High on life after traumatic accident, OF helps Buccos beat Spare Parts in 'vengeance' game

at a crosswalk (Photo above shows Mike Pivarnick (middle right) on Donna Sloan's 2019 Ohdahorra team)

Mike Pivarnick raced into the left-center gap for a long flyball from the Spare Parts leadoff man. It popped in and out of his glove. An inauspicious start on the first play of the game.

A disconsolate Pivarnick told me in the dugout his head was juddering like a bobblehead giveaway at Dodger Stadium and his glasses were all over his face like ants at a picnic as he raced for the ball. As a sometimes outfielder myself, I know the feeling of running across a lumpy outfield with the landscape looking like the San Andrea Fault has just opened up.

“I just love that you went for it,” I told him. No guts, no glory, me Buccos!

Pivarnick more than atoned for that going 4 for 4 at the plate with four runs scored to lead the offense as the Buccos dismantled the Spare Parts 15-9 in the opening game of the LA County’s Senior Softball League’s Fall-Winter season.

The Buccos had strong hitting up and down the lineup. The bottom five were on base 9 of 17 times for a sparkling .529 on-base percentage. That’s how you win games in this league.

“Vengeance is ours,” was my jokey mantra of the week. The Spare Parts had crushed the Buccos 15-6 in the championship game of the summer season just two weeks earlier and also defeated us by the same score in the regular season.

This game was the inverse of those two defeats. This time it was Spare Parts pitcher/manager Tom Griego who struggled with control, not me, as he issued six free passes. This time it was the Buccos pounding hits into the infield holes and finding gaps in the outfield.

“I think you have a really good team,” said Spare Parts bench coach Donna Sloan, who sat out while rehabbing a broken ankle. (Perplexingly, Donna was also shouting advice from the sidelines to Bucco Mark Weber, one of her former proteges, on where to position himself at rover against batters from her own team).

The game was not without controversy between two teams with a growing but good-natured rivalry. In the final frame, with Spare Parts trying to mount a comeback, I intentionally walked Griego, the team's biggest power threat, to load the bases with one out. He was clearly unhappy about that. We closed it out without further damage. A big hit with the bases loaded could have opened the floodgates.

“If it’s not a playoff game, you should pitch to everybody,” Donna opined.

Bucco star shortstop Eric Badener begged to differ. He said he and Tom laughed about it when they saw each other the following morning. “I said ‘you’d have done the same thing to me’ and he agreed.”

The Buccos’ defense was awesome, especially given it was the first time we had played together following the Sept. 17 draft. Each season begins with a “snake draft”. Each team picks one player per round and a lottery determines which team gets first pick. The order reverses with each round so if you pick last in the first round you will pick first in the second round. I had the last pick in the first round. 

I ended up trading my first pick in the second round to reunite that player with the manager he’s played with for some 30 years. The player I got back was Raul Aguilar, the brother of David. My first-round pick was for one of the best shortstops in the League, Eric Badener, who comes with his father, Sy, the league’s oldest player at 91. So with father-son and brothers, “We are family”, the Sister Sledge song that became the theme of the 1979 World Series Champion Buccos.

                -----                         -----                        -----                  -----

Mike Pivarnick is lucky to be alive, let alone playing softball at an elite level. On a hot Saturday night in July 2011, at the age of 47, he and his then-fiancee were struck by a drunk driver at a crosswalk in the New Jersey beach town of Long Beach. At the time, he was working as a supervisor for a construction company clearing debris at the site of the World Trade Center destroyed in the 911 attacks.

“I was sent into the air and landed on the left side of my face,” he says. The impact jarred his brain so badly he lost "cognitive functions". Mike took the brunt of the accident, but his fiance's ankle was shattered. He lay in a coma for a month before being sent to a neurological center for the next two and a half years “to have my brain rebooted.”  He then spent another year restoring his learning.

“I have no memory of the accident,” Mike says. “My life basically changed forever.” He suffered from PTSD for years, which took a toll on his mental health. “I’m a very humble person now and live life just hoping god lets me live another day.”

Severn years ago, the father of three with two grandchildren, moved to the Los Angeles area to reboot his life. In 2019, he met a veteran surfer dude named Sean Tuttle at an LA Fitness gym, who recruited Mike to the Wednesday softball League in the Valley. The two new friends then created a cannabis products distribution company called CaliYork Industries.

“I’m a heavy activist for plants over pills,” Pavirnick says, citing his own long rehab.

Like many others in senior softball, the New York City native has played the game all his life – both ASA fast pitch and slow pitch. Naturally athletic, Pivarnick was a New York City high school champion in his wrestling weight class.

Pivarnick was one of a half-dozen or so top-rated players to join the LA County Senior Softball League this season, one of the biggest such influxes in years.

“I’m a competitor. I’ve always brought to the table that I can be better than you. But being 60s years old now, it’s about helping the team win…And just being able to be part of the sports world again.”+