Deputy D.A. Makes Her Case for Reviving Pro Baseball League

By day, Gina Satriano plays hardball in the courtroom. At night, she plays real hardball. She’s a pitcher and infielder, with a fastball that’s been clocked in the 80 m.p.h. range. Satriano, a deputy district attorney in Compton, plays for the Los Angeles Gatekeepers, a women’s baseball team whose players hope to someday be a part of a new women’s major league.

It has been more than four decades since women have played major league baseball. Los Angeles Gatekeeper founder and team coach Mike Boyd and Satriano feel it’s time for women to get back into the swing of things.

“There is no reason women shouldn’t be allowed to play,” said Satriano, 27, a Malibu resident. “Women can throw the distance and with good speed between the bases. There is a physical challenge but strength is not all there is to the game.”

Satriano has worked hard at developing her baseball skills, but there’s probably a genetic component, too: Her father, Tom, was a catcher and third baseman who played in the majors from 1961 to 1970 for the Angels and Boston Red Sox.

Gina Satriano got an early start at the game. Twenty years ago in Woodland Hills, she was something of a celebrity when she became the first girl in California to play on a boy’s Little League team.

Not everyone was delighted about it. At one point, her family received threatening phone calls.

“My mother was the one that fought to get me into the league,” Satriano said. “I just liked to play. . . . The boys didn’t give me a hard time. It was usually the parents and coaches.”

With her mother’s encouragement, Satriano continued to play on teams throughout high school. At UC Davis, she went out for the men’s baseball team. She missed the final cut, but concluded from the experience that she wasn’t out of her league.

“Then, I knew that I was able to compete” beyond the high school level, she said.

After finishing undergraduate work in political science and Spanish at UC Davis, she earned a law degree at Pepperdine University. She also played for a year in a local men’s league, on an El Segundo team called the New York Heartbreakers.

Baseball, though, was never far from her heart. Last December, she heard about the Gatekeepers from a friend.

“I hadn’t played ball in a couple of years so I called the coach and tried out,” she said. “I was asked to join the team and I was thrilled because I could play again.”

The team practices three to five days a week in a Burbank park. Because a professional league has yet to be formed, Satriano and her teammates play in weekend tournaments. Despite such limited exposure, they hope to increase the public’s awareness and bring back the fun of the game.

“It’s in our hearts,” she said. “We have nothing else to play for except the love of the sport.”

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Norma Gonzales has been named president of the Venice Family Clinic, the nation’s largest free health care clinic.

A native of Mexico, Gonzales recently retired from her position as a district manager for the Southern California Gas Co. She has served on the clinic’s board of directors for more than a decade.

She was honored at a reception Nov. 3 at the Julie Rico Gallery in Santa Monica.

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The Pacific Southwest Region of the Federation of Jewish Men’s Clubs presented its “Red Yarmulke Award for Humanitarian Service” to Sandy and Milt Gordon.

The Westside couple was honored for their years of volunteer service to the Jewish community. They were honored Nov. 7 at a dinner held at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles.

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Barry Boehm has been named to the TRW Professorship in Software Engineering at USC.

The Santa Monica resident, who serves as director of USC’s Center for Software Engineering, specializes in the development of large-scale software systems. He has also worked on projects for the U.S. Department of Defense, RAND Corp. and TRW Corp.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Harvard University, and a master’s degree and doctorate in mathematics from UCLA.

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The Awards Committee of the All-UC Group, professors in economic history at University of California campuses, has awarded a $2,000 research grant to Thomas Laichas.

Laichas, chairman of the history department at Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences in Santa Monica, will use the grant to fund his research toward his dissertation on the economic history of California. He will report on his finding to the All-UC Group’s Conference on the Budget Crisis next spring.

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