Mark Patton: Santa Barbara’s Baseball Roots Go Back to Mexico Rule

The national pastime — the game we celebrate now during Major League Baseball’s All-Star Week — goes deep into Santa Barbara’s own past.

The late Walker A. Tompkins, history columnist for the now also late Santa Barbara News-Press, pinpointed the exact site where baseball was first played West of the Mississippi in 1847:

A dusty, ox-cart avenue in what is now downtown Santa Barbara.

Another local writer, Summerland’s May Lambert, reported that the first night baseball game was also probably played on the South Coast during the early 1890s.

We may be too small to field an MLB team — and, as several failed attempts proved, our Junes are perhaps too gloomy to support a minor league club — but baseball has been forever stitched into the fabric of our town’s history.

The Art of Baseball

Santa Barbara has played several roles in the culture of the game — from the poem “Casey at the Bat” to the film classic Bull Durham.

Ernest Lawrence Thayer, a Montecito resident during the latter third of his life, penned “Casey” in 1888.

Newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst, his former Harvard classmate, propelled the poem into the national consciousness by publishing it in the San Francisco Examiner.

Thayer actually regretted that kind of fame. He considered the poem to be mere “doggerel” and an impediment to his quest for a more high-brow standing in the literary world.

When Thayer was asked about the ballad of Mighty Casey by an interviewer in 1909, he replied, “All I ask is that I not be reminded of this part of my life … Why not let me talk about what I am writing now?”

He dodged autograph seekers and even refused all royalties for its use. Montecito became his hideout until his death in 1940.

Ron Shelton, the writer and director of Bull Durham, spent the first part of his life in Montecito. He graduated from Santa Barbara High School in 1963.

But unlike Thayer, who wasn’t much of a baseball fan, Shelton excelled as a ballplayer for both the Dons and Westmont College before joining the Baltimore Orioles’ farm system.

Ideas for the film — which was ranked No. 1 in Sports Illustrated’s “The 50 Greatest Sports Movies of All-Time” — came from both his minor league experience as well as from the many games he watched as a youth at Laguna Park.

His childhood hero was Baseball Hall of Famer Eddie Mathews, SBHS Class of 1949.

He even paid tribute to the former Milwaukee and Atlanta Braves’ star in 2001 by writing his feature obituary in the Los Angeles Times.

“I lived that life,” Shelton said of the national pastime, “from an evangelical upbringing to being liberated by Eddie Mathews, of all people … to playing in high school and college, and having a dream of playing for seven years.”

Mathews himself became a footnote in literary history when he was pictured on Sports Illustrated’s first cover on Aug. 16, 1954.

Mark Kauffman’s photograph showed Mathews swinging at a pitch in front of a packed grandstand at Milwaukee County Stadium on June 9 of that season. New York Giants catcher Wes Westrum and umpire Augie Donatelli were also in the frame.

“He said he took about 150 shots of different players and turned them all over to the editor,” Mathews said in his autobiography, Eddie Mathews and the National Pastime.

“The editor chose that particular photograph because he said it was timeless — you don’t really see anybody’s face, and it doesn’t emphasize an individual, but rather a scene that’s repeated thousands and thousands of times every year.”

Of War and Baseball

Cooperstown, New York, has received credit as the birthplace of baseball, but the first recorded game played by recognizably modern rules was actually held at Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey, on June 19, 1846.

The New York Nine defeated the New York Knickerbockers, 11-8, in a game chronicled by several of the area’s newspapers.

But less than a year later, baseball was also played 2,500 miles to the West in Santa Barbara, which was still part of Mexico.

Tompkins wrote about it in a pair of books: Santa Barbara Yesterdays and It Happened in Old Santa Barbara.

“At that time the New York Knickerbockers were sponsoring that historic first game, the U.S. Army was recruiting volunteers for an infantry regiment for Mexican War duty out in California,” Tompkins said. “All these volunteers came from the streets of New York and Brooklyn.

“So many baseball players signed up for military duty on the western frontier that no more games were played in the New York area until 1851.”

The war had ended by the time Col. Jonathan D. Stevenson’s New York Volunteer Regiment made it around Cape Horn and arrived in Alta California. The troopers were assigned duty as an occupation force until California could be annexed into the Union.

Company F took control of the pueblo of Santa Barbara in April 1847 — and its bored soldiers organized a baseball game soon thereafter.

“They laid out a diamond at what is now the intersection of State and Cota streets — which were not surveyed until five years later — and manufactured themselves a ball out of a lump of gutta percha, covered with cowhide stitched like a segmented orange,” Tompkins wrote.

“A stick of mesquite served as a bat.

“The ball, after one swat of the bat, turned oblate instead of spherical, enabling pitchers to throw some weird curves at the plate, making grounders zig-zag, and causing fly balls to take odd trajectories.”

Their games, by several accounts, were loud, brawling affairs — and a major irritation for the native Californians.

Much of Tompkins’ research had come from a book — History of Santa Barbara County, State of California — that had been edited in 1939 by Owen O’Neill, one of the founders of Old Spanish Days.

O’Neill scoffed at the disgust expressed by the native Santa Barbarans, writing, “These people who thought nothing of allowing running horses and stray cattle all over the town considered a flying ball, with shouting men in pursuit of it, a dangerous nuisance — in the days when scarcely a house boasted glass windows.”

But Tompkins noted that “many a vegetable garden was ruined by an outfielder vaulting a fence after an extra-base hit, and many a line of laundry was soiled by dust flying from a baserunner’s slide.”

“Largely because of the baseball games,” he added, “the Spanish-speaking people of Santa Barbara came to look upon the New Yorkers as loudmouthed, uncouth hoodlums.”

