The Buccos First Practice

“I’m “Pittsburgh Bill” and we’re the “Buccos!” I declared to the players sitting in a dugout at our first practice ahead of the opening game of the Los Angeles County Senior Softball League in mid-May.

Some are smiling at me, others looking at their shoes and two at the end are animatedly finishing a conversation.

“Pittsburgh has a mini community among many little communities in LA. There’s Steelers’ bars all over town. You see more Terrible Towels at a Chargers game than their fans. It’s what makes it so multi-cultural and delightful for someone who spent decades abroad in Asia,” I continue. And look, Jim’s already a part of the community. “

Jim Paul, my left fielder, is wearing a newly bought black and gold T-shirt reading: “Make The Buccos Great Again” a reference to a generation of futility for the Pittsburgh Pirates -three winning seasons in the last 30 years. I grew up in Pittsburgh,

“I drafted this team – with advice from Donna - for its veteran leadership, golden gloves in the field, and, above all, the potential for team chemistry and connectivity. If that happens, we’ll have a lot of fun and win a lot of games,” I say to them. More tentative, smiles and shoegazing. Should I ask them to put their hands in the pile, and shout ‘Go Buccos’? What would Donna do?

     THE HORROR

Three seasons earlier, I first met Donna Sloan when she drafted me, knowing nothing about my (lack of) skill set, for her “Ohdahorra” team. That meeting was also at the first practice before a season-opening game. We were all wearing newly issued T-shirts with a skull superimposed on a map of Africa against a blood-red background under the Ohdahorra name. On the back was a reference to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: “The darkness darkened. Oh the horror, the horror. It was horrible.” She gave me the moniker "Pittsburgh Bill" in a nod to the Pirates cap I always wore and to differentiate me from another Bill on the team.

Tall, athletic, vivacious, and gorgeously blonde, Donna was a former Canadian national team softball star and a club ice hockey player. Her coaching style exuded both positivity and profanity.

That first practice in the fall of 2021, Donna, an American Spirit cigarette cupped discreetly in her hand, squinted at us through a chain-link fence, upon which a sign read “This is a smoke-free zone.” She was giving us a scouting report on our opponent, the Dodgers. Behind her, a triptych of granite San Gabriel peaks loomed over the emerald practice fields in the Sepulveda Basin, a vast expanse of ballfields and golf courses around Encino in the San Fernando Valley.

“Look, just put the ball in play,” she said then. “Their infield is a fucking disaster. The first baseman, the tall guy, is unwell. Any throw to first base, if it’s not straight into his mitt, you’re going to see it skipping away. And don’t, whatever you do, run into him when you’re running the bases. He’s wearing a colostomy bag, god bless him. The second baseman literally cannot bend over, so try to hit it to his side. Whatever you do, don’t hit it to the shortstop. That asshole’s probably the best player in the league.”

I had never played senior softball before, and all this was eye-opening. We looked like the Bad News Bears as boomers, collecting Social Security checks. One of our players had rolled up in a wheelchair because he was recovering from heart surgery.

Few of us knew each other. For one thing, softball had been suspended the past three seasons due to the pandemic. And because players are selected in a pre-season draft among the 15 teams in the mixed-player League, rosters are never the same from one season to the next. At the start of each season, players come from throughout the county to get their attenuating skills rated on a scale of one to 10. The draft ensures each team has a gamut of players, from athletic superstars to the hobbled and decrepit. Each team generally has a couple of women players. And Donna was the best of them.

BOOMERS DOMINATE

Softball is the number one sport for senior men and women. Nearly three million men and women over the age of 50 play the game, a figure that has doubled over the past decade. Women, while accounting for about 10 % of senior players, are by far the fastest-growing segment of the sport, according to surveys from USA Softball.

Boomers dominate the senior softball leagues – the average male age is 67. For them growing up, baseball was not just recreation and entertainment, it was still “America’s Pastime” and helped define what it was to be an American. The boomer generation’s retirement is a major factor in the sport’s growth, especially as life spans increase and retirements lengthen – more than a dozen players in the LA County League are in their 80s. They play because for some it’s their main fitness regime, an active team sport that allows anybody at any level of ability to play. And it offers a community among players that connects them back to their youth and their glory days. It’s also a microcosm of American society, and as I have learned, its social fault lines.

LEADERSHIP TEAM

Back at the Buccos practice, I gently introduced my leadership team. I followed my playbook as a Reuters Bureau Chief in Asia. Stand in front of the newsroom for monthly town halls, cascading messages from our lords and masters and singling out reporters for their winning stories in front of a receptive staff with Confucian values.

I said Mark Lambert, recently retired Los Angeles Deputy City Attorney, will be my deputy, running the team in my absence. Flanking him in left-center will be longtime WABC talk radio host Doug McIntyre. Joe Blachman, who provides network security for a major bank, is our top-rated shortstop. Dave Aguilar, a former star player and team manager coming back to the league after a long hiatus recovering from cancer, will be second. Noted aviation publicist Greg Waskul is our all-star third baseman. And then at first base, there is Allan Judkowitz, a slick-fielding, heads-up player who has been battling pancreatic cancer for over five years.

We finish up practice with Doug hitting infield drills – throws to first, then turn double-plays at second, finally throws home.

Joe has come up with a design for a Buccos shirt that an online retailer will make for $20 each, I tell them. Hope you all don’t mind reimbursing me for that. (They don’t mind)

Our first game is against another new team under their vocal rookie manager, Ben Franco.

“Ben’s loud but he’s a lot of fun, too. That dugout is going to be boisterous come Thursday evening,” I said.