Diamonds For Women

[dodgerblue6]

It's all getting underway this week!

I've noticed that BA.com now lists its rankings by region rather than nationally.

It's hard to argue with any in the Pacific Division top 15--LCC at No. 15 is the only representative from San Diego County, but JSerra at No. 1 is perhaps the least surprising revelation.
_________________
"The Dodgers have always occupied an enormous place in the history of the game. If the Yankees are the most successful team in baseball history, the Dodgers are the most essential. Their legacy is unique."

-Baseball Hall of Fame

[forloveofthegame]

Really happy to get this one going.
_________________
"Baseball is an allegorical play about America, a poetic, complex, and subtle play of courage, fear, good luck, mistakes, patience about fate, and sober self-esteem." - Saul Steinberg

[dodgerblue6]

Haven't gotten out to one game yet! It hasn't helped with all the rain we've had, either. But the Lions Tournament is coming up (April 3-6), and if we can spare the precipitation, all the better.
_________________
"The Dodgers have always occupied an enormous place in the history of the game. If the Yankees are the most successful team in baseball history, the Dodgers are the most essential. Their legacy is unique."

-Baseball Hall of Fame

[dodgerblue6]

How far behind are we here? Cathy, I know you went to one of the Lions Tournament games. La Costa Canyon beat Eastlake, 3-1, to win it, and the Mavericks now sport a 12-1 record.

I wanted to also share this uplifting story from the L.A. Times about prep players of Filipino descent paving the way for baseball in the Philippines.

"Local Filipino American Players Pave Way for Baseball’s Growth in Philippines"

BY LUCA EVANS
MARCH 26, 2023 4:30 AM PT

Nestled in a clearing between rye fields and lush jungle, the bases on one of the few baseball diamonds in the Philippines’ Tanauan City sat in sludge.

In video taken by scouts visiting the area, a rooster crowed in the background and a dog watched from behind a rusty foul-line fence.

Baseball dreams hardly exist there, where kids play with fraying gloves and a cracked yellow bucket of cowhide-less baseballs. Yet to representatives visiting last summer from the Philippines national baseball team, the field represented promise.

“There is endless possibility out there,” said Bill Picketts, head coach of the Philippines national team. “There’s nothing. There’s no facilities.”

There are hundreds of kids with unbridled joy for the sport, as Picketts — also the head coach at L.A. Pierce College — saw during a summer trip to Tanauan City. Vince Sagisi, a former Major League Baseball scout of 13 years who’s now the Philippines national team’s recruiting coordinator, said he stumbled upon a 14-year-old with a wipeout three-pitch mix and a shortstop “making throws like Derek Jeter” on a six-week trip to the islands.

Baseball has long taken a backseat to basketball in Filipino culture. Picketts and Sagisi, though, look at the Philippines as the next Dominican Republic: an international gold mine for baseball scouting.

“I’ve always believed there’s talent there,” Sagisi said. “It could be the next big Asian market to take off.”

Growing the game in the Philippines, the national team believes, starts with a pipeline to Los Angeles as a slew of Filipino-American talent is popping up across the Southland. Over the summer, much of that talent played together on a youth national team alongside a couple of players from the Philippines.

For many, it inspired hope they could help build a baseball culture in the Philippines — and turn the region into a force on the world’s biggest stage.

“Playing for a nationality, building it up now, I think it’d be really important for me to play on the [World Baseball Classic] team,” said Loyola’s Adam Magpoc, who is half-Filipino and has committed to Boston College.

“I was here when it started,” Magpoc continued. “So I’m going to be there when it’s successful.”

These days, JB Dalumpines’ voice rarely raises above a mutter.

In youth baseball, the Birmingham High third baseman used to be loud. Then he noticed there wasn’t anyone who looked like him sitting in the dugout and started to feel he didn’t belong.

When he was 10, he was standing at third in a travel-ball game when a parent yelled at him from the stands. Dalumpines doesn’t remember exactly what — “something racist,” he said — but the words hit like a blow to the stomach.

