Foul Ball : Players Re-Enact Malathion Bath

Players made great catches. Fans cheered in the grandstand. It was a typical game in the Pony-Colt League the night of April 17, until the pesticide malathion rained on the baseball diamond at Holifield Park in Norwalk.

“It was a madhouse out here,” said Kevin Sanders, manager of the Orioles, a Pony team of boys 13 and 14 years old. “People were just running everywhere.”

Many coaches, players and fans returned to the field last Saturday night to re-enact the spraying incident for a commercial produced by anti-malathion activists.

“With children involved, there would be more of an emotional impact,” said cameraman Monty Rowan, a member of Action Now, a group opposed to pesticide spraying.

Rowan said he hopes to persuade area movie theaters to show the 30-second commercial as a public service announcement. He said he doubts whether television networks will accept the commercial, but that he plans to contact an advertising agency about getting the commercial on the air.

Sanders, 28, the Orioles manager, recalled the night of the game between the Orioles and Cardinals, when the helicopters arrived about 9:15 from beyond left-center field.

“It was the third or fourth inning,” he said. “They were flying in military style formation. I know, I was in the military in Beirut. I said to the ump, ‘Hey, we got malathion coming.’ He put a halt to the game.”

As the spray--used in an effort to eradicate the Mediterranean fruit fly--descended, players and fans ran behind the backstop to the shelter of the snack shack; many huddled beneath trees.

“Some of the kids were laughing and kind of making a joke out of it at first,” Sanders said. “As it fell you could taste it, it sticks to your clothes. They didn’t think it was too funny after a while.”

Andrew Gutierrez, 8, a player in the league who had been a spectator at the game, recalled: “It was sticky, I had to take a bath.” His friend, Jesse Jones, 10, said: “It felt like rain. I looked at the choppers and started running.”

Irene Garcia, 30, sat in the stands that April night. She was 3 1/2 months pregnant at the time. “I didn’t get to enjoy my chili beans because the stuff got in them,” she recalled. “I got nauseated. It was dripping from the trees. It was on the benches. We had to get rags and wipe them off. The smell was awful.”

Her husband, Eddie, an assistant coach with the Orioles, said: “It was like an assault scene from a Vietnam movie.”

Many of the people who were at the game reported becoming ill after the spraying, according to a survey by Jean Hinsley, a Norwalk resident who said she suffered laryngitis after a spraying last December.

In Hinsley’s survey, 67 of 159 people at the game--39 children and 28 adults--told her they felt sick, either that night, the next day or during the next week. The most common complaints were of headaches, sore throats, irritated eyes and nausea.

But Jim Stratton, an epidemiologist with the state Department of Health Services, questioned whether those symptoms could be attributed specifically to exposure to malathion. “They could have been caused (by exposure to) a virus at the ballgame,” he said this week in an interview.

“Based on what we know of the toxicity of malathion and the application rate, this ought not to represent an acute health problem for the folks involved,” Stratton added.

Kim Koons, director of the Los Angeles County Health Department’s malathion evaluation clinic project, said that direct exposure to the spray “could cause possible allergic effects and eye irritation.”

Koons said the clinic has asked Hinsley for her information but has not received it. “Our department has been doing surveys and collecting illness reports, and we are analyzing them for patterns of illness in the spraying areas,” Koons said.

Hinsley said she has not given her survey to the clinic project, but has shown it to a state Department of Food and Agriculture committee that meets to discuss malathion spraying. She added that she challenged the evaluation clinic to conduct the same surveys she did.

The black sky above the ball field’s light towers held only a full moon last Saturday night. Players and spectators were told by a film crew to make believe that helicopters were swooping over.

The youngsters, on cue, would tear off the field, as they had done in the April 17 spraying. Caught up in the filmmaking, they laughed as they reached the snack stand, their spikes scratching the concrete.

The klieg lights were turned on. A camera was positioned atop a light tower. Director Pascal Franchot, 28, who has worked on other commercials, began casting.

“Were you scared the night of the spraying?” he asked Jake Sanders, 12, second baseman for another Cardinals team. Sanders had played earlier on an adjacent field and was in the stands watching the game at the time of the spraying.

“A little bit,” was the shy reply.

“Would you be able to act scared again?” Franchot asked.

Jake, who is not related to Orioles manager Kevin Sanders, nodded, then was given an audition. He ran in front of a dugout and when Franchot shouted, “Now! Helicopters!” the boy stopped and scanned the sky with a look of terror.

“Excellent,” said Franchot, and he gave Jake the part.

Cameraman Rowan, 37, of West Hollywood, was on the infield preparing to shoot a scene of a player sliding into home plate.

He said the commercial would normally cost about $150,000 to make but is being done for almost nothing because of donations, including film from Eastman Kodak and cameras from Clairmont Cameras Inc. of Studio City.

Officials of the Norwalk Pony-Colt League and parents of the ballplayers are angry at the state Department of Food and Agriculture because the aerial spraying was done during a game.

The first league games begin about 5 p.m. Sandy Smith, who runs the snack shack, said: “We found out at 4:30 (April 17) that they were going to spray.”

Her husband, league president Dave Smith, said he called the Norwalk sheriff’s station. “They couldn’t get a hold of anybody (involved with the spraying),” he said. “I didn’t cancel the games because I thought there might be a possibility that they wouldn’t get here ‘til late. I thought with the lights on they wouldn’t try to come over.”

Smith said that after that night he canceled games when spraying was scheduled.

Caree Lawrence, public information officer with the Co-op Medfly Project in El Monte, confirmed that the field was sprayed April 17 by five helicopters. The Medfly project involves the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the state Department of Food and Agriculture and the agriculture departments in Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside counties.

“When people are having ballgames or other community things, they call us,” Lawrence said. “We don’t give exemptions, but we try to accommodate people by letting them know what time we think we’re going to be over an area.”

But Sandy Smith said, “As far as I’m concerned, they didn’t care.”

After the helicopters had made two passes and the excitement had eased, the game resumed and the Cardinals won, 14-2.

“That is an umpire’s decision,” said Dave Smith, who had left the field before the spraying. “If I would have been there, I probably would have left it up to the managers and umpires to decide whether to keep playing.”

“Helicopter! Now! Look up!” Franchot, 27, yelled through a megaphone.

With Rowan’s camera rolling, a crowd of about 60 people, bathed in white lights, ran screaming from the stands toward the snack shop last Saturday.

The commercial, Rowan explained, will include footage of soldiers running along a river to avoid Agent Orange being dumped in Vietnam, and a farmer fleeing crop dusters in a grape vineyard.

“Our major concern is informing the public about abuse of pesticides,” Rowan said.

He said a slow-motion shot of Jake Sanders looking up at helicopters will open the malathion segment.

“We liked his shyness,” Rowan said. “It enabled us to capture the sense of fear we wanted.”

The climactic scene will have Jake, at bat in a crucial last-inning situation, driving a ball up into the lights and toward the helicopters, which will be spliced in during the editing process.

It was past midnight, but Jake tried hard to please. He blasted line drives and hit grounders over the dusty infield marked with the tracks of a camera dolly. But he could not hit a fly ball.

“Cut!” Franchot yelled repeatedly.

Rowan, behind his camera, told his director, “Tell him not to kill it.”

Jake, facing more pressure than he probably ever had in a real game, swung at about 15 pitches. Finally, about 1 a.m., he delivered a clutch pop-up that knocked the commercial into the can.