Overview:
Several of Jackie Robinson’s future sidekicks on the Brooklyn Dodgers played their first games of professional baseball in Santa Barbara
Baseball may be America’s pastime, but its minor-league version became too passé for Santa Barbara during the several times it took a turn at bat.
It had more starts and stops here than a clunker on Highway 101 at rush hour.
A Brooklyn Dodgers farm club, however, did become a big deal for Santa Barbara during a successful run that began 85 years ago this season.
And it had the New Deal to thank for it.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave local baseball a venue during the Great Depression when his Works Progress Administration aided the funding for Laguna Park.
The City of Santa Barbara was granted more than $22,000 in federal aid for what was described as “emergency improvements.”
A $15,000 chunk of that was paired with matching funds to finance the construction of grandstands, fences, dugouts, a press box, clubhouse and baseball diamond on a 5.4-acre parcel bounded by Olive, Ortega, Garden and Cota streets.
The project was completed in 1938 at a total cost of $35,000 — about $850,000 in today’s dollars.
The late Timmy Badillo, foreman of the city Parks & Recreation Department and longtime groundskeeper at Laguna Park, once boasted that the field’s dimensions were larger than those of Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field.
“The stands had seating for 2,083, with room to expand to 4,000 if needed,” he said while giving an antemortem eulogy just days before the park’s demolition in 1970.
“The field was 317 feet to the left foul pole, 440 feet to dead center, and 382 feet down the right field line.”
The Dodgers later erected a new home run fence that reduced the distances in both center and right fields.
The ballpark was originally built to attract Major League Baseball teams here for spring training.
Officials from several clubs were brought to town by the Junior Chamber of Commerce to check out the new stadium.
Not one took the bait.
“I don’t blame them,” Badillo said. “After heavy rains, I have seen the entire ball field, even the pitcher’s mound, submerged under two feet of water, flooding the interior of the clubhouse and dugouts and everything.”
The site picked for the stadium, unfortunately, had once been a lagoon fed by artesian springs.
Minors Adjustment
Professional baseball had its first, brief fling with Santa Barbara in the early 20th century.
The Class D Pasadena Millionaires, too destitute to make rent at its city ballpark, moved to Santa Barbara midway through the Southern California League’s season of 1913.
Their first game here was played, ominously enough, on Friday the 13th of June.
The newly named “Santa Barbara Barbaraeans” were tagged out with the resultant bad luck when the whole league went bankrupt and disbanded on July 23.
The announcement was made just after the local squad had taken over first place in the second-half standings.
Babe Ruth himself talked Santa Barbara into taking another swing at it. He lobbied the city’s leaders for a new baseball park when his barnstorming tour came to town during the fall of 1924.
“Build a good athletic field and Major League Baseball teams will be clamoring for a chance to train in Santa Barbara,” he told a crowd of about 1,500 at the old Pershing Park.
“As I understand it, Santa Barbara thinks more of football than baseball,” he continued. “But when the Morning Press can stage a baseball game with a few big leaguers in the lineup in the middle of the football season and pack in a crowd on a rainy day, I think that interest in baseball would soon outstrip football.”
He made the same pitch when he returned in 1927 despite being greeted by another rainstorm.
Local officials had to move his exhibition game from a flooded Pershing Park to Santa Barbara High School’s Peabody Stadium.
The Babe’s Field of Dreams prediction — “Build it and they will come” — was finally realized in 1941.
The Brooklyn Dodgers placed a farm club at Laguna Park to play in the newly formed California League.
The eight teams in the Class C circuit competed at what would be the equivalent of today’s Class A division of minor league baseball.
Laguna Park got the honor of playing host to the league’s first game on Friday night, April 18.
The Santa Barbara Saints, as they were initially known, rewarded a sellout crowd of 2,500 with a 7-3 victory over the Anaheim Aces.
The team wound up drawing more than 44,000 fans that season.
Saints Be Praised
The 1941 Saints were led by player-manager John William “Bud” Clancy, a first baseman who had previously played in the major leagues for nine seasons.
Clancy, who hit a career-best .300 during his first full year with the Chicago White Sox in 1927, still had enough pop at age 41 to bat a California League-best .344 in 108 games for Santa Barbara.
“We’re ready,” he told reporters as 1941’s Opening Day approached. “I think we’re going to have a good club, one that will get better as it goes along.”
Right he was.
The team, headlined by California League MVP John Jorgensen, finished first in the league’s second-half standings and swept the first-half champion Fresno Cardinals in the four-game, championship series.
The lefty-swinging third baseman, better known as “Spider Jorgensen” during his hey days with the Brooklyn Dodgers, led the 1941 Saints in hits (184), doubles (43) and triples (9) while batting .332.
He got his nickname not from his web gems at the hot corner but for wearing black gym shorts with orange stripes during a basketball game at Folsom High School.
A teacher said it reminded him of the black-widow spider he’d just squashed in a woodshed.
The Saints got a boost when two other future Brooklyn Dodger stars — young pitchers Vic Lombardi and Hal Gregg — were promoted to Santa Barbara from their Class D clubs late in the season.
