Vaughn’s Mom Knew Left Was the Right Way to Go

Of all days to give credit to Shirley Vaughn, none is better than Mother’s Day.

So all of you Angel fans who leaped out of your seats once, then twice when Mo Vaughn, swinging a big bat from the left side, cracked two big two-run home runs Sunday, Mother’s Day, you should all give a big hug to big Mo’s mom, Shirley.

“Yep,” Mo said after the Angels’ dramatic 7-6 victory over Texas, “my mom taught me to hit left-handed.”

Shirley Vaughn, who looks young enough to be hitting some home runs herself, who is not too proud to be wearing braces and rubber bands on her teeth, just like a teenager, put a bat in her little boy’s hands when he was 2 years old.

Mo was right-handed up till then in everything he did. So was Shirley. Except when she was hitting a baseball.

And Shirley did love to hit the baseball. There were six kids in Shirley’s family. Every one of them was right-handed in all things except hitting a baseball. The oldest brother hit left-handed and he passed it down. And every brother and sister passed down to the next youngest that left-handed hitting thing.

“So it was just natural,” Shirley said Sunday afternoon, “that when I first started to teach Maurice how to hit, it would be left-handed. I mean, that’s the way I always hit and that’s the only way I knew how to teach Maurice.”

His mom still calls her son Maurice. When you look at Mo, so large with the deep voice and the scowl he wears at the plate, he doesn’t look like a Maurice. But to Shirley, Mo looks like Maurice. Maurice is the child who still wants his parents with him in Orange County, who doesn’t want to be alone.

So whenever the Angels are home, Shirley and her husband, Leroy, come from Virginia to stay with Maurice. He might be 32 years old now and able to hit a baseball 400 feet without thinking, but Maurice would have been a sad little boy Sunday if he didn’t have dinner plans for his mom on Mother’s Day.

By the time Mo was 3, while Leroy was off at work, Shirley would tie a Wiffle ball to a tree branch, burrow a little bat deep into Maurice’s left hand and let her son whack away. “He could do some amazing things right then, even when he was 3 years old,” Shirley said. “He would hit that ball and then he would hit it again when it came swinging back around.”

When Maurice was 10, his dad tried to get his baseball lefty to hit right-handed. “But I was too late,” Leroy said, “and I guess that was a good thing, wasn’t it?” Shirley smiles and agrees.

Just then, Troy Glaus smashed a home run in the bottom of the ninth inning, a home run that tied the game at 6-6. Shirley was still jumping up and down when Scott Spiezio hit the game-winning home run. She looked at her husband and said, “That’s a walk-off home run, isn’t it?” Shirley has the lingo down. Walk-off it was.

Downstairs later, Vaughn spoke reverently of his mother’s batting advice.

“She’s a great athlete, man,” Vaughn said. “She could hit the ball herself. I’ll tell you what. If my mom was growing up now, she would be getting a college scholarship in some sport.”

Not often do we hear professional athletes giving credit to their mothers for athletic talent or batting skills. Not because many of these moms didn’t have athletic talent, but because these women grew up when there was no place for them in sports. But in Shirley’s family the boys and girls played with balls. Baseballs, basketballs, footballs.

As Vaughn sat at his locker, having hit home runs now in three consecutive games, having left-handedly kept the Angels in Sunday’s game by clubbing one homer when his team was behind 4-0 and the second when his team was behind 5-2, his eyes got a little misty when he talked about Shirley.

“I want her around me all the time,” Vaughn said. “She’s a very special person. The man that I am is because of her. She’s tough but she’s gentle. She has expectations of how to be a good person.”

Vaughn paused a moment.

“And one more thing,” he said. “If I ever have a son I’m going to glue the bat in his left hand. That’s the best thing I could do for his baseball career.”

On this triumphant Mother’s Day, though, Vaughn did have one complaint about Shirley. Shirley loves to garden, loves to dig deep into the soil, take deep breaths to smell the earth, plant things and gently make them grow.

“Yeah,” Vaughn said, “all she wanted for Mother’s Day was a bag of dirt and a shovel. What kind of gift is that?”

So maybe that’s what it was. Unable to think of anything else, and unwilling to settle for handing Shirley dirt and a shovel, Vaughn gift-wrapped a couple of long balls. Left-handed, of course.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com