Ex-Major Leaguer Tries to Rescue Centennial Program

Buckets of soapy water and towels were ready, but business was not good at a car wash to raise money for the Centennial High baseball team.

Coach Lenny Randle, wearing the blue-and-white uniform from his playing days with the New York Mets, stood last week at El Segundo Boulevard and Central Avenue in Compton and beckoned drivers to pull into a school lot.

A man in an old foreign car called Randle’s name and waved, but like all the others, he whizzed past the graffiti-scarred corner where the coach and some of his eager players wanted to earn a few bucks for the team.

“Back when I was here if we did something like this, there would be cars lined up for blocks,” said Randle, 44.

Randle, with the help of former major leaguer Rudy Law, hopes to restore pride, community involvement and some stability in the long-neglected Centennial program. Randle is the fourth varsity coach at the school in four years.

“That’s one of the reasons we haven’t improved, we’ve had so many coaches,” senior catcher Bernie Leyva said.

There has been a hint of progress. The Apaches finished last in the six-team Pioneer League with a 3-12 record, but two of those victories were over South Torrance, which secured the league’s third playoff spot. The varsity team has won six games overall, one more than last season, but the junior varsity team won only once.

“We’re sacrificing this season to teach,” Randle said. “They’ve got to learn somewhere.”

In the late 1960s, when Randle attended Centennial, the school was known for producing fine athletes, some of whom went on to play pro sports. But shifting demographics, years of community decay and the attraction of gangs to would-be athletes have sapped much of the energy the school once had.

Weeds garnish the baseball field, a dry, wind-swept patch on the outskirts of the campus. Randle found the dugouts full of beer cans and covered with gang slogans. A street behind the right-field fence is a no-man’s land separating rival gangs, players say.

Equipment is nearly nonexistent. Walk-on baseball coaches have come and gone and the sport’s paltry operating budget of $1,000 has sometimes been raided by other Apache teams.

“When I first got here two years ago, the budget for baseball had already been spent (on other things),” Principal Edward Gilliam said.

Randle, who is paid $1,400 a season, works out of the trunk of his blue Mercedes, which is stuffed with bats, balls, gloves and memorabilia. Most of the athletic gear is donated, but Randle said he buys some of it himself.

In addition to a scarcity of funds, there is a scarcity of players. Only nine, the minimum to field a team, turned out for the start of varsity practice. Eventually, the varsity roster grew to 15 players.

“I was in shock the first week,” Randle said. “I just took it for granted that there were athletes here.”

Randle said he also was surprised how the city and Centennial have changed in ethnic makeup, from mostly black when he was a student to heavily Latino now.

One of eight children in a family that lived on Piru Street during the 1960s, Randle was a standout football, basketball and baseball player at Centennial.

After playing at Arizona State, he broke into the major leagues with the Washington Senators in 1971, the year before the team moved to Texas. He was a big-league infielder for 12 years with six teams and had a career batting average of .257. His best season was 1977 when he batted .304 for the Mets, but he gained notoriety during spring training that year when he punched Frank Luchessi, his manager at Texas. Referring to that incident, the Washington Post said Randle was “a nice quiet guy until something snapped.”

After playing in a senior league in Florida in 1985, Randle has been a baseball card show promoter and real estate investor. He lives in San Bernardino.

He took the Centennial job in March after prodding by Compton mayoral candidate Omar Bradley, who wants prominent former residents to put some time back into the community.

Randle asked Law, an outfielder for the Dodgers in the late ‘70s, to speak to the team as the season got under way. Afterward, Law said he would help out, and ended up being the junior varsity coach.

A lot has changed in Randle’s old neighborhood. Vacant lots where he once played catch, with paper sacks as gloves, now hold houses and industrial buildings. Parks are unsafe. Youth sports programs that nurtured young players like Pittsburgh outfielder Lonnie Smith, who attended Centennial, have disappeared.

“Kids have nowhere to go,” Randle said.

Law said that Centennial, which does not have a freshman baseball team, is at a disadvantage against Pioneer League schools from El Segundo and Torrance because those areas have well-established youth programs that teach baseball fundamentals.

“There’s no baseball in the inner city,” said Law, who grew up in east Palo Alto in a neighborhood much like the one near Centennial. “So the things that these guys should know from playing Little League, like hitting the cutoff man (on a throw), they don’t understand.”

A perpetual losing attitude has resulted.

“They’re so used to losing that they accept it,” Law said. “They’re really better than they look, but they just accept losing because it’s easy.”

Randle said the Compton Unified School District should take some of the blame for that attitude.

“Look at this,” the coach said during the car wash. He pointed at dry, unkempt grass next to defaced classrooms. “When I was here this was manicured like a golf course.”

Then he turned his attention to the neighborhood in which he grew up. He pointed across El Segundo Boulevard, where “Bam” and “Crime” were scrawled on the side of a building.

“We didn’t have graffiti either,” Randle said. “(We) just want to help, but it’s not easy.”

Gilliam said he does not expect Randle and Law to work miracles.

“The program needs to stabilize and get a solid group of boosters from the community to raise money just for baseball,” Gilliam said.

Some signs have been encouraging. About 30 players were on the junior varsity roster, and Randle and Law hope others will come out next season.

A strong fund-raising program is Randle’s goal, but it has been slow getting off the ground, as the car wash proved. He has solicited businesses near the school for $100 in exchange for advertising their names on the outfield wall.

Corporations so far have been cool to the idea, but Randle keeps trying. After buying tacos for the players, he crossed El Segundo Boulevard to buy sodas at a grocery store. He asked the store manager for a donation for the team, but was told, “That kind of request has to go through our corporate office.”

Those kind of responses are typical, an undaunted Randle said as he pushed a shopping cart full of sodas across the street to where his players were washing a car that had pulled into the lot.

A smile crossed Randel’s face and he vowed to push on.

“I just hope what I am doing works,” he said. “I’ve got to give these kids hope.”