Overview:
Nights of foggy gloom brought doom to Santa Barbara’s venture into professional baseball
A trip to New York City this month brought me full circle with the game of baseball.
One of the last stops was Citi Field to check out Santa Barbara-born Jeff McNeil, the reigning National League batting champion of the New York Mets.
A stroll through the stadium’s “Fan Walk” also took me directly over a plaque cemented in the sidewalk that featured the photograph of former Santa Barbara High School pitcher Jesse Orosco.
He was shown throwing his glove into the air after getting the last out of the Mets’ Game 7 victory over the Boston Red Sox to clinch the 1986 World Series.
But our town’s relationship with Mets goes back much further than 1986.
One of its first minor-league farm clubs actually became my first favorite team in 1962.
I was turning 8 while the Mets were a newly born, expansion franchise. My first baseball lessons came from watching the Santa Barbara Rancheros, their Class C affiliate.
The 120 games the Mets lost that year were the most of any Major League Baseball team since the Cleveland Spiders went 20-134 in 1899.
Maybe I would’ve become more than just a junior college benchwarmer had a New York Yankees farm club been my first exposure to the game.
Redux with the Rancheros
Santa Barbara had gone without professional baseball since the Brooklyn Dodgers moved its minor league team out of town in 1955.
But my dad, the newly arrived sports editor of the Santa Barbara News-Press, wasted no time in lobbying civic leaders to seek a replacement.
Caesar Uyesaka, who was already managing double-headers by running both a local coffee shop and an auto parts store, made it happen by talking the Mets into placing one of their farm clubs at then-Laguna Park in the 600 block of Garden Street between East Cota and East Ortega streets near downtown.
The old, clapboard stadium was freshened up with 350 gallons of forest green paint. A set of bleachers was added to expand its seating capacity to 3,080 from 2,083.
And on the sunny Tuesday afternoon of April 24, 1962, Laguna Park nearly filled to the brim for the Santa Barbara Rancheros’ debut against the Reno Silver Sox. The hometown fans were rewarded with a ninth-inning rally that capped a 7-6 victory.
Their parent club in New York barely beat them to the winner’s circle by getting its first victory the night before. That ended a season-starting, nine-game losing streak for the Mets.
But while the curtain had just risen at Laguna Park, a misty one would soon fall upon the ballpark. A frigid fog rolled in off the ocean just one night later, and only 386 fans followed it into the stadium.
A persistently chilly April was followed by a gray May. Club officials were so desperate for fans to warm the seats at Laguna Park that they installed a pair of heat blowers under the stands.
They could do little, however, to mitigate the chilling effect the fog was having on the field.
The Rancheros lost a June 19 game to San José after one of the umpires nullified a run-scoring hit, emerging from the mist to insist that he had been trying to call time out.
The game ended when Ken Orbison lined an apparent single into left field, only to have the umpires guess incorrectly that it had been caught on the fly instead of on the hop.
A Kid’s Game
The Rancheros tried every promotional gimmick in the book to attract fans. They began to target kids with giveaways that ranged from bicycles to go-carts.
They even got the famed Los Rancheros Vistadores, a local riding group, to pony up a Shetland as a raffle prize.
The screaming children that romped unattended throughout the stadium that night prompted my dad to write this edgy lead in his game story of June 6:
“It was a wild-and-woolly game last night that was witnessed at Laguna Park by 685 paid fans and an additional 1,800 noisy youngsters.”
Philip Patton had enough noisy youngsters at home, thank you.
The rowdiest Kids Night came on July 9 in a game that featured 11 errors and an escalating row between the Reno Silver Sox and umpire Dick Vallencourt. He ejected one batter and cleared out Reno’s dugout when it showered him with insults.
The next batter protested by refusing to enter the batter’s box. And when Vallencourt ordered the Ranchero pitcher to throw the ball, he automatically ruled his soft lob to be a strike.
I was one of 302 kids who began shouting at the Ranchero dugout, pleading with manager Gene Lillard to give us our own turn at bat.
The Rancheros also tried to attract spectators with pregame, celebrity softball contests. Singer Bobby Rydell, whose hit “Wild One” had reached No. 2 on the charts just two years earlier, was among the stars to accept the invitation.