The pitching staff also benefitted greatly when two league teams, the San Bernardino Stars and Riverside Reds, disbanded on June 29.
The Saints picked up Stars’ ace Manuel Perez, the league leader that year in both wins (24) and earned-run average (1.86).
Ray Hathaway, another future major league pitcher, went 13-9 with a 2.84 ERA for Santa Barbara’s 1941 team.
Walter “Ole” Olsen, one of two 17-year-old pitchers on the 1941 club, also had a 13-9 record with a 3.29 ERA.
He got stronger as the season ensued, taking a no-hitter into the seventh inning in a crucial, Aug. 14 shutout of the Fresno Cardinals.
Bob Fontaine, the team’s other teenager, went 1-1 in just 22 innings with the Saints. Few players, however, had a longer run in professional baseball.
Dodger owner Branch Rickey hired him as a scout in 1949 to begin an off-the-field baseball career that lasted 45 years. It included Fontaine’s five-year stint as general manager of the San Diego Padres, from 1975 to 1980.
War Torn
Japan’s surprise attack at Pearl Harbor four months after the 1941 season prompted America’s entry into World War II — and the departure of more clubs from the Cal League.
Only Santa Barbara, Fresno, San José and Bakersfield fielded teams for the 1942 season.
Saints president Bill Hitchcock remained optimistic, declaring “I’m quite positive the league will be carried on this season.”
His team was leading the league with a 43-24 record when the season was cut short on June 28.
League officials cited gasoline rationing and blackout regulations that were instituted after a Japanese submarine shelled the Ellwood oil fields west of Goleta.
Olsen, who was having a standout year with a 10-1 record and 3.03 ERA, won 10 more games when he continued his season at Class C Dayton.
Charles Sylvester, an All-CIF football and baseball star for Santa Barbara High in the late 1930s, was batting a team-best .343 for the Saints when the 1942 season was abruptly ended.
He finished the summer playing 75 games for the Hollywood Stars, a member of the Class AA Pacific Coast League, before becoming a beloved teacher and coach at his alma mater.
Several other Saints finished their 1942 seasons elsewhere.
Lombardi, who went 9-4 for Santa Barbara that year, won four more games after the Dodgers promoted him to the Class B Durham Bulls in North Carolina.
Clancy registered for the military draft but was turned down because of his age. The Dodgers kept him in their organization by naming him as manager of their Class D affiliate in Valdosta, Georgia.
Several other members of the 1942 Saints did march off to war. Hathaway enlisted in the U.S. Navy and won a bronze star for heroism during the horrific fighting on Guadacanal.
He returned home in time to finish the Major League season of 1945 by pitching four games for the Brooklyn Dodgers. He even made his way back to Santa Barbara to serve as a player-manager in 1947.
Olsen spent the latter part of 1943 pitching for a team called “The Major League All-Stars,” playing exhibition games against Negro League clubs.
He lost a 2-0 pitcher’s duel to the Kansas City Royals on Oct. 17 at Recreation Park in Long Beach, but beat them with a three-hitter, 6-2, in a rematch at Los Angeles’ Wrigley Field.
Olsen followed that up by joining the U.S. Army Air Corps.
At war’s end, he pitched in Germany and France for a racially integrated Army team called “the Overseas Invasion Service Expedition All-Stars.”
They capped it all by upsetting a team from the 7th Division of Gen. George Patton’s Third Army that featured such Major League stars as St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Harry “The Hat” Walker.
Color Coded
Several of the 1941 Santa Barbara Saints became footnotes in history when Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier in 1947.
Both Hathaway and Jorgensen befriended him the previous season when they were teammates with the Montréal Royals, the Dodgers’ Class AAA minor league club.
“I thought he would be up (in Brooklyn) before the season was over,” Hathaway said. “He fielded well, ran well and hit well.
“If you were scouting him, and among the scouts, the question was ‘What can’t he do?’
“And if you saw him play, you would ask yourself the same question.”
When Jorgensen finished spring training in Cuba the next year, he sent his equipment ahead to Syracuse, New York, for Montréal’s first game of the 1947 season.
Injuries to veteran infielders Cookie Lavagetto and Arky Vaughn, however, prompted the Dodgers to redirect him to Brooklyn.
“I came into Ebbets Field on Opening Day, scared to death,” Jorgensen said. “I didn’t think I was going to play.
“I didn’t have any equipment with me. My glove, bats, everything else went to Syracuse.
“Then Jackie comes over and says ‘Here, use my second base glove.’ He was going to play first base.
“So I used his glove and borrowed a pair of spikes … and I’m in the lineup.”
Robinson officially became the first black athlete to play in a Major League game when Dick Culler of the Boston Braves hit a game-opening ground ball to Jorgensen at third base.
He snagged the ball with Robinson’s glove and threw it across the diamond to his fellow rookie for the first out of 1947.
“I was so scared, but Jackie helped me relax,” Jorgensen said.
He got comfortable enough two days later to drive in six runs with a home run and two doubles in a 12-6 victory over the Braves.
