Overview:
The Santa Barbara Foresters have won the National Baseball Congress World Series 10 times since 2006
A baseball game is like true love: It has the potential to last forever.
There’s no limit to the number of possible extra innings, just as there’s no end to the ties that bind the human heart.
Bill Pintard, the longtime manager of the Santa Barbara Foresters, holds onto those maxims at age 78 as tightly as anyone who ever gripped a baseball.
“I have loved the game ever since the first time I had a ball in my hand,” he told Noozhawk.
His embrace includes the 30 seasons he’s guided his summer collegiate team … and with the late son who first drew him to the Foresters.
The spirit of Eric Pintard, a pitcher and coach who died of cancer in 2004, lives on with the Foresters’ Hugs for Cubs program.
He started it in 1995 to support the children and families who battle that same disease.
“Managing the Foresters has been a lot of work,” admitted his father, whose duties include recruiting, housing and coaching the players.
“I’m a little worn out.”
Pintard is also tasked with the team’s fund-raising and philanthropic efforts.
He even labored with some serious yard work after the Foresters had moved from Caesar Uyesaka Stadium at UC Santa Barbara to Pershing Park on the Santa Barbara waterfront in 2017.
“The first year there, we brought in 55 tons of dirt,” Pintard said. “I hadn’t used a shovel or rake in a while and my hammies were sore.”
“It’s been wonderful, too,” he added quickly. “That’s because of the relationships I have with the players, and because of the Hugs for Cubs … and Eric’s legacy.”
Pintard’s 31st season as the club’s manager will begin this Friday, June 6, when the team faces the Orange County Riptide in a 7 p.m. game at the Great Park Baseball Complex in Irvine.
The Foresters will play six games on the road until Santa Barbara High School’s Eddie Mathews Field — their new home as of last season — becomes available.
Their home debut against the Philippines Baseball Group is scheduled for 4:30 p.m. June 13.
“The Foresters have meant a lot to me, and I think they’ve meant a lot to Santa Barbara,” Pintard said. “I know a lot of people tell me that.
“They’ve been able to see future major leaguers when they’re young, and we’ve done some good things for the young kids going through cancer.”
Major Influence
He figures that he’s now “on the backside” of his tenure at the helm.
“It’s been a good run … a rewarding run,” said Pintard, who also serves as the West Coast scout for the New York Yankees. “We just have to find a way to keep it rolling.”
He’s helped send 73 Foresters’ alumni to Major League Baseball, 23 of whom are still active.
Third baseman Morgan Ensberg was the first alum to play in both the MLB All-Star Game and World Series. He achieved both feats with the Houston Astros in 2005.
Ensberg is also the only baseball player ever to have won championship rings in college (USC in 1998), Minor League Rookie Ball, Single-A, Double-A, Triple-A, and in MLB’s National League.
But when he’s in Pintard’s company, he’ll wax most nostalgic about his 1996 season with the Foresters.
“I had to tell him, ‘But Morgan, you played in the Major Leagues! … You played in the All-Star Game!’” Pintard said.
“And he says, ‘Yeah, Pinner, but the best time I had was with you guys.’”
The Foresters’ manager gets almost daily text messages from Baltimore Orioles slugger Ryan O’Hearn, who played for him during the summers of 2012 and 2013.
O’Hearn currently leads the Orioles in hitting with nine home runs and a .338 batting average.
Pintard, however, chose to note his two stolen bases this season in their most recent exchange.
“I texted him and went, ‘Who do you think you are, stealing bases?’” he said. “He texted back and said, ‘It’s because I want to be an All-Star.’”
Los Angeles Dodgers batting coach Aaron Bates made his playing debut with the Boston Red Sox in 2009 — five years after his second season with the Foresters. But he still chides Pintard for not calling him more often.
“I told him, ‘Aw, Aaron, I know you’re busy … I don’t want to bother you,’” Pintard said. “But he goes, ‘Coach, I love you, man … I want you to come down to a game.’”
Pintard had fun with Bates when he took up that offer and joined him on the field at Dodger Stadium during a pregame batting practice.