“It hurt me first, but then it started to motivate me,” Dalumpines said. “Like, I got to prove that guy wrong.”

The lack of Filipino representation in baseball is stark; only a handful of players of Filipino descent have played in the majors. Sagisi once was a scouting supervisor for the Cleveland Guardians, assigned to the Los Angeles and Central California areas. Filipino-American players were, as he said, “hard to find.”

Beacons have started to pop up across the Southland. Dalumpines and Taft’s Elijah Gaviola play in the City Section; Magpoc, Harvard-Westlake’s Kai Caranto and Sherman Oaks Notre Dame’s Kai Gonzaga are all standouts on strong Mission League teams.

More than a dozen others extend across schools from West L.A. to the Inland Empire. And most came together to share a dugout for the youth Philippines national team over the summer.

“It opened up my eyes,” Redondo Union’s Kyler Gloth said, “to the possibilities.”

This summer, Picketts is planning college showcases for that youth team and a “Filipino World Series” at Pierce College to pull together a range of talent across the world. The goal is simple — grow the number of college-level Filipino-American players in Los Angeles to provide exposure for players in the Philippines.

“It’s important to show the kids there is a path,” said Picketts’ son Will, the national team’s director of baseball operations. “Kids like Magpoc and JB that can lead the way for our very first group of Filipino players … are very important.”

The Philippines has never qualified for the World Baseball Classic. With Japan winning this year’s WBC, Sagisi said, it should serve as motivation.

Before every game last summer, players on the youth national team would utter a simple war cry: “Laban!”

It’s the Philippines’ informal version of a “Let’s go!” More precisely translated in Tagalog, a major language of the Philippines:

“A fight!”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Last, the precipitation this winter and spring have affected the CIF schedule quite a bit.

Another from the L.A. Times:

"Rainouts Wash Away Seasons For Some City Section Baseball and Softball Teams"

BY LUCA EVANS
APRIL 16, 2023 9:52 AM PT

Aaron Beltran can play baseball. He’s a “unique talent” at Panorama High, coach Cullen Haywood said.

But last Monday, quite literally, Beltran could not play. He had no pants.

With that simple confession to Haywood — he’d forgotten his baseball pants — the circus set off. Here was the coach, trying to sew together a team four hours before a game against Granada Hills Kennedy, and his best pitcher had no pants.

Now, he could get the kid pants. But even if so, Haywood’s catcher hadn’t completed his physical. So Haywood didn’t have anyone who could handle Beltran’s fastballs behind home plate, and his only other pitcher was ineligible, and so there was nobody around who could feasibly either throw or catch because there’d been no chance to practice … and over the phone Haywood let out a sigh that weighed about 5,000 pounds.

Panorama lost to Kennedy 35-2 that afternoon, in just its third game of the season.

“They really need to get some playing under their belt, and it’s not happening,” Haywood said of Panorama (0-4). “So it’s going to be pretty much a wash for us this year.”

A pun both genius and grim. Record rainfall in Los Angeles this spring has rewired the schedules of most high school baseball and softball teams. Most top-tier programs in the Southern Section and the City have been able to bounce back without issue, with the resources and field maintenance to capably handle the elements.

For a range of lower-division programs across the city, the weather has been unusually catastrophic. Schools such as Panorama and Van Nuys have fields that don’t drain properly, leaving conditions a mess for up to a week; others such as Dorsey and Maywood Academy practice and play at neighborhood parks, which require reservations for field use well in advance.

It’s another example of the widening divide between the haves and have-nots in Los Angeles high school sports, often leaving programs in lower-income communities of color with a never-ending uphill climb. Haywood, for example, is fighting to shift the culture at Panorama. But how is there a path forward when he hasn’t been able to even get on a field?

“This is almost a lost year — in my view, this year’s going to go down like a COVID year,” said Dorsey softball coach Wayne Kimble. “Because these kids just didn’t get the reps.”