Californians had a much different reaction to the game of baseball when Brooklyn sent another group of players called the Dodgers their way in 1958.

Fired Up About Baseball

Baseball caught on quickly in California during the late 1800s, with amateur teams forming up and down the South Coast.

The players of Summerland, a town of spiritualists founded just east of Santa Barbara, got an unexpected boost when oil was discovered accidentally at posthole depth in 1888.

The local residents took advantage of the strike by digging wells and piping the natural gas into their homes.

May Croop Lambert’s book, Ninety Years of Memories, told of how some of the neighborhood boys tapped into the gas reservoir that lay underneath Lillie Avenue so they could continue their sandlot games into the evening.

“When it began to get dark,” she wrote, “they would drive short pieces of pipe into the ground about five or six inches and light the natural gas which percolated through the soil to make a flame about a foot high.

“Fifteen or 20 of these natural gas torches gave plenty of light for a night baseball game.

“When bedtime came, the kids would snuff out the flames — and use the pipes again the next night.”

Major League Baseball wouldn’t catch up to Summerland for another 45 years. It didn’t play its first night game until the Cincinnati Reds installed lights at Crosley Field in 1935.

Tim Badillo kept the home fires burning in the 1920s, organizing baseball teams in Santa Barbara for the next half-century.

He was only 17 when he started the Santa Barbara Cubs, a team that drew as many as 1,000 fans to the original Pershing Park.

Games were also played at the old racetrack along the waterfront as well as on a Westside field by San Andres and West Pedregosa streets.

Badillo invited several traveling teams to town, including the all-black Billy Boykins All-Stars in the early 1930s.

Very suspiciously, however, city officials announced just before that game that Pershing Park had been condemned.

Pershing was subsequently un-condemned just a few weeks after the cancellation.

Badillo did beat Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey to the punch in breaking the color barrier.

He recruited such black players as Joe Coles and Ben Gamble to his Cubs, and got Satchel Paige to pitch against fellow Negro Leagues star Henry McHenry in a local exhibition.

The Cubs had to disband for financial reasons during the Great Depression. Badillo, however, continued his reign as the czar of Santa Barbara baseball by managing Laguna Park, the city’s municipal stadium.

He kept its grounds in big-league shape from the time it opened in 1938 until another generation of myopic city leaders actually did condemn its home stadium.

The city tore down Laguna Park in 1970 to make room for a maintenance and storage yard for municipal vehicles.

The lyrics of Joni Mitchell’s newly released song, “Big Yellow Taxi,” struck a chord with the angry baseball fans of Santa Barbara: “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”

Pros and Cons

Professional baseball did have an on-and-off love affair with Santa Barbara.

The Pasadena Millionaires had a brief fling with the town. They moved their Class D minor league club to Santa Barbara to finish the Southern California League season of 1913. The team had been evicted from its home field after they failed to make rent.

Baseball great Babe Ruth played in Santa Barbara during his barnstorming tours of 1924 and 1927. Bob Meusel accompanied him on the first trip and Lou Gehrig on the second.

“Build a good athletic field and major league baseball teams will be clamoring for a chance to train in Santa Barbara,” Ruth told a local audience. “Santa Barbara is a logical place for baseball teams to train.

“You have the best climate I ever saw, where players can get into condition quickly. You have every accommodation for baseball teams but one — an athletic field.”

The city finally took care of that when crews from the Works Progress Administration completed the construction of 2,500-seat Laguna Park.

Santa Barbara made its minor-league debut in the California League in 1941. Its Dodgers farm club set the circuit’s record for season attendance when it drew 92,541 fans in 1947.

The advent of television and persistently foggy evenings dropped that number to less than 43,000 in 1950. The Dodgers moved the team to Bakersfield after the summer of 1953 when the attendance dropped to an all-time low of 29,000.

News-Press sports reporter Francis Tuckwiler put in his own two cents by writing, “Santa Barbara wouldn’t pay 10 cents to see an earthquake.”

The city took one more swing at the minor leagues when local businessmen Caesar Uyesaka and Jerry Harwin founded the Santa Barbara Baseball Club Inc. in 1962.

They got the expansion New York Mets to place their farm club at Laguna Park in that first season. The Dodgers took over the lease for their Class A team the following year.

Uyesaka and Harwin tried every gimmick in their playbook to put butts in Laguna’s stands. Max Patkin, the double-jointed mascot known as “The Clown Prince of Baseball,” even coached third base at times.

Shelton was so entertained by Patkin that he recruited him to play himself in Bull Durham more than two decades later.

The local Dodgers also hired former major leaguer Jackie Price to perform stunts between innings. He’d throw three baseballs at the same time to three different catchers, bat pitched balls while hanging upside down, and shoot baseballs out of a bazooka.

But you know it’s over when the fat lady sings. Although my mom was actually pretty slender, Rita Patton’s operatic renditions of The Star-Spangled Banner in 1967 turned out to be the swan songs for minor league baseball in Santa Barbara.

The Dodgers moved the club back to Bakersfield.

They did inquire about a return here a few years later. The city turned them down the same way it had when Billy Boykins and his all-stars tried to play here four decades earlier: They told them the ballpark had been condemned.

This time it was the sad truth. The clapboard home of Santa Barbara baseball already had been reduced to a pile of splinters.

The city’s vow to build a new baseball park was another kind of pile. Its promise has gone unfulfilled for the last 54 years.

The Santa Barbara Foresters did pick up our banner for baseball in 1991. Bill Pintard has guided his summer collegiate team to 10 National Baseball Congress championships in the last 18 years.

They now play their games on the high school diamond where Eddie Mathews once romped.

It’s just seven blocks — and 176 years — from where Company F first swatted a cowhide-covered orb with the best mesquite Santa Barbara could offer.