“I rubbed his jersey between my thumb and forefinger and said, “Nice threads, man! I like your suit!” Pintard recalled. “And then I looked around and said, ‘I like your office, too!’”
Bates laughed and said, “Coach, can you believe that I’m the hitting coach for the Los Angeles Dodgers?”
The conversation struck Pintard for how their player-coach dynamic remained intact after more than two decades.
“They revert back to when they were 19 and 20 as far as the relationship goes,” he said. “You can still feel it.”
And so he played the role to its needling conclusion.
“No, Batesy, I can’t believe you’re the hitting coach of the Los Angeles Dodgers,” he said. “You were the dumbest damned hitter I ever had.’”
A Perfect 10
Success has helped Pintard recruit some of college baseball’s top talent.
He’s guided the Foresters to 10 National Baseball Congress World Series championships —most recently in 2022.
They also made it to the 2023 final of the Wichita, Kansas, event as well as to last year’s quarterfinal round. They were ousted both times by the Hutchinson (Kansas) Monarchs.
But it’s Pintard’s personal touch that most compels college baseball coaches to trust him with their players.
The Association of Professional Ball Players of America awarded him the Sparky Anderson Good Guy Award in 2010.
“I’m a happy guy,” he said with a shrug. “I’m outgoing, and I don’t think you see me frown too much at a ball game.
“I don’t have a lot of filters, which isn’t good, but I’m losing the filters as I get older.
“I think I just have an unabashed enthusiasm for the game, and that seems to spill over to my players.”
You’ll often find Pintard chatting up those players while they stretch during warmups.
“I just walk by and say, ‘How you doing today? You hurt? How’s it going with your host family? Talk to your parents?’” he explained. “I’ll tell them if they’re going to be in the lineup that day, or if they’re not.
“One guy told me, ‘Geez, coach, I’ve been here only two weeks, and you’ve already talked to me more than my college coach did all year.’”
They are his family, and his family is theirs.
Pintard made that clear during a 1998 interview with former Santa Barbara News-Press sports columnist John Zant.
“My wife (Kris) washes uniforms,” he began. “My daughter folds them, my brother is on the board of directors, my son is the pitching coach, and my nephew is the batboy.”
Pintard’s bloodlines might as well be chalk.
His own father, Osborn Pintard, was a coach. His mother, Kay, worked for the Wilkes-Barre (Pennsylvania) Barons, a minor-league affiliate of the then-Cleveland Indians.
Mom was the one who taught Bill and younger brother Dave how to keep a baseball scorebook.
“I lived right across the street from a ballfield” in Arcadia, California, Bill said. “It was a school field, but we made it into a ballfield.
“We’d play every day from 8:30 in the morning until 8:30 at night … until Mom would yell, ‘It’s dark out there! Get home!’”
They formed a neighborhood sandlot team that would play the kids “from two blocks away.”
“We didn’t have any adults screaming at us,” Pintard recalled. “We didn’t have umpires, but we managed to make calls.
“We’d argue about them, but we’d come to a resolution.
“It was just kids playing a great game. That was the feeling.”
Kids Play
Pintard’s four children — Ethan, Eric, Brittney and Kelby — inherited that same sporting feeling.
Eric, like older brother Ethan, was a multisport star at Carpinteria High School. He continued his pitching career at Santa Barbara City College and San Francisco State.
His dad offered to help with the Foresters in 1993 when then-manager Bobby Townsend signed Eric as a pitcher.
By the time Pintard took over as manager two years later, Eric had been diagnosed with ependymoma, a rare and deadly cancer of the brain and spinal cord.
He was told he had only six more months to live.
Eric took that fight into nearly 11 years of extra innings. He even pitched a few innings in 1997.
He also went to bat for the children and families he met in the cancer ward by starting Hugs for Cubs.
The program has been conducted in conjunction with the Cancer Foundation of Santa Barbara and the Teddy Bear Cancer Foundation.
Eric and the Foresters would take young cancer patients on surfing and bowling excursions, as well as to Major League baseball games in Los Angeles.