Last Tuesday, Maywood Academy finally played its first game of the season, almost two months after its season opener was scheduled.

Sounds impossible? The players don’t have their own field; instead, they’re at the mercy of Maywood Park, which hosts Maywood High games and the Dodgers’ youth RBI program. The park has canceled a number of games because of poor field conditions from the rain, Maywood coach Patrick McGlynn said, and rescheduling is difficult given the shared use.

“The kids haven’t had a chance to play a ton of baseball the last few years,” McGlynn said, referencing COVID-19. “I can tell that it’s really frustrating for some of the older kids.”

Skill development is limited when you’re forced to practice primarily on a soccer field. And as the runs ticked up and an April afternoon ticked away in the span of their first inning Tuesday against Torres High, players in the dugout grew antsy. An hour into an eventual 15-0 loss that ended via mercy rule, the St. Genevieve High baseball team — a Southern Section program — walked behind the Maywood Academy bench to prepare for a subsequent doubleheader against Torres.

Multiple Maywood Academy players pulled themselves to the chain-link fence, calling out:

“Anyone want to put on a uniform?”

The lack of reps at lower levels is widespread. Dorsey softball has played one game this spring after an 8-2 finish last year. Huntington Park baseball has played five after 13 games last year. Entire months of scheduling have been canceled as rain ravaged home fields and local parks.

Complicating matters, reassembling schedules has been difficult thanks to a nationwide officiating shortage.

“It was horrendous, the number of games that were switched in and out … to find new [umpires] was very difficult,” said Kirk West, a San Fernando Valley and Santa Clarita Valley umpire assigner for the City and Southern Section.

Kimble has paid about $200 out of his own pocket at Dorsey, he said, to hire someone to clean up the field at the Rancho Cienega Sports Complex where Dorsey practices. He still hasn’t received clearance to play, he said.

City Section information director Dick Dornan said the responsibility to schedule games at off-campus fields and parks falls on individual schools, and that the section hadn’t heard complaints from programs about the issue. Kimble seeks a broader partnership between the Los Angeles Unified School District and the Department of Recreation and Parks.

“Be in the yearbook, wear the uniform, represent their school on their jersey - that’s part of the authentic high school experience,” Kimble said. “And I think some of these kids are robbed of that.”

In part because of the effects of COVID-19 and this year’s rainouts, Maywood Academy pitcher Samuel Loza had never toed a high school mound. Tuesday’s loss to Torres, at the very least, was a chance to wear that jersey — the day etching both hope and disappointment in a wistful smile on Loza’s face.

“It definitely has been a little hard,” Loza said. “But I guess we just try to take any opportunity we can get.”
_________________
"The Dodgers have always occupied an enormous place in the history of the game. If the Yankees are the most successful team in baseball history, the Dodgers are the most essential. Their legacy is unique."

-Baseball Hall of Fame

[sunnyblue]

I had read that before, but I'm glad you shared it. With our great programs and all the talent there is here, players from Socal shape baseball all over the world.

[forloveofthegame]

Yes, thank you for reminding me! We saw Del Norte beat Madison, 8-2. LCC has a great team this year.
_________________
"Baseball is an allegorical play about America, a poetic, complex, and subtle play of courage, fear, good luck, mistakes, patience about fate, and sober self-esteem." - Saul Steinberg

[sunnyblue]

I found out something from talking to a friend in OC this morning. I heard something about this last year but didn't follow it much, and now, he's a senior reliever so he's getting more notice. Logan Rome is a right hander pitching for University High in Irvine. I remember when his brother Jake was there a few years ago but supposedly Logan is the better of the brothers at baseball. Here's an article from Maxpreps about him.

[forloveofthegame]

I had not heard that, Sunny. Thanks for info. I remember a few years back he was making the rounds with a travel team.
_________________
"Baseball is an allegorical play about America, a poetic, complex, and subtle play of courage, fear, good luck, mistakes, patience about fate, and sober self-esteem." - Saul Steinberg

[dodgerblue6]

I have to admit, even though I did post earlier about the rainouts affecting the "have-nots" teams around Socal, I was still not aware there was a team this hapless playing CIF baseball as the one described here. But...

