Team Making a Run at Baseball Title

This isn’t Little League anymore.

The 15 area teenagers competing in the Big League Baseball World Series today have facial hair and college plans. One even has an offer to play for the Detroit Tigers organization.

In the dog days of summer, the all-star Conejo Valley squad is taking to a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., field to compete against Venezuela in the tournament, which is for boys ages 17 and 18.

Formed just six weeks ago, the team has played 17 games in the last month on ball fields from California to Florida.

The players are riding a 15-game winning streak going into today’s winner-take-all game against the Venezuelan team, but are underdogs--Americans have won only two of the last 12 championships.

In between, the team has come as close as one strikeout away from losing its quest for the title. And center fielder Brian Forkin of Thousand Oaks has experienced the joy of being part of the triumphant squad that won the national championship Wednesday, only to have his father succumb to cancer a day later.

Today, Forkin and the rest of the team will play in front of a national television audience at 9 a.m. on ESPN-2 while as many as 50 proud parents and friends congregate at a Thousand Oaks pizza parlor to cheer them on.

“Youth baseball by definition pretty much ends at 18,” said coach Steve Henson, who is also a Times sportswriter. “This is a final youthful fling. This is the final hurrah.”

The players all hail from the organization’s District 13--from the Santa Clara River to Kanan Road--and must have played for a Big League team within the district this season before joining the all-star team, said Earl Stone, District 13 administrator of Little League Baseball. Players had to be no older than 18 as of July 31.

Coming from six area high schools--Westlake, Newbury Park, Thousand Oaks, Moorpark, Camarillo and Agoura--they have played against one another for years.

Most will go on to play for college and perhaps professional teams. Camarillo High catcher Joe Yingling, whom The Times named county player of the year, has been drafted by the Detroit Tigers and must decide after the game whether to turn pro or attend college.

With adolescence giving way to adulthood, the team has come together rapidly.

“I played against a lot of them, and the ones I played against were the top ballplayers on every team,” said Dave Turner, today’s starting pitcher. “We’re getting closer together, and then if we lose, we pretty much don’t hang out with each other anymore. So to stay together, we had to win.”

And win they have.

“In this tournament we’ve outscored our opponents 45-12,” Henson said. “We won our national championship with the ‘mercy rule.’ ”

The rule dictates that if a team is ahead by 10 runs by the end of the fifth inning, the seven-inning game is called. Conejo Valley beat Macon, Ga., 10-0 on Wednesday, scoring seven runs in the fifth inning.

Some of the team’s toughest games came early.

At the sectional tournament in San Luis Obispo, Conejo Valley lost one game to Santa Barbara and was in danger of losing a second game--and the competition--when, with two outs in the bottom of the seventh, right fielder Mike Falco came through with a home run.

The team then beat Santa Barbara again to advance to the next round.

By winning the regional tournament in Sacramento and the national title, Conejo Valley has become the first team from the West Coast to play for the Big League World Series championship since Buena Park in 1980.

“We’ve got nothing to lose now,” said left fielder Matt Bernstein. “Our confidence level is incredible. . . .We don’t play against the other team; we’re playing against the game of baseball.”

With that kind of intensity, the focus hasn’t been on keeping the team under control on the diamond, but off the field, Henson said.

Partly out of team unity--and partly out of boredom--a dozen of the players on the roster dyed their hair a shocking bleached blond on their second day in the national championship tournament.

The move has helped perpetuate the stereotype of wild and crazy Southern Californians, Henson said. And it has energized the folks watching at home.

“I’m kind of excited he didn’t sign with Detroit right away,” Joe Yingling Sr. said of his son. “It’s just been overwhelming. . . . It’s the first time we’ve been able to see him on television.”

The next step is to see Yingling and his teammates come home with a trophy.