Close call for Buccos and their third baseman

Dave Aguilar roped a line drive to left-center on a 3-2 count with two out and the bases loaded in the final frame, but the outfielder was perfectly positioned for the catch and the Buccos lost a closely contested contest 13-12 to the Softball Junkies, one of the top two teams in the LA County League.

The previous pitch to Aguilar was a ball to everybody watching on and off the field (including the opposing manager), except for the umpire, sadly, who called it a strike. The walk would have at least tied the game.

“You’re the toughest team we’ve faced after the Archies,” said Junkies’ manager Greg Loria, referring to the only team they’ve lost to. He just smiled when asked if he saw ball four, too, in Aguilar’s at-bat.

Greg Waskul, a former LA Times reporter who owns one of Southern California’s leading public affairs and marketing agencies, led the offense, going 4-4. His last hit in that fateful final frame, a line drive to right-center, was all the more remarkable because he had lost feeling in his left foot after a Junkie runner slammed into him at third base, as Greg was retrieving an errant throw in foul territory. Greg, who has a spinal cord injury that leaves him vulnerable to paralysis from such mishaps, was apoplectic afterward. Play was stopped for a bit to calm the situation and sort out the confusion over where the runners should be after the collision.

"Trying to play on one leg after being run over from behind was really tough the last few innings, particularly trying to hit in the seventh with the game on the line. Luckily, I got a pitch I could handle!" the 69-year-old Greg said.

He was not expected to perambulate at all without a walker or cane after his accident in 2012. He was taking photos for a charity golf game benefiting military veterans, standing at the edge of a steep hill, when a player looking for his mishit ball (Greg’s had some bad luck with errant balls), sideswiped him with his golf cart. Greg tumbled 40 feet and felt his back “explode”. His left foot was shattered.

After his spinal surgery, Greg's neurologist, Helena Chu, the neurology chair at USC’s Keck School of Medicine, told him “the medical consensus was I never would walk again without a walker, or maybe a cane.” And certainly “not a chance in hell of playing ball again.”

“She calls me her ‘moonshot’,” Greg says.

Five years after the accident in 2017, the burly and bespectacled competitor went to his  first game in the LA County league as a low-rated 4 player. The first time Greg hit the ball, “I took two steps toward first base and face-planted. I just laid there. Couldn’t get up. I could hear a woman in the stands say: ‘Is he dead?’”

It’s a genuine fear sometimes in the senior leagues. There have been several incidents of heart attacks and other medical emergencies during games that required players to be carted away in ambulances.

In the dry summer months, the infield dirt on the Supulveda Basin fields turns to beach said, which has contributed to Greg's misadventures around third and his 'My Left Foot' season - his reconstructed foot sliding in the sand has sent him sprawling at times. Otherwise, he fields anything within reach and has a strong, accurate arm.

Greg is now an 8-rated player and a perennial All-Star. The Buccos leading homerun hitter gets off his powerful swing by stepping into pitches with that hobbled left foot. “I’m very proud that I’ve worked very hard and improved with age at a sport I love,” he says.

Greg’s career mirrors his tenacity and talent on the field. He began at the Los Angeles Times, after earning a journalism degree at Cal State-Northridge. In one of his biggest stories, he was writing up the breaking news from reporters in the field after Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, a member of the Manson Family cult, attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford in Sacramento. (She was released from prison in 2009 and living now in upstate New York, for those scoring at home).

Still in his 20s, Greg joined first Lockheed and then Northrop providing public affairs content and strategy for the two big defense contractors, which took him to 135 countries over the years. In 1996, he started Waskul Worldwide Communications and remains its president and CEO.

Over the years, he’s served on over 100 boards, working for many nonprofits. One of the biggest is the Bob and Dolores Hope Foundation, which is especially involved in military charities. Greg is currently working with a foundation to restore the battlefield at Pearl Harbor.

Yet he still finds time to play softball games three to four times a week in various leagues.

“It is such a great community. I’ve made so many friends in the game,” Greg says. “I just feel really lucky to play, let alone be an All-Star.”

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