Dream Season : Fantasy Baseball Camp Offers Patrons a Taste of Big Leagues and a Chance to Hobnob With Their Boyhood Idols

Mark Neiberg, a 35-year-old manufacturer from Encino, said he was taking a shower “when I looked around and realized who was in there with me. Duke Snider. Pee Wee Reese. Frank Robinson. Warren Spahn. Willie Stargell. Me, a nobody from the Valley, in the same shower with these Hall of Famers. It was a dream come true.”

Neiberg paused to savor the memory. “I know it sounds stupid, even weird,” he says, but it makes perfectly good sense “if you know baseball.”

Indeed, no other sport brings out the boy in men better than baseball. Nothing seems too weird or too stupid for a guy hopelessly trapped in an adolescent time warp. Bubble-gum cards. Autographed baseballs. Hero worship. Memorabilia from their youth, when the world was no more complicated than pennant races and box scores.

“There’s a little boy in all of us,” says Chris Wasson, a baseball-crazed real estate developer from Studio City.

Men who will stop at nothing to satisfy their baseball habit have an expensive fix these days. Fantasy camps. For $4,395 plus air fare, they can spend a week at the Dodgers’ Ultimate Adult Baseball Camp in Vero Beach. The opportunity enables them to wear real uniforms, play real games in a real spring training facility and, best of all, rub elbows--in dugouts, bars and shower rooms--with real baseball stars, Hall of Fame legends.

“I laughed more in that week than I have in a long time,” says Ed Lucks, a Northridge attorney. “It was really fun to sit around and spit and talk dirty and then listen to those great players tell baseball stories all night.”

Neiberg, whose company makes electrical parts for cars, and Lucks were among 87 men--women have fantasies, but generally they’re not about baseball--who attended the camp in February at Dodgertown. It was the first camp for Lucks, 43, who went with his twin Irv, also a Northridge attorney. Neiberg was making his fourth visit, but this time he took along his father Phil, a retiree from Carlsbad who is “60 and still trying to charge around those bases,” Neiberg says.

For five days and six nights, the Dodgers’ fantasy camp enabled average athletes to experience what it’s like to be major leaguers. They were divided into six teams, coached by the Hall of Famers, and even got to play against the old-timers. Unlike real life, their fantasies usually came true.

“I wanted to see if I could hit a fastball,” says Wasson, who has been to two camps. Whether he can touch Dwight Gooden isn’t the point. Thanks to the camps, Wasson, 38, now has bragging rights to Catfish Hunter and Bob Feller, who used to be known as Rapid Robert. Wasson got a hit off each, which is better than an autograph any day.

Ron Brown’s fantasy was getting a hit--off anybody. Brown, 42-year-old owner of two McDonald’s franchises in Van Nuys, was raised by a father who didn’t believe in sports and forbade his son to play. That didn’t prevent him from becoming an avid Dodger fan, but his baseball experience was limited to high school physical education classes. To prepare for the camp, he practiced at the Malibu Castle batting cage in Sherman Oaks, and, he points out: “I was not afraid of the ball at all.”

But real arms were a different story. Catfish Hunter struck Brown out on a curve that dived liked a paper airplane. Even against ordinary arms, Brown didn’t fare much better. His only hit came on a waist-high fastball off a pitcher who fantasizes about clocking 55 m.p.h. on the radar gun. What does Brown remember about the single? “I made the connection,” he says. “It was sharply hit.”

What Brown really wanted was to “get into a Dodger uniform.” He got his wish, and more. Brown became friends with Don Drysdale. When Brown got his only hit, it was Drysdale who presented him at dinner with the Mr. Potato Head Award as the outstanding member of his team that day. At the end of camp, Drysdale gave his uniform to Brown, who swears he doesn’t wear it around the house.

Another Valley resident with a Mr. Potato Head on his mantle is Stanley Kesselman of Encino. Like Brown, Kesselman, a 45-year-old attorney, had never played hardball before working out against the pitching machines at Malibu Castle to avoid “being a laughingstock” at camp. Kesselman managed to hit .417, but what he enjoyed most about the camp, he says, “was the male bonding.”

Friendship, in fact, was an unexpected bonus to some campers. “You quickly got camaraderie on the team,” says Ed Lucks. “To me, that was a bigger thrill than meeting the Hall of Famers.”

“You make lifelong friends,” says Neil Adams, who owns a company in Reseda that installs car alarms. Adams, 39, has been to five camps and calls them “a five-star holiday.” He keeps in touch with other campers--”When the camps end, the camaraderie continues on”--and plays for Dodgertown West, a team of former campers who play every other weekend in Redondo Beach.

Not everybody cherishes the big moments the most. “I really enjoyed the quiet moments in Holman Stadium,” says Denis Robinson, a 41-year-old Van Nuys attorney who hit .467 and doubled in his first at-bat. Also “kind of a thrill” for him was opening a Vero Beach newspaper and seeing his photo in the sports section.

Considering the time and expense--Robinson calls the camp “outrageously priced”--it would seem that campers’ wives would get a restraining order to keep their husbands at home. But surprisingly, wives not only approve of the trip, but pay for it, too. Ed Lucks’ wife heard about the camp on the radio and knew that Ed and his brother were baseball fanatics. So she and Irv’s wife sent the twins to Dodgertown as a birthday present.

Dan Pulos, a 35-year-old Woodland Hills electronics executive, also got the camp as a birthday present from his wife “or I wouldn’t have gone.” When he found out the price, he balked at going, but his wife persuaded him, he says, by telling him: “Why don’t you go while you can still run, throw and hit?”

A possible downside of the camp is being disappointed in how your fantasy turns out in real life. “There’s a Chinese proverb that says, ‘Beware of getting what you want,’ ” says Kesselman. This is especially true when a Hall of Famer doesn’t live up to your inflated expectations.

But with the exception of one camper who felt Snider “didn’t seem happy to be there,” there was nothing but praise for the Hall of Famers. “They knew you by your first name and they were your buddies,” says Neiberg. And even though their skills have eroded, says Ed Lucks, “you get a feel for how good they once were. They make it look so easy.”

The camps, of course, also serve to keep the former major leaguers in a perpetual state of boyhood. “I think they enjoy it more than we do,” Wasson says. “They strike up old acquaintences and have fun.”

Most of the campers hope to return to Dodgertown for another shot at playing Peter Pan. But Kesselman has decided that once is enough. “One thing about a fantasy,” he says. “You don’t want to overdo it.”