His catchy number made an appropriate theme song for Santa Barbara’s untamed pitching staff. Vern Pritchett earned a team-best nine wins during the summer of ’62 despite walking 113 batters in 104 innings.
Squandering a Gold Glover
The Rancheros did swing some big bats that season. Bob Rikard, a 29-year-old catcher, hit .332 with 33 home runs and 121 RBI.
First baseman Tommy Muñoz drove in 106 runs with 15 homers, while outfielder Grimm Mason hit a team-best .347 with 44 stolen bases and 17 homers.
Paul Blair, an acrobatic, 18-year-old centerfielder out of Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, hit 17 homers, as well.
But Baseball Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby, the Mets’ hitting coach that season, made a comment that chilled my father worse than any fog.
Dad interviewed Hornsby when he arrived to give the Rancheros some batting instruction during the Mets’ West Coast road swing.
When he asked about Blair’s promising future in the big leagues, Hornsby said the Mets “didn’t have colored players.”
They didn’t have winning baseball teams for a long while, either.
The Baltimore Orioles picked up Blair in the November draft … And the rest was history.
He wound up winning eight Gold Gloves during a 17-year career in the big leagues, helping the Orioles win World Series titles in 1966 and 1971.
Dad chronicled how he broke the hearts of his old ball club when Blair returned to Laguna Park with his new minor-league team on May 7, 1963.
“Hard-swinging Paul Blair, who won several games for Santa Barbara last year with clutch hits and his 17 home runs, took one away from the Rancheros last night with a two-run circuit clout in the ninth inning that gave the Stockton Ports a 4-2 victory.”
Dad got to cover Blair one more time in the 1966 World Series, writing about his heroics in helping the Orioles sweep all four games against the now-Los Angeles Dodgers.
He also mentioned how Hornsby’s racist attitude cost the Mets a valuable player at a time when they were more myopic than amazin’.
Clowning Around
Laguna Park did get a more congenial visitor during the summer of 1962 when Max Patkin, “the Clown Prince of Baseball,” performed during a game. Some of the Ranchero players even participated in a few of his loosey-goosey routines of baseball contortion.
But they turned some of their games into a circus, as well. The Rancheros barely eluded last place by the time the first half of the California League season had ended.
They were also getting outdrawn by the Santa Barbara Foresters, the local amateur club.
Tim Lillard, the 15-year-old son of the Rancheros’ manager, pitched the Foresters to a 10-7 win over the Dodger Rookies before a crowd of 400. The next day, only 236 fans showed up for his dad’s Rancheros game.
The elder Lillard finally resorted to stealing two of the Foresters’ best players.
Bill Oakley, who had been an All-America pitcher at Cal, went 2-0 with an earned-run average of 4.09 in seven appearances after switching to the Rancheros.
Lillard also picked up Foresters’ star Johnny Osborne to play 19 games at shortstop. Osborne, a former Santa Barbara High and UC Santa Barbara star, had played three seasons in the Dodger farm system during the late 1950s.
Making a Run at Reno
Summer eventually warmed up for the Mets’ Class C farm team during the second half of the California League season.
Dad reported on Aug. 7 that “Santa Barbara finally gave her Rancheros some of that summer weather she is famous for, and her ball club responded with a well-played, 9-6 triumph over the San José Bees.”
By Sept. 5, a hot streak had drawn the team to within 1½ games of first-place Reno in the second-half standings.
But one last cold spell set in. The Rancheros lost four of their last five games and surrendered the pennant to the Silver Sox, the Dodgers’ California League affiliate.
That wasn’t the only thing they lost to the Dodgers. Walter O’Malley took over the lease at Laguna for just $1 a year and the promise of stadium upgrades.
The California League was also upgraded to Class A ball in 1963. Both the weather and fans of Santa Barbara, however, continued to give professional baseball a cold shoulder.
Santa Barbara lost minor league baseball for the final time when the Dodgers moved the team to Bakersfield after the 1967 season.
City officials, ignoring the objections of Pearl Chase and the Parks & Recreation Commission, ordered the demolition of Laguna Park in 1970. It replaced it with various city maintenance yards, buildings and affordable housing, while vowing to build another ballpark at a different location.
Santa Barbara sports fans have waited more than a half-century for that promise to be kept.
Minor league baseball’s return to town will now take a miracle that makes the 1969 Mets look like child’s play.
