North Hollywood Battles Dissension in 13-6 Poly Win

Poly High junior Jonathan Campbell made a lot of noise with his bat Wednesday, slugging two home runs and driving in four runs with three hits. But he probably drew more attention with his glove during Poly’s 13-6 East Valley League win at North Hollywood.

Campbell made a sparkling defensive play when he chased down Harry Marks’ towering drive to make an over-the-shoulder catch about 390 feet from home plate.

Campbell made the catch with his back to home plate. He ran so far out of the normal field of play that he scattered a group of North Hollywood football players practicing on the field.

“Our outfield is awful tough,” Poly Coach Jerry Cord said. “We’ve got a lot of speed out there.”

But while Campbell was tracking down long drives, some of North Hollywood’s players were letting their tempers get away. An on-field shouting match between Marks and teammate Erik Martinez carried into the dugout and eventually led to one-game suspensions for Marks and third baseman Adrian Padilla. Both starters will miss today’s rematch with Poly.

“It’s disgusting,” North Hollywood Coach Marty Biegel said after a prolonged postgame team meeting. “It’s the abomination of my life to see them do that. It’s just sad.”

The problems began when Marks got into a loud disagreement with Martinez. In the dugout, after the fifth inning on-field incident, Marks told Biegel that he didn’t want to catch anymore, prompting Biegel to bench Marks and move Padilla behind the plate.

Martinez (3-3), Wednesday’s losing pitcher, persuaded the coaching staff to let him catch. Padilla, unhappy with the shifting, tore off his gear and made a remark to the staff that prompted his benching.

All the while, North Hollywood was playing competitively with the league-leading Parrots (17-3, 12-0 in league play). In fact, Marks’ titanic shot surely would have cleared any reasonably distanced fence--the outfield at North Hollywood has none--and would have given the Huskies a 7-5 lead in the fourth inning. Instead, they ended the inning trailing, 5-4.

In the fifth, a home run by Poly’s Marlon McKinney made the score 6-4. That, in turn, led to the argument between Marks and Martinez.

North Hollywood (7-8, 5-7), which made six errors, then sealed its own fate in the seventh inning, watching a 7-4 games degenerate into a 13-4 Poly lead.

“They’ve got to look in the mirror today and know their embarrassment,” Biegel said after the game. “It’s got to be a learning experience.”

Biegel let the team vote whether to keep Marks and Padilla on the team. The vote was overwhelmingly in the players’ favor.