The 55-and-Over Crowd Pops Up at the Ballpark for Senior League Softball

For a guy who nearly dropped dead on three separate occasions from heart problems, Pete Michelle is batting 1.000.

He’s also a heck of a ballplayer.

The 60-year-old Irvine mechanic, the feisty left fielder for the Irvine Swinging Angels, went 4 for 4 Sunday, tearing around the bases of Huntington Beach’s Greer Park like he had never suffered two heart attacks, a mild stroke or quadruple bypass surgery.

“We have a good time out here, us old guys,” Michelle said in between shouts of “Three at least! Three at least!” as teammate Al Razor rounded second for a stand-up triple. “Thank God I’m here. I figure you should play as long as you can because you only go around once, and I know it.”

For Michelle and dozens of other 55-and-over men who play in Huntington Beach’s Seniors Softball League, coming out to the familiar field to throw the ball and shoot the breeze is a thrill, even if their limbs don’t quite snap into action like they once did.

Casting his eyes downward to his hefty belly, Spirits shortstop Julius Arrigale of Westminster said he joined the league to have a good time and to “get some of this beef off.”

“I’ve been playing since I was a young guy,” said the 55-year-old Bronx native, who, sporting a New York Yankees cap, has lost neither his Big Apple accent nor his affection for the Bronx Bombers. “I’ll do anything to play ball, even if my wife puts me in the dog house.”

“What’s really fun is to see a new guy who hasn’t played in 20 years not doing very well,” added John Miller, the Spirit’s dependable left fielder. “Then he gets a hit or makes a play, and you know you got him hooked. He’ll be stiff all week, but he’ll come back.”

Bob Thrall, the league’s supervisor, who doubled as an umpire during the final spring season game Sunday, said of Orange County’s men of autumn, “They live for this once a week.”

Thrall said that while most of the players come out to have a good time, some of the team managers take the game a little too seriously.

“They get power and maybe it’s something they had years ago,” he said. “Some yell at their men too much, and they get dropped.”

Despite the occasional bad sport, the 16-team seniors league is thriving as it heads into its fifth summer season June 1. By 1:30 p.m. Sunday, the next two teams to play--the Huntington Beach Gray Angels and the Seal Beach Seals--were leaning on the park fence watching the final inning of the Irvine-Fullerton game.

The Fullerton Spirits, who trailed most of the game, threatened in the bottom of the seventh inning. But Wally Holm’s lead-off single and Arrigale’s sailing double were not enough.

Irvine’s Swinging Angels won the game, 14-9, and, because of a key loss that day by the Costa Mesa Old Goats, took first place for the 1986 spring season.

As the players shook hands repeating the closing ritual comment, “good game, good game,” and walked off the field for some post-game pizza, Tony Vario, 58, of Irvine had one last thought.

“This brings back a little of the nostalgia,” Vario said. “We get to relive our old youth.”