‘That’s what he stood for’: Loyola High fights through emotional game after loss of beloved teammate

For just a moment, when the players took the field, Loyola High left third base empty.

That was Ryan Times’ position. The beaming boy who said, according to teammate and best friend Griffin Salerno, any stranger was simply “someone he wasn’t friends with yet.” The fierce competitor who drew a forlorn smile from coach Keith Ramsey, remembering Times’ eagerness to bounce up on the mound in an 9-0 loss. That was Times’ spot when he was a Cub, a past tense that still feels impossible to shell-shocked friends and teammates, and Loyola wanted its community to just feel how much he meant.

So in warmups before Tuesday’s first inning against Sherman Oaks Notre Dame, they left third base empty. Shortstop Adam Magpoc jogged out to the dirt, a few yards away, and the void hit him.

He turned away from the infield for a moment, the emotions too much, knowing the kid he’d played next to for seven years in travel ball and high school was gone. He cried a bit.

Then he turned around and picked his head up.

“Because I know,” Magpoc said, “that’s what [Ryan] stood for.”

Loyola lost a game it was in no way prepared for and, frankly, in no shape to play. Just a week ago, the whirlwind began, Ramsey texting players asking if they’d heard from Times, the kids reaching out to parents for information thinking the rumors they were hearing were some kind of prank.

Last Wednesday night, as Cubs were scattered across the country in hotel rooms visiting schools over spring break, they officially got word: Times was dead.

He’d been struck by a North County Transit District Coaster train in Carlsbad. He was 18. Ramsey and other school officials didn’t comment on the details.

“So many different emotions there,” said pitcher Nathan Savarese, who started Tuesday. “It made me feel really — human. And really just fragile.”

Times had a habit, parents remembered, of stealing players’ phones and taking silly pictures of himself. In the past week, many have gone back through their camera rolls and found random photos of Times they’d never seen.

“He was literally one of the most perfect friends you could have,” Magpoc said.

Loyola had a game scheduled last Thursday. It was canceled. There was no possible preparation, and a blindsided team needed to regroup. In addition to counselors being made available most any time of day, players gravitated to a familiar spot — the office of pastor and teacher Billy Biegler, who had Times and many others on the team in his class.

“You just try to be present. I don’t know why this happens... How do you understand God in the midst of this?” Biegler said. “But the truth is … God is on that field.”

Grief is a long process, community members echoed, that has no particular structure or end point. And members of the team are all at various points in their healing, a mess that had practice unfocused Monday. They simply didn’t look sharp, Ramsey said.

So they paused, and senior Cameron Kennedy delivered a simple, 20-second message to the effect of: Yes, we’re suffering, and plenty of us don’t want to be here. But Ryan was a competitor.

“We’re trying to honor that concept,” Ramsey said.

Still, it was tough for teammates to focus Tuesday without him. Times was a key third baseman and pitcher for Loyola, a tenacious talent who teammates called the “Knight Killer,” Magpoc said, after he threw a shutout to beat Notre Dame as a sophomore and then had a walk-off hit in a game against the Knights his junior year.

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A picture of Times sat on a tiny table outside Loyola’s dugout, and his No. 8 jersey hung in the dugout, a number Magpoc will never forget. Behind home plate, on a chain-link fence where his team picture hung alongside those of other Cubs, Times’ smiling face was surrounded by a wreath of ribbons — white, team parents Lisa Stern and Kimmy Saulino said, to capture the “brightness of who he is.”

Biegler delivered a pregame moment of silence, and the Knights delivered flowers to honor Times behind home plate. Savarese couldn’t help thinking of Times in taking the mound after the ceremony. But the senior was always about the next pitch, Savarese said — letting everything roll off his shoulders and just competing.

“All I had to do was keep thinking, ‘next pitch,’” Savarese said. “Kinda got in the rhythm, and that was it.”

The Cubs lost 9-0, unable to muster anything against Notre Dame pitcher Justin Lee, unable to keep the Knights’ bats from igniting. The wound was raw, and won’t close anytime soon. But Ryan Times would’ve given his best, players felt.

And so they did their best, for him.