Irvine’s Upbeat Season Ends Today : The ‘Beastie’ Boys of Summer Take On Taiwan for Title

Steve Mendoza, right fielder for the Northwood Irvine Little League All-Star team, will have to go above and beyond the call of comedy today to keep his teammates loose for the World Series championship game against Hua Lian, Taiwan.

“I don’t have a radio, so I gotta make some new things up,” Mendoza said Friday. “I can do it, though.”

If he had a radio (they are not allowed in the team’s barracks), Mendoza, the team’s DH, as in designated humorist, could easily ward off all those butterflies. He’d just slip in a tape of the Beastie Boys’ “You Gotta Fight for Your Right to Party,” throw on a pair of shades and drive his teammates nutty with his lip-sync act, just as he did on the team’s video.

That’s right, these guys have a video. No championship team leaves home without one.

They made it during the Western Regional tournament in San Bernardino last weekend. It opens with the 14 players doing their own rendition of “La Bamba,” including a guitar solo (substituting a baseball bat for the Stratocaster) by Aron Garcia, who will pitch today.

Mendoza takes over for the one-man finale, a perfect Beastie lip-sync, complete with his series of funny faces and an array of windmill air-guitar riffs.

“My job is to keep everyone loose,” Mendoza said. “I make a bunch of jokes, faces and keep everyone laughing. I’ll try to get their minds off baseball for a while.”

That’s going to be one tough task, considering that Irvine will be shooting for the championship of the entire planet. Unlike the major leagues’ World Series, which determines only a U.S. professional champion, this tournament spanned the globe, beginning seven weeks ago with 7,500 teams worldwide.

Friday, in the resumption of a game that was suspended Thursday because of darkness, Taiwan scored four runs in the top of the eighth inning and beat Moca, Dominican Republic, 4-0, as Wang Chih-Kwou, who hit a home run to break a scoreless tie, pitched a two-hitter.

So, sometime this afternoon, Little League’s world champion will be crowned, signaling the end of a long season for the Northwood players, who began regular-season play in early April. All-star competition started July 11, and since then, Irvine has won 18 straight games.

Through all the games and travel and the nights spent together, the players have developed into a close-knit group, one loaded with personality.

“They’re a mesh of different personalities,” said Manager Bob Garcia, Aron’s father. “We have comedians, like Mendoza; spark plugs, like Didgit Tuttle; calming influences, like Chris Greinke and Loc Tran. It’s hard to describe the kids.”