Pirates’ Treasure : Band of Players Other Teams Shunned Sails Into Title Game

The other coaches in the league thought Stu Cahn was kidding when they saw the roster of players he had chosen for his new baseball team, the Pirates.

He picked the shortest player. He picked a boy with autism and another with attention deficit disorder. He picked one of the only girls in the Los Alamitos Junior Baseball League. He also picked two of his three sons, because, in fact, Cahn had started the team for fear no one else would draft them.

The team was the laughingstock of the league. Until it started winning.

And on Monday night, with a record of 16-1, the Pirates stepped onto the Los Alamitos Baseball Park to play the season championship game for the Pinto division.

“The coaches laughed at me,” Cahn, 47, said Monday. “Now I can laugh at them.”

The division coaches had met in February at Los Alamitos High School to pick their teams, after the 7- and 8-year-old players tried out.

“They all want the very best players,” Cahn said. “And nobody, I mean nobody, wants to take a girl.”

But Cahn picked 7-year-old Nicole Mayes. He also selected Kenny Roberts, who has autism. And he drafted the boy with attention deficit disorder. He also took 3-foot-6 Marc Montana, the shortest boy in the division.

“Maybe it’s because I remember when I tried out for Little League and didn’t make it,” said Cahn, 47. “Back in those days, if you weren’t good enough, you just didn’t play.”

Cahn’s 8-year-old son, Ben, said that at the team’s first practice: “I was amazed. I saw my teammates and thought, ‘Geez, they are so small. They don’t know how to play baseball.’

“I never thought we’d win this much.”

Lisa Mulvaney didn’t expect the team to win many games, either. She enrolled her autistic son because he likes sports and she thought it would be a good way for him to play with other children.

“Socialization is one of the biggest problems with autism,” Mulvaney said Monday night. “But out here, he likes the camaraderie, hanging out with the other kids. And there’s not as big a disparity as there is with school and schoolwork.”

Bruce Mayes, the father of the team’s only girl, said each of the Pirates “really treats her as an equal. If anyone [on another team] jokes [about] her, she completely ignores it.”

Before Monday’s game, Mulvaney said, she walked by the opposing team and overheard a player say, “Hit it to the girl every time.”

“I thought to myself, ‘They’re not going to get any further than they would if they hit it to any other player.”’

But the Pirate’s winning streak was broken Monday night when the 17-0 Orioles beat them, 1-0.

A few Pirates broke into tears. “Don’t cry,” Cahn said. “You didn’t lose; they just beat you.”

Anyway, Mulvaney said, the team has “never been about winning. It’s always been low-pressure.” Even playing in the division championship, she said, seemed “really weird. It almost seems surreal.”

Ben Cahn said the season has taught him that “you shouldn’t judge people by the way they look, or by how tall they are. Like this kid,” Ben said as he covered teammate Mark Montana’s face with his leather baseball glove. “He’s pretty small but I think he’s the best player on the team. . . . And he’s turned out to be a pretty good friend.”

Cahn’s coaching partner, Ryan Olson, said the season “took a lot of patience.

“But look at the reward for all of this,” he said. “They may have beat us, 1-0, but the top two teams are here, and we’re one of them.”