alone on the empty field, the players gathered in a circle and held hands, with their bats on the ground. McGuire went around the circle with the store-bought doggie bone and rubbed each bat.

The ploy was reminiscent of a scene in the motion picture “Bull Durham,” in which one player rubbed a cross made of chicken bones to get the hex off of his bat.

Meanwhile, as McGuire rubbed the bats, the scene grew stranger when Kim suddenly burst into a Korean prayer to further rid the team of the evil hitting spirits. When Kim finished, Jeff Marks followed with a similarly unexpected Jewish prayer, with the same intentions.

All the while, the players held hands and stared at the sky.

“It looked like a cult out there,” Ricky Banuelos said.

Before dismissing this incident in the boys-will-be-boys file, consider the words of outfielder Jason Cohen.

“It worked,” Cohen insisted. “It really worked.”

A check of the numbers: In the three games after the ritual, Woodland Hills compiled 40 runs, 47 hits and five home runs, including two grand slams.

Needless to say, the bone, which hung faithfully on a rope in the Woodland Hills dugout, will be making the trip to Idaho.