Two other former Saints, Lombardi and Gregg, also played with Robinson during his ground-breaking season of 1947.
Lombardi, who was in his third year with the Dodgers, was among the faction of players who welcomed Robinson to the club.
“I had a lot of black kids who were my friends here (in Fresno), growing up,” he said. “I wasn’t prejudiced.
“The only thing I was prejudiced about was (jerks), and they come in all colors.”
But a petition penned by Dodger outfielder Dixie Walker, Harry the Hat’s older brother, and supported by three other Southerners on the club was circulated among the players in an effort to keep Robinson off the team.
“There was a lot of stuff going on that was really unnecessary,” Lombardi said.
It wound up affecting Lombardi personally when Rickey unloaded the discontented Walker in a multiplayer trade to the Pittsburgh Pirates just two months after the 1947 World Series.
Lombardi, who started Games 2 and 6 of that historic series against the New York Yankees, was included in the deal with Gregg, his former Santa Barbara Saint teammate, in exchange for Preacher Roe, Billy Cox and Gene Mauch.
The Sporting News called Lombardi the “surprise name in the trade.”
An Empty Feeling
But baseball, however tradition-steeped it may seem, is an ever-evolving game.
The farm club in Santa Barbara changed its nickname from Saints to Dodgers when it resumed play after the war in 1946.
It drew 82,546 fans that season and a record 92,541 in 1947 despite finishing fourth in the California League standings.
“Attendance was sensational at Laguna Park in the ’40s,” Badillo recalled. “If you didn’t get to the park an hour before game time, you couldn’t get a bleacher seat.”
The fervor of the 1940s eventually cooled off in the ’50s and turned frigid during the ’60s.
Annual attendance at Laguna Park, which had slipped to 61,948 when Olsen pitched the last of his six seasons for the local club in 1951, plummeted to 29,007 by 1953.
The invention of television siphoned off much of Santa Barbara’s interest in minor league baseball.
Los Angeles Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley tried to gauge the town’s support when he personally canvassed several downtown merchants.
He soon thereafter moved the franchise to Bakersfield for the 1954 season.
A hybrid Ventura-Santa Barbara team called the Channel City Oilers replaced the Dodgers in the California League that year with Manny Perez as manager.
It divided up its home games between Laguna Park and the Babe Ruth League field at Ventura’s Seaside Park.
But that team also had trouble paying its bills. It moved to Reno midway through the 1955 season.
The Fraternal Order of Foresters kept the ball rolling at Laguna Park by throwing together a baseball team the following year.
It joined the semi-pro Central Coast League — a circuit that already included two other Santa Barbara teams named the Missions and the Merchants.
By the end of the 1950s, even old Ole Olsen, now a Santa Barbara County sheriff’s deputy, dusted off his glove and pitched for the Foresters.
The Foresters disbanded a few years after the New York Mets, a new expansion franchise in the National League, placed their California League franchise at Laguna Park in 1962 while adopting the nickname of “Rancheros.”
The Dodgers decided to give Santa Barbara another try, however, and outbid the Mets for the Laguna Park lease in 1963 … for $1 a year.
They did agree to repair and repaint the stands and fences, install new lights, furnish a boosters club lounge, pay player salaries and even install heaters for those chilly, damp nights.
But the sports fans of Santa Barbara gave the team a cold shoulder once again. By 1967, the annual attendance had plummeted to 15,479 — an average of just 221 per game.
Tom Seaberg, the club’s business manager, reported that the Los Angeles Dodgers were losing $100,000 a year in its operation of the farm club.
He sent out an alarm in the local media that the Dodgers would move the team again if the turnout didn’t improve the following summer.
But by the time the 1968 season rolled around, O’Malley had already moved the team back to toasty Bakersfield.
The situation grew even grimmer for local baseball fans when the City Council ignored the objections of its Parks & Recreation Commission and long-time civic leader Pearl Chase and voted to demolish Laguna Park in December 1970.
It replaced the venerable facility with a city maintenance yard, various offices and some affordable housing.
There was talk several years later of the Dodgers’ interest in returning its California League team to Santa Barbara.
The lack of a suitable baseball facility turned it into a moot point.
Semi-pro baseball filled the void again when Bob Townsend resurrected the Santa Barbara Foresters in 1991. Bill Pintard has run the club since 1995 while transitioning it into a summer collegiate program.
The Foresters have become a major success story in the community.
Off the field, their Hugs for Cubs program has provided immense support for cancer-stricken children and their families since 1995.
And on the field, they’ve won 10 National Baseball Congress World Series championships in the last 20 years.
But most ironically, they served as a vial steppingstone to stardom for 66 big leaguers — many more than the old Dodger farm club sent to the majors in about the same number of seasons.
The lack of a municipal baseball stadium does force them to play their games at the same Santa Barbara High where Babe Ruth played an exhibition game 99 years ago.
Forester fans at Eddie Mathews Field can almost hear the ghostly sound of the Bambino’s voice echoing within the canyon that contains nearby Peabody Stadium.
Build it and they will come.
MORE MARK PATTON
