1,500 Wins, No Losses Worth Crying Over

It was seven guys sitting around a restaurant table, talking about each other, reliving the good times and laughing their heads off. I didn’t know any of them, but after an hour, I envied them all.

They have something I want; something all of us probably want. The reason there’s so much uproarious laughter on my tape recorder is because they know they’ve got something special.

The guys are a team, a bunch of good-time Charlies in their 40s and 50s who play softball twice a week. Lots of men and women in Orange County do that, but not as well and not nearly as long.

Around the table are three charter members of a team called Stac Pac that began playing in January 1988 and is still going strong. The others joined not long after.

Last month, thanks to the meticulous record-keeping of charter member and manager Bob Baumgarten, the club celebrated its 1,500th win. By Baumgarten’s count, it has won nine “major” championships. “The most games we ever played in a year was 1992, when we played 181,” Baumgarten says. “We were 132-49. We won five of the six leagues we played in and six tournaments.”

The weird thing is, to hear the guys tell it, it’s not about winning. They swear they aren’t a team of psycho jocks to whom winning is everything. Once, they walked off the field when the other team wanted to rumble. “There are a lot of jerks in softball,” says ranking elder Mike Galli, 57. By contrast, “these guys have pretty minimal egos.”

“We’ve gone into a lot of tournaments when we were not the best team out there,” says Dan Wiercioch, 43. “But we were the best team out there.”

Their 1,500th win (they’ve lost 651) was merely my excuse to meet them. I envy the bond that develops on a team that plays together for 14 1/2 years. And, as a guy who used to play three times a week in three leagues, I wanted to hear the stories start flying....

“Worst collision we’ve ever seen,” one of them starts out.

Instantly, different guys start telling the story as one. “Mike [Galli] and another Mike.... They collided in a qualifying tournament in Torrance.... Had to be April of ’91.... The other Mike was huge, about 250 pounds, and we always said if those two ever collided, Mike Galli would get killed.... They collide head-to-head on a fly ball.... The other Mike broke bones on the side of his face.... But Galli is knocked out cold, lying on the ground snorting like a horse....”

By now, big laughs are reverberating from the table, as the punch line comes: “He caught the ball, though!”

I ask them to get serious, which proves harder than turning a triple play. Dave LeFort, 45, tries. “Everybody has to have a release from work, from life, and all that,” he says. “When you hit that softball field, you can get everything out. It’s the guys; it’s having a good time.... I wouldn’t want to do it with anyone else than with the teams we’ve put together.”

Al Shelley, 45, chips in: “It’s the perfect blend, to me, of doing something you love with guys you love, and their families.”

It’s about them remembering when Al brought a girlfriend named Nanci to her first softball game. They’re now married with five children. It’s joking about another of the players’ daughters whom they first knew as a little girl and who’s now old enough to order a beer.

It’s about another former player who played the day his wife gave birth to their first child. “I didn’t even have him in the lineup,” Baumgarten says, “and he was the first guy to show up at the field.”

Hey, it was only a birth. That was the team.

Lest you think this is a bunch of Peter Pans, they go around the table and recite lengths of their marriages or long-term relationships: 12, 24, 18, 17, 25.

At the risk of being ejected from the room, I ask: Is the end in sight?

“We don’t want to think about it,” one of them says.

Denial?

“What do you mean, denial? Of course, it’s denial,” says Galli, a two-time grandfather, longtime Stac Pac leadoff man and, according to Baumgarten, possessor of more than 4,500 hits.

In a more somber moment, Galli, who has a sore shoulder, says, “It has to end. It can’t go on forever.”

And then comes a bunch of jokes about Dr. Kevorkian and Viagra, and I leave the guys as I found them, laughing and chiding each other.

And very much aware of good fortune that comes in ways more important than wins and losses.

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Readers may reach Parsons at (714) 966-7821; at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626; or at dana.parsons @latimes.com.