A Desert Trek to Some California League Oases

By MIKE HISERMAN

Aug. 11, 1993 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

It is a tough job, but someone has to do it.

Our latest assignment is in: Chronicle a six-day, six-stop tour of California League baseball franchises located within a three-hour drive of the Valley.

Our editors say we should approach our task as if we were two baseball junkies on a vacation.

“Isn’t that basically what we are and what we’re doing, taking a vacation?” says George, my partner.

He has a point. We have a company car, two company credit cards and two guilty consciences.

This might as well be vacation. Accordingly, we will pretend as if we are on a tight budget.

It is a Monday in June. We have packed clothes, note pads, pens, cameras, lenses, batteries and, as importantly, our gloves.

George will take pictures. I will take notes. We will play catch. Lots of catch.

Just after noon, we merge onto the 118 Freeway in Granada Hills, curly fries already bouncing on the dash.

First stop, San Bernardino.

Ten years ago the California League might well have been called the Northern California League.

Then came a great migration. More than half of the Class-A league’s 10 teams now are located between Bakersfield and Palm Springs, a 3 1/2-hour drive.

On several occasions this season, a fan could have watched a game in six cities on consecutive days. Our trip will take us from San Bernardino to Adelanto to Bakersfield to Rancho Cucamonga to Riverside to Palm Springs.

We will visit old parks in San Bernardino, Bakersfield and Riverside; new parks in Adelanto and Rancho Cucamonga, and a park in Palm Springs where fans can shower in a fog-like mist.

The trip will be educational.

For instance, do you know where smog goes when it leaves Los Angeles?

We do. San Bernardino. There are mountains only a short drive from Fiscalini Field, home of the San Bernardino Spirit. Yet, as we pull into the parking lot at 1:30 in the afternoon, the peaks are barely visible through a thick, brown blanket of haze.

The ballpark has been around since 1935, but there isn’t a bad seat in the house. The stadium is clean. The mascot is entertaining. The food is hot. There are no lines at the concession stands.

An added plus for the home fans: The Spirit wins, 2-0, on a home run by Steve Anderson and the four-hit pitching of Rod Pedraza.

After the game, we set out for our motel about five miles away.

Mr. Bodett has left the light on for us and, inexplicably, the satellite pointed toward . . . Colorado?

Brenda, the receptionist, informs us that all the local television channels are tuned in to Denver stations. “I guess it has to do with the direction the dish is pointed in,” she says. “And, you know, the economy.”

We make sure we can get ESPN, then hand over our credit cards.

Next stop, Adelanto, near Victorville.

An advertisement on the radio promotes Sea World Night later in the week at Maverick Stadium, home of the High Desert Mavericks and our destination. A little farther down Interstate 15 is a billboard publicizing an upcoming Huck Finn Jubilee.

We can’t stay for either event, but neither can we resist a quick stop at the Roy Rogers Dale Evans Museum in Victorville, about a 15-minute drive southwest of the baseball stadium.

We exit the freeway at Roy Rogers Drive and look for the 40-foot-tall statue of Trigger, Roy’s horse and co-star.

Trigger, whose anatomically correct presence dominates the entrance of the museum, appeared with Rogers in 188 movies. The horse was so popular that he was star of his own comic book series.

When Trigger died, Roy had him stuffed--oops, one of the caretakers says Rogers prefers the term “mounted”--and placed in one of the museum’s displays.

Out at the stadium, we learn that Roy and Dale live in nearby Apple Valley. They threw out the ceremonial first ball at one Mavericks game, staying just long enough to hear “Happy Trails” be played during a pitching change.

Leanne Pagliai, the Mavericks’ 34-year-old general manager, shamelessly reports she still hasn’t returned the favor by visiting Roy and Dale’s museum. But, shucks, she has lived in the area only three years .

Maverick Stadium is located just off Highway 395, a barren stretch of blacktop that runs for miles through a lonely landscape of sagebrush, Joshua trees and billboards advertising three- and four-bedroom homes from $60,000 to $80,000.

Signs of life are few and far between, but the homes must be there. High Desert is second in the league in attendance.

Next stop, Bakersfield.

We head north on 395 into a vast expanse of emptiness. Near the town of Kramer, we pick up Highway 58 and head west. Our only stop on the way to Bakersfield will be in a community named after an element.

Boron is home of the Twenty Mule Team Museum, which includes displays of early mining equipment and exhibits taken from the pits of the Pacific Coast Borax Co.

Borax isn’t just a brand name. The compound, which is used in cleansers, has been a lifeblood for longtime residents.

Heading south on Boron Avenue from the freeway, we pass Rocks Rock Shop, which advertises “desert discoveries.”

We didn’t stop at Rocks, but our best guess is that similar “discoveries” can be found by pulling to the side of the freeway and taking a short walk out into the desert.

Back on the freeway, we pass the largest open-pit borax mine in the world, measuring 600 feet deep and between one-eighth of a mile and 1.2 miles wide.

Farther west is Edwards Air Force Base. When the space shuttle lands, people have been known to literally park on the freeway to watch.

Forty miles outside Bakersfield, near Tehachapi, the horizon is filled with churning metallic windmills.

The rhythmic flow of the tall, powerful structures seems as hypnotic as the mesmerizing crash of waves at a beach.

Or maybe we’ve just been driving in the desert too long.

Geographically, Bakersfield represents the center of the 10-team California League, a 3 1/2-hour drive from Palm Springs in the south and San Jose in the north. The other franchises we will visit play in the circuit’s southern division. Bakersfield is in the north along with Central Valley (Visalia), Modesto, San Jose and Stockton.

Our visit is worth the effort.

