Sylmar Baseball Team Deals With Life, Its Tragedies

Gary Donatella moved across the Sylmar High baseball diamond, clapping his hands vigorously as his team formed a semicircle around the infield dirt, performing a basic fielding drill like a well-trained regiment.

It was a bright, sunny day, the kind of early May afternoon that begs to be spent on a baseball diamond. Donatella, 36, wore shorts and a navy blue, short-sleeved baseball shirt. Etched in white cursive over the left breast were the words: “Sylmar Baseball: The Tradition Continues.”

A proud tradition, indeed. This season marked the program’s 21st consecutive appearance in the City Section playoffs.

“You gotta love it,” Donatella yelled at his players as he clapped. “You gotta love it.”

Beyond right field, the San Gabriel Mountains rose strikingly, etched sharply against a smogless sky.

“I tell my kids there’s no field in the city with a view like this,” Donatella told a visitor with a smile, looking north. “They’ve got to appreciate this.”

In 1990, the Sylmar baseball team came to appreciate all that--and much more. From March 25 on, each infield drill took on added meaning. Each glance at the mountains on a cloudless day carried significance. The Sylmar players, whose emotional roller coaster of a season ended last Friday with a 14-13, nine-inning loss to Birmingham in the playoffs, learned more about life and its fragile nature than they had bargained for.

Coping with death can do that.

In the early-morning hours on March 25, Sylmar right fielder Ryan Vela died in a car accident.

Vela, a senior who batted .450 through the team’s first eight games, was the only fatality when the Volkswagen bug he was riding in was hit broadside by a police car as the Volkswagen turned north on Laurel Canyon Boulevard off the eastbound 118 Freeway off-ramp. Another teammate in the car suffered a fractured scapula. The driver was relatively unhurt and a fourth passenger suffered head injuries.

But Vela lost his life, and shock waves spread through the Sylmar community.

Grief engulfed the team and the school. Donatella postponed the team’s games for a week. At a wake for Vela, a line of mourners spilled onto the street. Subsequently, Donatella and the players waited 2 hours and 10 minutes to view the body. On the morning of the funeral, the school “was a ghost town,” according to Donatella.

Against that emotional upheaval, the Sylmar players were expected to return to playing baseball. They did--but with a controlled passion. The season was to be dedicated to Ryan. Players drew Vela’s No. 17 on hats and uniforms. They spray-painted it on cleats, emblazoned it on wristbands.

“On the Monday or Tuesday of the week in which we didn’t play, we held a meeting,” Donatella said. “The kids expressed a lot of their feelings. As far as dedications, the kids did it on their own. It was one of the toughest things I’ve ever had to deal with.”

Sylmar remembered Vela each day at practice; the team would jog out to right field--Vela’s old position--gather in a circle and yell, “1-2-3, Syl-mar!”

But the season did not unfold in storybook fashion. Big wins would be followed by big losses. Inconsistency reigned. After shellacking Reseda, 16-2 and 14-0, the Spartans lost to lightly regarded Van Nuys. After beating Grant and Monroe, Sylmar surrendered five ninth-inning runs in an 8-7 loss to North Hollywood.

The players refused to blame emotional instability for the inconsistency, although it was a factor that was difficult to ignore.

Donatella, in an effort to ease the players’ readjustment to baseball, relaxed team discipline. In any normal season, he required his players to sign in with him each morning at 8--the better to monitor their attendance and keep them eligible.

But after the accident, he stopped making that practice mandatory. Some players stopped signing in, a symptom of the instability that gripped the program.

“It was hard,” Sylmar pitcher James Encinas said before the playoffs. “But we tried to get back in the groove. We want to do what (Vela) wanted to do. And he was a hard worker.”

Sylmar concluded the regular season with a 16-9 record but finished a distant second in the East Valley League with a 10-7 mark, seven games behind Poly. The Spartans’ final two games were losses to Poly--a one-run game and a blowout.

Still, a playoff berth offered a chance to fulfill promises. The memory of a City title would last a lifetime.

“We’re playing our best for him,” center fielder Dereck Ornelas said before the playoffs. Ornelas, after the accident, became one of the area’s hottest hitters in the area. He hit safely in 16 consecutive games, had 24 runs batted in, four home runs and batted nearly .500 over the last two months of the season.

“I always try to get a base hit a game for him,” Ornelas said. “He batted No. 2, right ahead of me. I always remember me and him talking, and he would say, ‘I’ll get on base’ and I would say, ‘And I’ll knock you in.’ It gets me motivated to do my best for him.”

The playoffs proved a sadly fitting summary of a topsy-turvy year. In the loss to Birmingham, Sylmar came back from a 4-0 first-inning deficit to take a 12-5 lead in the fifth. The Spartans then watched their lead melt away as Birmingham took a 13-12 lead in the seventh. Sylmar mustered a run to force extra innings but lost in the ninth on a squeeze bunt.

“To end like that,” designated-hitter London Woodfin said, “I just can’t even describe it. I was amazed. I just looked at all the faces. I couldn’t believe it was real.”

The 4-hour, 35-minute game closed the book on Sylmar’s season. Darkness was settling on the field at Birmingham when Donatella gathered the team on the grass for a final word.

In front of the empty dugout, someone had drawn Ryan’s name in the dirt.

“Some players had tears streaming down their cheeks,” Donatella remembers. “I think some of them felt that they had let Vela down. But I told them that they had no reason to feel that way. They didn’t disappoint anybody.”

To the players, it was a feeling that words could not express.

“(Donatella) told us that this was the way the whole season was, but it was hard to take,” Woodfin said. “Players had tears in their eyes. Then Dereck said to the team, ‘If Ryan was looking down today, he would have congratulated us.’

“Then he just put his head down.”

In sum, a hard lesson in life for a group of teen-agers.

“I don’t think anybody could get any experience close to this unless it was firsthand like this year,” Donatella said. “It was one of those years in which our kids had to grow up. And we have grown up. We faced a lot of challenges and the kids have met every one. In my 10 years of coaching, this team ranks right up there with No. 1.”

A strange feeling of relief swept over Donatella after the Birmingham game. He said that he slept more last weekend than he had all season long and that he feels refreshed.

But late Friday night, he admitted, thoughts of this year refused to leave his head.

“I was just thinking about the kids,” he said. “They hung in. They never backed off. We could have . . . gone in the tank so many times. But every time people would count us out, we rebound. We keep our head above water.

“Hey. The tradition continues.”