From the L.A. Times:

"A Girl Who Wanted to Play Baseball, Emily Varela is Washington Prep’s ‘Golden Ticket’ "

BY LUCA EVANS
APRIL 28, 2023 9:26 AM PT

Hope is hard to come by, out here, where weeds twist up from the dirt mound and the coach carries not a bucket but a tiny pail of usable baseballs.

Washington Prep’s baseball team has the day off Thursday afternoon, and new head coach Erik Cortez has assembled but a handful of frolicking players for a pseudo-practice. To give his pitchers some live-batter simulation, he steps into the box, urging a kid on the mound to throw the ball over the plate.

It does not happen. The pitcher, scared of hitting his coach, lobs offering after offering into the dirt into the opposite batter’s box.

Elsewhere, parent Catalina Varela, who’s stopped by after work, calls to a kid shagging balls on first base. On, because he is quite literally standing on first base, and Varela motions for him to move over, position himself off of the base.

Hope is hard to come by, because this is life at the bottom. For the last two decades, there might not be a worse baseball team in the entire City Section.
At Washington Prep, where about a quarter of the community in surrounding Westmont lives in poverty, baseball has exactly one non-forfeit win since the 2014 season. Their “coaches,” before Cortez was hired as a P.E. teacher, have been a rotating array of volunteers and Spanish instructors, the team using the simplest of lineups last year: The first baseman hit first, second baseman second, and so on.

“It was just, like, a catastrophe,” said sophomore Kainoa Kaiwi.

Yet freshman Emily Varela, the next pitcher who takes the mound on Thursday, is not afraid of catastrophe. She is afraid of nothing, in fact: not a boy, not crowds telling her she should go back to softball. Varela is a girl playing baseball. She also has the best arm at Washington Prep.

So to Cortez, to Washington Prep athletic director Ahmad Mallard, to a program that’s experienced a lack of resources and motivation for decades, Varela is more than a talent.

“She’s the golden ticket,” Mallard said.

Since Varela raised her grades enough to be eligible to play a few weeks ago, she’s struck out double-digit hitters in three games, and the program has taken on a new energy.

She grew up playing baseball at Jesse Owens Park in South L.A. because of her late grandfather, Heriberto, who played in an adult league in Los Angeles. She could’ve pivoted in high school to softball, where she would’ve had a better chance at a college scholarship. But Varela wanted to play baseball, wearing her grandpa’s cleats in his memory when she plays.

“It was shocking,” Kaiwi said. “Usually, people didn’t want to play. So when she showed us how determined she was to play, it was like, ‘Oh.’ It brings everybody up.”

The spark started the first day Cortez invited Varela, who’d heard the team needed a catcher, up to the mound to pitch against the team in practice.

“He saw none of the boys could hit a ball when I was pitching,” Varela grinned.

“She struck most of us out,” Kaiwi said, “and we’re like, ‘Dang.’ ”

Mallard did a double-take when he saw a girl had signed up for the baseball team. But he, and so many others, were made believers on April 10 when Varela whiffed 10 in a 9-6 win over Crenshaw.

“My goal is to maybe just highlight her, and show the success that we’re having with her,” Mallard said. “And maybe she can bring girls to the team, and bring more boys to the team, and maybe even help with softball.”

It’s already working. Two of Varela’s friends, who Cortez said knew nothing about baseball but help with scorekeeping and other tasks, have officially been added to the roster.

And now, Varela’s teammates beg Cortez to pitch her every game.

“And I love that,” Cortez said, “because other than that, the kids will not be motivated. We would keep on losing over and over. [We] wouldn’t have some sort of hope on our team.

“Which, is Emily, at this point.”



