Little League: a Community’s Spirit at Play

Opening day isn’t until Saturday, but the people who live near the North Venice Little League fields don’t need a calendar to tell them what season has arrived.

Boys and girls have been swinging in the batting cage for several weekends now. Ice plant along the driveway has exploded into brilliant pink bloom. Fig trees in the community gardens--bare through the winter--are dotted with new green.

Soon they’ll all be back. Susan Scheding with her youngest daughter, a member of the Honeys. Three generations and numerous branches of the Flores family. Don and Audrey Hedge, who as newcomers to Los Angeles found their first sense of home at these ball fields.

There is nothing fancy about North Venice Little League--unless you count the splendor of its location atop Mar Vista Hill.

Where else can you watch children play baseball with the Pacific Ocean shimmering in the distance? Where else can a coach, player or parent cool off among the roses and lettuce mounds and fragrant rosemary bushes that grace community garden plots on the hill’s western slope?

Against this backdrop is an unpretentious Little League franchise, now entering its 36th season. If parents are partial to fancy ways, they wisely leave them behind when they make the climb to the ball fields. There are no cellular phones, and clothing is strictly utilitarian.

The 500 youngsters--ages 6 to 18--who play here come from neighborhoods sharply delineated by ethnicity and income. But just as the game of baseball has traditionally offered a respite from the push and shove of daily life, so North Venice Little League has found a way to meld its diverse families.

Which is to say everyone does a shift in the snack bar, and Jaguars are just as likely as pickups to have their windshields smashed by a hard-hit foul. Deaths, births, weddings quickly become community property. Sharing blankets, sunscreen, lukewarm fries and the glory days and miseries of each other’s children submerge most remaining differences.

Sure, the crummy cliches of Little League can be found here: screamer coaches, managers who bend the rules to get the best players, parents who put cruel pressure on their children so they might bask in reflected glory.

“But other parents can just go up and tell them to take a hike. You don’t have to have a title to do something about something you don’t like,” says Susan Scheding, mother of two former players who this year will head back up the hill with 10-year-old Meg.

Scheding, who lives on a street of pricey hilltop homes near the ball fields, likes North Venice’s straightforward ideas about baseball.

You don’t hear much parenting-class talk on the hill about nurturing a child’s inner child or about how losing doesn’t matter as long as everyone has fun.

Here, a child’s self-esteem flows directly from personal accomplishment, however small it might seem to others. You can see it in the dazzling grin the first time a child crosses home plate and in the swelling pride of a youngster who, when struck out, finally makes it to the dugout without crying.

If the league had a motto, it would be Play Hard and Win.

Yet, North Venice Little League also comes with heart.

Ask Don Hedge, an Englishman with no native interest in the game of baseball.

Like so many of Los Angeles’ immigrants, Hedge had struggled in the sprawl and rushing ambition of the city to find a way to call it home. Neighborly relations, he recalls, consisted mostly of seeing each other from a car.

Then a friend invited him and his wife, Audrey, to an early spring game on the hill.

They sat in the bleachers, warming themselves with coffee against the bitter ocean winds and trading jokes about Southern California’s supposedly balmy climes. Hedge knew at once he’d stumbled into a warm haven.

“There were a lot of neighbors and friendly people, and we had a marvelous time,” he recalls of that first afternoon.

Hedge, who came here in the ‘60s, became a familiar figure at the fields, once his two children came of playing age. As not only a fan but also as a volunteer field hand, fixer, fund raiser and, finally, treasurer.

“What this league really did was bring me into the American way of life,” says Hedge. He’s retired from active league duty now but is still seen in the bleachers for an occasional game. “All of a sudden (my neighbors) became people who saw me with an identity because their boy was playing on a team.”

The Moraga family could also tell you about heart.

During her fourth season, all-star Cathy Morag, 14, was stricken with lupus.

“The way we discovered she was sick actually had to do with her cleats,” Cathy’s older sister, Linda Gonzales, recalls. “We had just bought them for her, and she kept complaining they hurt her feet. It turned out her feet had swollen because her kidneys were failing.”

Cathy spent the next three months in Santa Monica Hospital, but her team did not forget her. When they won their first game, the girls crowded around Cathy’s bed and gave her the game ball. When her illness went into remission in time for the playoffs, the league made her an honorary member of the 1980 all-star team.

Cathy died that October. The youngest of the Moraga children, she had been the only one to play at North Venice.

Understandably, her death might have severed the tie. But the following March, Linda Gonzales got a telephone call. Could she and the rest of the Moraga family come to opening day?

There, in a solemn ceremony, league officers retired Cathy’s number and dedicated several pages of the 1981 yearbook to her memory.

“It wasn’t just our family’s loss. The whole community up there mourned,” says Gonzales, who went on with her husband, Benny, to preside over the league from 1988 to 1991, while their three sons played.

These are busy days for the parents of North Venice Little League, counted in brush strokes of blue on worn bleachers and shovelfuls of new dirt for the pitcher’s mound.

On a recent Saturday morning, Fernando Flores was spotted on the major field. That’s Coach Fernando, also known as the brother of Coach Hector Flores, Manager Cesar Flores and League Vice President Abel Flores--not to mention his ties to numerous younger Floreses who play on North Venice teams.

On this day, though, Fernando Flores had left his notes on batting order and the esoterica of pitching rotation at home. In his hands was a shovel. Slowly, he shaped the ragged, rain-nourished turf into a clean arc around first base.