verdugo288

When we started this thing in 1990 I went in to the Post and somehow got them to sponsor our Team…something Verdugo Hills Post 288 had not done in about 30 years.  For more info on how that came about read my earlier Post titled “From $1000.00 to a Team Bus?”  While I was excited to have been “hired” to coach Post 288 (for no pay)…….I had just ONE PROBLEM.  I didn’t have any players……

I had just finished up my first year as a PAID coach at Burbank High.  So I was planning on taking a couple of pitchers with me from that school……our tough little right-hander Chili Rivera and left-hander Jason “White” Chandler.  But that’s really all I had.  I knew some of the kids from CV and had coached many of them in Colt League in ’88 and ’89.  Alot of those guys had already verbally committed to joining us but I still had many slots on the Roster to fill. 

So I started picking the brain of one of the players from my 1989 Colt Team..John Rogers.  Rogers was smart, funny, and most importantly…he could SELL.  In reality, Rogers was the GM for our Team the first year of our existence.  He kind of bridged the gap with a lot of these players we wanted to recruit for the Team and he really opened up the lines of communication with these players.  Rogers had already played for me for a couple of years and had a feel for how I liked to run a program and I think he did an unbelieveable job SELLING this to the players who ultimately ended up on our Roster.  But being the new guy, I still had ALOT of selling of my own to do.

Glendale had a powerful program going on, and I am sure many of the guys who played with us that first year (if given the choice) would have played for them instead of us.  But there was something going on behind the scenes that worked in our favor.  Glendale was trying to recruit the guys who ended up on our Roster as “Filler” players.  They wanted them on their team, but they wouldn’t make any commitments to these players as to how much (or little) playing time they were going to get. 

Most of our guys probably felt (and rightfully so) that they could be STARTING for the Glendale team.  As I spoke more and more with these players that we ended up with, I realized that they were pretty pissed about the whole thing.  This kind of worked to our advantage.  And in the end, they decided that PLAYING for us was better than SITTING for anybody.  I started to realize that this was a great group of guys….they all kind of had a CHIP on their shoulders and wanted to prove Glendale (and the rest of the world) that they were WRONG.  And I think that our guys more than accomplished this.

Glendale wanted all of the BIG NAME players.  The marquee players, if you will.  Hell, I’ve always said just give me nine guys who want to play hard and I’ll do fine with whoever it is.  Even if we play the entire season ON THE ROAD like we did. 

One of those Marquee players was Vic Ramirez.  The Glendale team was trying to get me to sign off on a waiver sheet and effectively “release” Vic over to them.  I had two words for the Glendale team when that was proposed to me…..those two words were “Hell NO.”  It looked like Vic might not even play that season at all.  But thanks to Hank, BullOxen, and some of the other guys doing a little behind the scenes “selling” Vic ended up playing for us and having a great season. This is the reason the Glendale team had it in for us and wouldn’t let us use Stengel Field at all in our first season.  And I’ll bet you if they did acquire Vic from us they would have won the District.  So Glendale may have ruined our plans of having a home field…but we ruined their season……….

You know what I say?  Canale is a marquee player.  Damon Martin is a marquee player. Weapon is a marquee player.  Hank is a marquee player.  Rogers is a marquee player.  Same with the pitchers we brought over from Burbank.  And the guys we filled out our Roster with were great players, too.  At least this is how I SAW IT.  And as far as I’m concerned, I SAW IT and the guys running the Glendale program missed it.  This is why Verdugo Hills had the greatest players….we had the guys who had HEART.  We had the guys who ate, lived and breathed the game.  So from our inception we had this great group of kids who felt they had kind of been OVERLOOKED.  They had a nice, big, fat CHIP on their shoulders.  And over the next several posts…I’m gonna tell you all about it!  I’m getting fired up right now just writing about it!!

It kind of goes without saying the chip I had on MY SHOULDER.  It was the perfect union…a coach who wanted to prove he could win at this level and a bunch of players who felt like they had been overlooked and wanted to prove that they could PLAY at this level.  Well, I think we proved our critics WRONG by the end of that first season.  Take a look at the stats from the 1990 Team when I post them here and try to tell me these guys were not players.  Canale as a 16 year-old made the ALL-STAR TEAM.  He had 88 Plate Appearances that season…..and he struck out ONE time!!!  

Yeah…..we all had a one big, fat, CHIP on our shoulder.  And I frickin’ LOVED IT.  While the rest of the league certainly didn’t label us as the new bully in the block…. I will say this….after just a few games they all were paying VERY CLOSE attention to US……….and there was a LOT of whispering going on behind the scenes about this New Team in the 20th District called Verdugo Hills……a Motley Crew of no-names who didn’t back down to ANYBODY.