Rick Dempsey, the rookie manager of the Bakersfield Dodgers, is charming and witty. His team has the worst record in professional baseball. In journalism we consider that a potentially great combination.

Dempsey does not let us down. Before the game, he grouses about his team’s lack of clutch hitting. During the game, he energetically and animatedly coaxes his young team from the dugout and third base coaches’ box.

The Dodgers lose, 1-0, in 10 innings. In the bottom of the ninth, they have a runner at third with one out but strand him. Dempsey told us so.

Next stop, Rancho Cucamonga.

We head east on 58, then pick up Highway 14 south through Lancaster, merge onto eastbound 138 through Palmdale and Wrightwood, and get on the 15 traveling south, which takes us by the stadium in Rancho Cucamonga.

We see more windmills, pass near the Dryden Air Research Center and blow by Sal’s Town Casino just east of Rosamond before reaching Palmdale.

For miles and miles, we see little homes without paved entrances or street lights. In Palmdale, we see paved roads and street lights--cul-de-sacs-in-waiting--without homes.

We pass over Avenue S in Palmdale, which runs over the San Andreas Fault. George pushes a little heavier on the gas.

Just east of Pearblossom there is a place that offers glider rides. Farther down the highway, the snow around Mountain High Ski Resort becomes more prominent. As we pass through Wrightwood, the landscape becomes more green and scenic.

Once we hit the 15, it’s a straight drop to Rancho Cucamonga, a boomtown that resembles south Orange County about 15 years ago except that there is no ocean breeze and the air is brown.

The Rancho Cucamonga Quakes play at a new $11-million park that has been dubbed “The Epicenter.” The stadium, which is white with a stylishly arched facade and forest green trim, is big league in almost every way. Television monitors are located adjacent to the main concession stands. Players from other teams have told us the infield here is like a putting green.

The Epicenter is part of a $17-million “adult sports complex” located in an otherwise commercial area of the city. Even the softball venues that surround the park are in tip-top condition.

It is, within a city block, the perfect place for adults of any aptitude to play ball.

Next stop, Riverside.

What could we possibly find on the 25-mile drive between Rancho Cucamonga and Riverside that could rival the thrill of seeing Roy’s bronzed boots or an almost-lifesize, illuminated mural of the original twenty-mule team?

Four miles out of Rancho Cucamonga, we exit the freeway and pull to the side of the road so George can retrieve a camera from the trunk. It looks like today’s best road photo might be of big-rig truck exhaust.

We park across the street from a billboard advertising a winery and a cafe. An arrow on the sign points down a narrow gravel road.

What the heck. This is no longer a job, it’s an adventure.

We turn onto the road heading east, past a tire company, a fiberglass company, a sheepskin factory, an electric company and a marble manufacturer, before reaching a parking lot adjacent to the Homestyle Cafe.

The menu says the cafe is “home of the 25-cent coffee.” There are cups at each table, and none of them match. Quaint.

Estelle, the cafe’s manager, tells us we are in Guasti, an area that encompasses about 4,000 acres just north of the Ontario Airport.

In the early 1900s, Secondo Guasti settled here and established the Italian Vineyard Co., building homes for his workers, a market and a church.

The little community, which has its own post office, still harvests grapes but now ships them to other areas to be processed.

Estelle has almost completed directions from the cafe to the wine-tasting area when breakfast arrives, stopping her in mid-sentence.

“Oh, no!,” she groans. “You didn’t order the pancakes, did you?”

As a matter of fact, we did. And now our waitress stands before us, forearms straining, with our breakfast.

It looked innocent enough on the menu: a pancake sandwich. Two hotcakes, an egg and a couple strips of bacon. There was never a hint that the pancakes each would measure 14 inches in diameter, three quarters of an inch thick and weigh more than some preschoolers.

Fortunately, we didn’t order an omelet on the side. They each include five eggs.

Next stop, Palm Springs.

We are three miles east of Banning when we see, rising from the scorching-hot sand, two gigantic reptiles.

We might have discovered the inspiration for “Jurassic Park.”

Outside a truck stop in a speck on the road called Cabazon stand a four-story, 50-yard-long brontosaurus and a 65-foot-tall tyrannosaurus. Both are the creations of the late Claude Bell, an artist and sculptor whose works have turned a cafe and gas station turnoff into a tourist attraction.

Bell spent 11 years and more than $250,000 of his own money to mold “Dinney,” a brontosaurus that is roughly three times the size of his Jurassic-period predecessors, out of steel and concrete. The tyrannosaurus cost almost twice as much.

The dinosaurs are big hits with kids, who can climb a narrow stairway for a view out the windows of a small museum and gift shop that is built into the brontosaurus’ belly.

In an adjacent lot, helicopter rides are available for $10 on weekends, but we pass on that opportunity. We are, for the first time, in a rush to get to our hotel.

That’s right, h otel. We have decided, after five days of constraint, that we deserve to splurge a little. No more Tom Bodett quotes in frames hanging on the walls. A real pool--with a view.

Next stop, home.

The following day’s drive home is fast and uneventful. At the end, the odometer says we have covered 818 miles.

We were spoiled by great seats in intimate ballparks and an array of fascinating promotions created to entertain minor league fans. Our arms are sore from playing catch. We are sick of eating hot dogs.

But we’re not ready to return from work.

The Travelogue

Bakersfield

Nickname: Dodgers

Major league affiliate: L.A. Dodgers

Stadium: Sam Lynn Ballpark (3,200)

Address: 4009 Chester Ave., Bakersfield

Tickets: $3 for general admission, $5 for reserved.

Rancho Cucamonga

Nickname: Quakes

Major league affiliate: San Diego Padres

Stadium: Epicenter (unofficial) (5,100)