He also had his teammates and coaches join him on hospital visits to ailing children.
He even designed the organization’s teddy bear logo.
“Eric was liked the Pied Piper,” his father said. “He was the hero the kids wanted to sit next to at the Dodgers game or on the bus.”
Eric Pintard died on Feb. 23, 2004. He was 31.
The eulogy delivered by his wife, Jessica, emphasized how Eric “represented hope” to so many.
“He made people feel life can be handled no matter what’s thrown your way,” she said. “I hope people never forget him … I hope the impact he made on people’s lives sticks with them.”
The impression he made on a 16-year-old patient named Andrea “Andi” Friend has been everlasting.
He met her during the team’s visit to Wichita’s Via Christi Hospital during the 1995 NBC World Series.
The nurses told him that Andi’s bone cancer was terminal.
“The other players and I stayed for a while and then left to visit others, but Eric stayed with Andi,” Bill recalled. “He said she shouldn’t pay any attention to words like ‘terminal,’ and to just keep fighting.
“‘Don’t buy into any of that stuff,’ he told her. ‘You can do it … You can get through this.’”
That night, while visiting the mound to talk to a struggling pitcher, Bill Pintard noticed Andi entering the stadium with three nurses.
She was rolled in with an intravenous pole that carried the tubes that were stuck into her arm.
“My catcher, David Willis, goes, ‘Coach, why are you looking at nurses in the stands?’” Pintard recalled. “I told him, ‘That’s Andi Friend! That’s the girl we saw in the hospital!’”
They stood there gawking for a long while, and then pointed her out to each umpire who asked about the delay.
“I wasn’t going to take the pitcher out because I didn’t have anyone ready to bring in,” Pintard said. “But that gave me three minutes to get someone warmed up.
“We won the game because she bought us some time.”
He thought a moment before adding, “And I guess we bought her some time, too.”
Foresters for Life
Andi Friend took Eric’s words to heart and defied her doctors’ prediction.
She’s now a wife and mother of two, and still attends the NBC World Series to cheer on the Foresters.
“She got married while the tournament was being held just to make sure we could go,” Pintard said. “She now lives about two hours outside of Wichita, but she still comes to the tournament.”
Andi surprised Pintard with her presence again in 2014 to cheer on his induction into the National Baseball Congress Hall of Fame.
The NBC, meanwhile, honors his son at its World Series every year with the Eric Pintard Most Inspirational Player Award.
Bill does the same by wearing his son’s number 19 on his back.
So have many of Foresters who went into professional baseball including Major Leaguers Ryan Spilborghs, Ryan Church, Brian Bannister and Kevin Frandsen.
“I’ve had a lot of guys call me up when they get to the minors to say, ‘Hey coach, I got 19!’” Pintard said.
The Foresters stitch that number each year into back of their caps. The 19 goes next to the initials of that season’s Hugs for Cubs honoree.
This year’s initials are BB to honor Blythe Brown, the daughter of former Forester Dalton Brown.
Foresters’ volunteer Christina Songer has kept the Hugs for Cubs ball rolling for many years. It was also picked up by Pintard’s daughter, Kelby.
The Hugs Club she founded at Santa Barbara High in 2016 started the team’s holiday tradition of delivering Christmas trees, lights and gingerbread houses to families with children undergoing cancer treatment.
Compass Real Estate kept it going after her graduation in 2019.
Her dad isn’t yet ready to graduate from the Foresters.
“I think I have a coach who could take over,” Bill Pintard said. “Steve Schuck has been with me for a number of years, since 2014, and I think he could do a good job.”
But he hesitates to give it up as long as his 97-year-old father-in-law, former Los Angeles Lakers’ coach Bill Bertka, remains a consultant with that NBA team.
“His mind is still sharp,” Pintard said. “He still watches films and breaks down players.
“You want to talk to him about the playoffs? He’ll break it down for you.
“He does love it when I say, ‘How can I retire when you’re not retiring … and you’re as old as Methuselah?’”
It keeps Bill Pintard returning every season as the Boy of Summer.