Luca Evans is a multimedia journalist focused on prep sports for the Los Angeles Times. A 2022 graduate of Chapman University, Evans worked as the sports and managing editor of the campus newspaper before beginning freelance work with The Times. He is focused on broadening and diversifying Southern California preps coverage and particularly interested in what makes athletes tick on and off the field.
_________________
"The Dodgers have always occupied an enormous place in the history of the game. If the Yankees are the most successful team in baseball history, the Dodgers are the most essential. Their legacy is unique."

-Baseball Hall of Fame

[sunnyblue]

Loved reading this. She's even being inspirational to the guys.

[dodgerblue6]

CIF playoffs getting underway this week!
_________________
"The Dodgers have always occupied an enormous place in the history of the game. If the Yankees are the most successful team in baseball history, the Dodgers are the most essential. Their legacy is unique."

-Baseball Hall of Fame

[sunnyblue]

I guess it didn't get posted about before, but what about that fight at a CIF game a couple of weeks ago? I know Mayfair was involved in it, I think the other team was Norwalk. This started with a taunt about brooms because of the sweep. This is the worst kind of example of lack of sportsmanship and even the parents and fans in the stand got involved. Ugly show.

Update - I did look it up to make sure and here's the link

[dodgerblue6]

The Norwalk "broom handshake" was out of line.
_________________
"The Dodgers have always occupied an enormous place in the history of the game. If the Yankees are the most successful team in baseball history, the Dodgers are the most essential. Their legacy is unique."

-Baseball Hall of Fame

[dodgerblue6]

JSerra and Santa Margarita play tonight with the D1 CIF crown on the line.
_________________
"The Dodgers have always occupied an enormous place in the history of the game. If the Yankees are the most successful team in baseball history, the Dodgers are the most essential. Their legacy is unique."

-Baseball Hall of Fame

[sunnyblue]

Now, my brothers were at that game and what a win! A scoreless tie broken when JSerra walked it off and won 1-0. Congratulations!

[forloveofthegame]

CIF finals will be taking place for the San Diego Section, at Tony Gwynn Stadium on Friday.
_________________
"Baseball is an allegorical play about America, a poetic, complex, and subtle play of courage, fear, good luck, mistakes, patience about fate, and sober self-esteem." - Saul Steinberg

[dodgerblue6]

Kearny plays Lincoln tomorrow and I'm trying to get to that game.
_________________
"The Dodgers have always occupied an enormous place in the history of the game. If the Yankees are the most successful team in baseball history, the Dodgers are the most essential. Their legacy is unique."

-Baseball Hall of Fame

[dodgerblue6]

Update: Komets won!
_________________
"The Dodgers have always occupied an enormous place in the history of the game. If the Yankees are the most successful team in baseball history, the Dodgers are the most essential. Their legacy is unique."

-Baseball Hall of Fame

[forloveofthegame]

No shock here, but LCC won the Open division CIF title last night over Eastlake winning 5-2 so they defended their 2022 championship. The game was played at Tony Gwynn Stadium. In the 5th inning with the game tied 2-2, Eastlake walked RF Kalen Applefield intentionally with a runner on base. Hayden Kline then hit a 3 run jack that ended up winning the game.

That was really the only division I followed but I thought you might be interested in this, Linda. Lincoln beat St. Joseph Academy, 7-4 for the D5 title. Sophomore Julio Ojeda had a grand slam. The notes on MaxPreps said, "The CIF title is the first in school history for Lincoln." It seems wild that as good as they have been at other sports, it was a first in baseball.
_________________
"Baseball is an allegorical play about America, a poetic, complex, and subtle play of courage, fear, good luck, mistakes, patience about fate, and sober self-esteem." - Saul Steinberg

[dodgerblue6]

Birmingham High won CIF-Southern Section yesterday at Dodger Stadium.

Congratulations to the champions!
_________________
"The Dodgers have always occupied an enormous place in the history of the game. If the Yankees are the most successful team in baseball history, the Dodgers are the most essential. Their legacy is unique."

-Baseball Hall of Fame