Bad Boys of Summer : Legions of High School Baseball Players Become Rebellious During the Off-Season, Leaving Coaches Nowhere to Turn

Pitcher Travis Arsenault of Woodland Hills (East) stood on a mound of frustration, created by an inability to throw an inside pitch for a strike.

His team led, 4-3, in the sixth inning, but Arsenault feared the strike zone was shrinking and he didn’t want Chatsworth to walk around the bases for an easy win.

Upset that the umpire called another inside pitch a ball, Arsenault made a trip to the plate to argue for leniency.

“I didn’t think the umpire was giving me the inside of the plate,” Arsenault said. “So I walked up and dusted off the corner of the plate with my glove. The umpire kicked me out of the game.”

Arsenault, who also pitched for Taft High in the spring, said he would have left the housecleaning duties to his coach if it had been a high school game.

“It was a stupid thing to do,” Arsenault said. “I doubt if I would have done the same thing in high school. The team rules are stricter and I would have been kicked off the team.”

Coaches agree that even their most reliable and dedicated high school players adopt a more independent and rebellious attitude when they slip into an American Legion uniform.

“You see sides of their personality that you don’t see in a highly structured system like high school baseball,” said Conejo Coach Jim Hansen, who also coaches the Thousand Oaks High team. There are more distractions in the summer, Hansen suggests, while during the school year players are more likely to narrow their focus to studies and sports.

“They have to sacrifice things they like to do to play baseball,” he said. “It’s interesting to see what choices they make and find who really is dedicated.”

Even Coach Bud Murray had trouble carrying his high school team’s success over into the American Legion season. Hart was ranked fourth in the nation by USA Today and won its first 26 games before losing to Fullerton in the second round of the Southern Section 4-A playoffs. But Murray’s Newhall-Saugus (Hart) team stumbled to a 5-20 record during the summer and never contended for a playoff spot.

Murray had access to the same group of players, but lacked the same drawing power.

“I lost most of my top players to jobs, and with today’s economy, I can’t blame them for working,” Murray said. “I can’t afford to give my kids a $50 a month allowance.”

Jeff Antoon, who played for Notre Dame High in the spring and the Van Nuys-Notre Dame legion team this summer, claims the legion season lacks the same payoff as its high school counterpart.

“It’s not like high school baseball where people congratulate you the next day at school,” Antoon said. “You don’t play the championship game in Dodger or Anaheim stadiums. It’s more like the final team party for the seniors before we break up and play somewhere else.”

Coaches, then, must adopt a different philosophy to get their high school players to compete in American Legion baseball. They rarely hold practices and they set fewer team rules.

“You can’t be too demanding or too strict because the players won’t stick around,” Royal Coach Brian Maloney said. “You have to hang loose and go with the flow.”

Coaches juggle game times around their players’ work schedules and vacations. They also share their top players with other high school sports teams and competing baseball leagues. By necessity they allow their players more freedom, but claim they are sometimes rewarded with insubordination.

“People think they can get away with more,” Arsenault said. “They’re more willing to cross the line and there’s no high school to punish you. If you get in a fight during a high school game, the athletic director and the dean wants to talk to you the next day. In legion, no one comes to talk to you other than the coach. You can’t get in trouble or suspended from school--just from the league.”

But Encino-Crespi Coach Scott Muckey points out that returning high school players do pay a penalty if they abuse their summer freedoms.

“I can be more demanding because they have to play for me next year,” said Muckey, who is also the Crespi High coach. “If they act lazy or fail to show up for a game, they’re not going to play for me next year.”

Still, Muckey couldn’t overcome the time-management problem inherent in American Legion. The pressures of the legion season gave the first-year legion coach little chance of realizing his lofty preseason objectives.

“I wanted to teach my infielders how to backhand a ground ball and work on hitting the ball to the opposite field,” he said. “But I really didn’t get a chance to do that this year. There were too many distractions and not enough practice time. I had players arrive 10 minutes before a game. And one game, we had only 10 players.”

Maloney, who is a varsity assistant at Royal High, had trouble keeping his best players.

“I had a player quit my team--I don’t want to say his name--the day before a college scout wanted to come out to see him play,” Maloney said. “I spent two hours on the telephone trying to convince him what great potential he had and not to give up. We worked things out and he got a chance to be seen.”

But insubordination and conflicts of interest aren’t the only things coaches have to deal with. There are also the typical distractions of adolescence.

“Guys would strike out, go to the bench, laugh about it and then talk to the girls in the stands,” Antoon said. “We would discuss where we were going out that night or what happened the night before. Our coach would be coaching at third and he would come over and tell us to knock it off.

“He’s a lot looser during the summer, but he also knows when it’s time to get serious.”

Jody Breeden, who coaches the Notre Dame junior varsity team during the school year, put an end to the non-baseball talk after his Van Nuys-Notre Dame team lost three games in one weekend. The defending District 20 champions had put their playoff hopes in jeopardy before Breeden called a team meeting.

“We had a difficult time this season because players were missing games because of work or they had commitments to other sports,” Breeden said. “We ended up with players playing out of position. I had to speak my piece before things got too out of hand.”

Van Nuys-Notre Dame won 10 of its next 14 games to retain its title.

Westlake Coach Chuck Thompson, who works as a corporate insurance salesman, has developed a system of fines to keep his players in check. Players pay $1 fines for such indiscretions as arriving late to a game, looking at a called third strike and spending too much time chatting with the fans.

Thompson also subtracts fines if a player make an extra effort in the field or advances the runner with a ground ball. The fines are collected and used to pay for a season-ending pizza party.

“The kids have fun with it and I earn some respect from the players,” Thompson said. “No one wants to pay for the party by themselves.”

But less anyone take certain players’ laissez-faire attitudes for a indication of apathy, let them come on out and listen to a game some summer evening. Players who bite their tongues during the high school season let the insults fly in legion games.

“There’s definitely more ragging done in American Legion,” Maloney said. “Players have rabbit ears and they won’t let one comment go by without a response. But we were just as bad at ragging as we were playing baseball. Some of the comments weren’t even Single-A comments.”

Yet despite the problems, despite the lack of concentration and discipline, most coaches will be back next summer. And the players will be back, too.

“I love to coach. I don’t know what I would be doing with my summer if I wasn’t coaching,” Hansen said. “Coaching makes me feel young.”