Major-League TV : Northridge Team Scores Big on ‘The Tonight Show’

Northridge’s Little Leaguers had faced adversity before, but on Monday they had to learn to deal with something more elusive than a curveball and more fleeting than a Venezuelan fastball--their own improbable celebrity.

“I’m nervous,” said Spencer Gordon, 12, the right fielder. “I have more confidence with baseball than TV.”

Spencer and the rest of the Little League team that gained fame and then the national championship as the Quake Kids were waiting backstage in Burbank to go on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno.”

If they were nervous, it didn’t show as they ran around a large room in uniform, throwing and hitting plastic whiffle balls. Venturing in was to put oneself in harm’s way. “I got hit in the leg,” laughed one “Tonight Show” staffer as she fled the room.

In the end, the Little Leaguers handled their talk show duties with the same bravado and humor that carried them from the tragedy of the Northridge earthquake, which left several without homes, to within one game of the world championship. And then allowed them to bounce back after they lost that game to a tough Venezuelan team.

“They’ve always been loose,” said manager Larry Baca, seated against a wall and out of the way, shrugging at his inability to explain it.

And they remained that way when the cameras started rolling. Leno introduced them, calling them “the most amazing story. . . . A lot of these kids don’t have houses.”

This was a touch of hyperbole. Only one is still out of his house.

The host asked Spencer about the loss in the final game at Williamsport, Pa. The boy admitted it was “real disappointing. It was an off day for us.”

Would they like to try to hit off him, the host asked.

“I’ll take you yard,” blustered Spencer, using a baseball phrase that means to hit a home run.

Leno lobbed a couple of whiffle balls up there and the Little Leaguers bashed them into the audience. Then the host pleaded a sore arm and brought in a surprise reliever, Dodger pitcher Orel Hershiser. The professional didn’t fare much better. One ball hit the lights above the stage. It may not have been as impressive as hitting one out of Tiger Stadium, but the crowd cheered its waffling flight.

Another guest, former pro football star and commentator Terry Bradshaw, ridiculed baseball players as wimps when the subject of the ongoing baseball strike came up. At the show’s end, the host asked how the boys from Northridge felt about that. The players jumped on Bradshaw in playful revenge.

After it was all over and the music had died away and the bank of monitors above the stage had gone black, the team posed with Leno for a picture.