‘63 Champs Still Savor Big Season

They’re pushing 40 nowadays and watch more baseball than they play. They’re scattered around Southern California and the rest of the country. And they’re more apt to talk about their golf handicaps than their boyhood batting averages.

But almost three decades later, nothing can dim the luminosity of that championship season.

It was 1963 when a group of 11- and 12-year-olds from Granada Hills fulfilled “Everyboy’s” fantasy on a baseball diamond in Williamsport, Pa., by sweeping the Little League World Series tournament. Before a cheering crowd of 12,000, the Granada Hills boys narrowly beat a squad from Stratford, Conn., in an extra-inning championship game.

“How can anything top that?” said Dave Sehnem, a Simi Valley real estate broker who was the winning pitcher that muggy afternoon.

“At that time it was definitely the biggest thing that happened to me in my life,” former outfielder David Bees said. “And it still is.”

The boys captured the title on Aug. 24, exactly 28 years before Saturday’s championship game which saw Taiwan defeat the United States 11-0. The U. S. team was from the San Ramon Valley in Northern California.

What better time to reminisce about the feat that no California team has since repeated?

“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” former right fielder Gary Anderson said. He owns a furniture store practically within a catcher’s throw of the team’s old playing field at Devonshire Street and Balboa Boulevard, now site of a hospital and an electronics store. “If you just get there, that’s great. But if you win, that’s unheard of.”

Especially for the Granada Hills National All-Star Team, Western region champions that year. Made up of 14 standouts from six local teams, the group could only boast a 5-foot, 4-inch pitcher as its tallest player and notched an average weight of a mere 80 pounds.

“I have a 10-year-old daughter who probably weighs more than that,” quipped first baseman Fred Seibly, the only former player who is not yet 40.

The boys were so slight that World Series uniforms for the previous year’s Western team billowed like cotton tents when the players tried them on. Amused Little League officials hurriedly ordered a new batch of scarlet-and-cream flannels from Philadelphia, barely receiving them in time for the first game of the three-round, weeklong competition.

The team had won 10 consecutive playoff games to earn the trip to Williamsport, relying on the strength of a brilliant bullpen that included southpaw Sehnem and right-hander Tom Berry. The batting lineup pivoted around stocky young Ken Kinsman, a catcher with the cachet of cashing in home run balls in a pinch.

But the acknowledged driving forces behind the scenes were the team’s two coaches, Bill Sehnem and Glen Berry, fathers of the two pitchers. Determined, highly organized and invariably chomping on cigars, the two set up a strict training regimen for their boys, with batting practice each morning, then drills in the evening.

The coaches stressed discipline and teamwork--lessons that resonate today.

“That’s the most important thing that I got from the experience that still carries with me,” said former utility player Tom Orlando of Los Angeles, who owns a saw manufacturing company. “I run a business, and my philosophy is that everyone works together as a team. Everyone’s an integral part of making something work.”

“We heard that every day,” Dave Sehnem said.

During their weeklong stay in barracks near the playing field in Williamsport, the coaches shielded their proteges from distractions, even by sending the squad into the mess hall last at mealtimes to keep them away from opposing teams. The boys were also forbidden to go swimming in the communal pool--a harsh decree in the unbearably muggy weather.

The rigid strategy paid off. The team successfully met a first-round challenge from a team of Houston hulks tabbed by many sportswriters to nab the title, then plucked a team from Izmir, Turkey, in a lopsided 14-0 semifinal shutout.

Saturday, Aug. 24, 1963, dawned with a drizzle that threatened to suspend the final against Stratford. The oppressive humidity shrouded the athletes like a wet sheet as swarms of gnats buzzed in maddening black balls around their heads.

To pass the time, some of the Granada Hills boys read Archie comic books. Others horsed around in the barracks, where jockstraps they had been given by the Bub Athletic Supporter Co. dangled from the ceiling lights--a pre-adolescent prank the men still laugh at today. (They also received cleats as promotional items, but they used those.)

At 1 p.m. blue sky finally peeped through the clouds and the teams filed into the Howard J. Lamade Stadium.

