U.S. Champs Do City Proud

Little girls and boys on their laps and at their feet, the baseball fans gathered in a sports bar here Thursday had their gazes trained on something big: The little men on the TV screens around them turning into Little League champs before their eyes.

By winning a doubleheader, the South Mission Viejo All-Stars did just that, becoming the first United States Little League champions from Southern California since a Long Beach team did it in 1992.

“You put a lot of years into it when they’re little, and then when they’re 10 or 11 or 12 you see them becoming the kind of person you hoped they would grow up to be,” said Barbara Destino, watching the serious faces of the players on the screen so hard you half believed they could feel her pride.

“To see them performing. To see them being little men in their little world. It’s so beautiful. I never knew that this day would come.”

Destino’s son isn’t on the team that’s riding a little boy’s dream these days. The parents of those lucky 13 are in Williamsport, Pa., watching their kids play ball. But that didn’t stop Destino and, it seemed, half the Mission Viejo population with kids from crowding into a hangout called the Clubhouse Family Sports Grill to cheer the home team on.

It didn’t matter that the restaurant’s air conditioning had conked out. About 200 fans shook the building with their yells and cheers, rocking back and forth in unison as they gave the team cheer: “We rock. We roll. We take control!”

As the game ended with a double play, bedlam broke out. Shaking plastic bottles filled with coins, the crowd gave the team an ovation for seven minutes, then eight, then on and on as the TV screen highlighted the game’s big plays.

“We’re proud of not only the young ballplayers but their moms and dads too,” Mission Viejo Mayor William S. Craycraft said above the din.

On Saturday, Craycraft and Councilwoman Susan Withrow plan to fly to Williamsport to attend the World Series when Mission Viejo plays the team from Nuevo Leon, Mexico.

“Hey, this is history in the making,” Withrow said.

The city has scheduled a large community celebration for 5 p.m. Wednesday at Mission Viejo Stadium on the campus of Saddleback College.

“We expect a full house,” Craycraft said.

It seems that everyone in the community has been consumed with the Mission Viejo team’s odyssey.

Scarfing down hamburgers and sodas and rising to their feet on nearly every play, the fans who gathered to watch the double victories were the parents of other kids in the same league, the kids on other teams, city officials and even--on the other side of the restaurant--a dozen or so coaches and players from a rival league.

They too have devoted hundreds of hours to watching their kids play their hearts out. They’ve raised money for uniforms and plane tickets. They’ve filled their minivans and Jeep Cherokees with aluminum bats and balls and mitts. With their friends and their kids’ friends in Williamsport now, planning to go all the way to the top, they’ve been faxing them newspaper articles and getting updates daily by phone.

On Thursday, they watched the cream of their league’s crop play their best. “Do you think they can hear us?” one mom asked above the screams as a 100-pound third baseman threw to first for a particularly exciting out.

“Yes,” a dad replied quietly. ‘They can.”

Whether they heard their admirers or not, something went right for the Mission Viejo team Thursday. They won their first game, the last of the round robin qualifying rounds, against a team from Pottsville, Pa., 3-0, with a pitcher named Gavin Fabian, who one parent watching described lovingly as “a ruthless killer.”

That took them into the championship game against a Brandenton, Fla., team just four hours later. They won that one overwhelmingly, 12-1, after five innings, when officials invoked the Little League’s “mercy rule,” which ends a game when a team leads by 10 or more runs.

“This is the biggest thing to happen here since [Olympic swimmer] Brian Goodell from the [Mission Viejo] Nadadores won his gold medals in 1976,” said Larry Burris, 35, former owner of the Clubhouse. “This community is for families, and they’re very recreational. You find them on every Saturday taking their kids to recreational activities.”

Everyone “just about knows everyone,” said Sandie Mittelstaedt. As evidence, Mittelstaedt explained her connection to Ashton White, one of the players: “A lady I baby-sit for, her 10-year-old son played on Ashton’s team last year.”

“Oh,” she added, “and Adam Elconin, the boy who hit tonight’s home run, his sister Alexi played on our son’s team.”

Long before the local kids became champions, they were winners to the fans who watched the games on the restaurant’s 14 big television screens.

“You’ve seen these kids grow up, and it just gives you this amazing feeling to see them accomplish a goal,” said Bill Bisch, one of many parents with children in the league, eyeing the screens nervously for much of the day.

“So you’re just proud; whether they win another game or not, you just feel good inside. And how many times do you have an opportunity to feel like that in today’s society?”

Mission Viejo is the kind of city that expects winning sports teams. A planned community with dozens of baseball and softball diamonds and emerald green parks, it has had district champs, division champs, soccer champs, diving champs, the works. More than 2,400 children play Little League in the city year-round. Almost twice that play soccer.

But something about baseball. Something about watching boys of 12 mimicking the manly gestures of their baseball heroes, on ESPN2 no less. Something about this game, this moment, this year has turned this team into something more.

“With these guys, it’s better than watching a major league ball game,” Tom Mittelstaedt said. “Not to take anything away from the pros, but they get paid. These kids can play baseball every day, and then on weekends they want to play some more! They just love playing baseball.”

Destino said her 18-year-old son, who handed her his Little League paraphernalia disdainfully two years ago, telling her he’d left all that kid stuff behind, is suddenly asking for his South Mission Viejo all-star cap back. Another mom’s teenage daughter has augmented her usual uniform of midriff-baring T-shirts and jeans shorts with a South Mission Viejo league jacket.

“We have good athletes out of Mission Viejo every year, but this team has really been brought to the next level,” Patrick Grover, 39, said. “It’s baseball. It’s a ritual. It’s pure. It’s America’s game.”

So there they were, moms wearing baseball glove earrings and dads in baseball caps, screaming “Shut ‘em down, Gavin!” and “That’s a hit! That’s a hit!”

Outside, the windows of their cars were adorned with white shoe polish missives to the Little League team. Inside, the restaurant was filled with excited chatter.

“Did you see that? People are asking them for autographs!”

“That’s good. That’s good. A walk’s as good as a hit right now.”

As they watched with overwhelming pride, many of the parents gathered together said they felt the tug of knowing that the little men before them would soon be too old to smother with hugs for a good long while.

But that couldn’t compare with the joy of watching the boys in their glory in Williamsport.

“These are our boys. These are the little boys that we’d comb their hair when they get their school pictures. They came through our lives as little ones and now look at them,” said Kelley Autry, who volunteers in the office of a school that many of the team’s players attend.

“It’s like you just want to keep pinching yourself. You can’t believe it’s real.”