“The golden hour is here . . . zero hour. The Little League World Series championship game,” local sports announcer Les Keiter intoned in the first-ever nationally televised final. Granada Hills, he explained, was an area “25 miles from Pasadena.”

The score stood at 0-0 until the bottom of the fourth inning when Kinsman clocked a solo home run over the left-field fence on a full-count pitch. “He hit that 3-2 delivery on a trajectory like a rainbow . . . Oh baby, did he rammycackle a fast ball!” gushed Keiter, who sprinkled his commentary with esoteric expressions.

But catcher Kinsman let a pitch get by him the next inning, allowing the New Englanders to tie the game. Dave Sehnem came off the mound and laid a comforting arm across his catcher’s shoulders. For the first time that afternoon, players who had seemed so cool and professional were boys once more.

“He was sobbing. He was really shook up,” Sehnem recalled. “He felt the weight of the game. He thought we were going to lose.”

The game stretched into an extra inning. Sehnem fanned two of the batters, including one husky lad who vainly sought divine help by crossing himself before each pitch.

In the bottom of the inning, with one out and Fred Seibly dancing on second base, Jimmy “Nails” Walker looped a pop fly to right field--and, to the surprise of everyone and the horror of some, Seibly began to run.

The ball landed just inside the foul line, finding a hole in Stratford’s usually airtight defense. Seibly rounded third and slid home for the winning run, easily beating the throw to the plate.

The boys cheered and hugged each other. Walker leaped into Sehnem’s arms, a jubilant moment captured in a photograph published in newspapers across the country. “Now we can go swimming!” a couple of the youngsters shouted again and again, according to an amused New York Times sportswriter.

The coaches briefly quieted the boys with a final piece of advice.

“I remember Mr. Berry telling us to be a humble winner,” recalled Bees, now owner of a remodeling company in Augusta, Ga. So the boys didn’t gloat over their victory and headed back to the locker room to celebrate with snow cones.

Instead, all of San Fernando Valley gloated for them with a ticker-tape parade, commendations from City Hall and plaques from an Optimist Club proclaiming them “Men of the Year.”

“We were barely into puberty and we were ‘Men of the Year,’ ” chuckled catcher Kinsman, now a senior vice president with a satellite television company in San Diego.

Most of the players went on to play baseball throughout their school years, and a couple--Sehnem and Seibly--even had brief careers in the minor leagues.

But nothing matched the laurels they were crowned with in the dog days of 1963.

And the former ballplayers fondly remember the coaches, especially Berry, who in their own way helped mold them into men. Many stayed in touch with Berry, who gave some of them summer jobs at his manufacturing plant while they were in college. He died several years ago of a kidney ailment.

“He was a very influential man in my life,” Sehnem said.

Now, the former world champs have children of their own playing Little League or T-Ball but say they do not want to pressure the kids with tales of that one glorious summer.

Instead, that championship season was resurrected at 10- and 20-year reunions that attracted almost the whole team. The men are already talking about a 30th, which will give them a chance to keep debating a lingering question: Why did Seibly run on the pop fly in that decisive seventh inning?

“There was one out, and it would have been a double play,” Sehnem said when a few of them got together recently. “How did you know that that was going to fall in?”

“I had the angle . . . I swear!” Seibly protested as his former teammates laughed.

“Man, you have dreamed about this too long,” Kinsman said.

“I had the angle. I knew it was going to fall in,” Seibly shot back. He shook his head in disbelief. “Twenty-eight years later, and they don’t believe me.”

BACKGROUND

Little League was founded in 1939 by Carl Stotz and George and Bert Bebble, three Williamsport, Pa., men who wanted to give children of the predominantly farming community an opportunity to play the sport. The league grew from three teams to more than 7,000 baseball programs for children 6 to 18 worldwide. Girls were admitted in 1974. The Little League World Series for 11- and 12-year-olds was instituted in 1947. Foreign teams began competing in 1951. The series tournament, held each August, involves four regional representatives from the United States and one each from Latin America, Canada, Europe and the Far East. The overall U.S. and foreign winners play in the final game.