verdugo288

I want to interject this now. I think it’s important to say. My goal when I started this thing was to eventually put the most-feared team in the 20th District on the field. Nothing more…nothing less. That was the goal.

If we win it all then we win it all as the most feared team in the District. If we don’t ….we’re still the most feared team. And personally? I would say if you’re the most feared ball club you stand a pretty good chance of going far……and inflicting quite a bit of damage.

I always wanted Verdugo to have a certain degree of “notoriety” if you will….

Kinda like John Madden’s 1970’s Oakland Raiders.

We weren’t there YET. We still had a lot to prove. This season was an absolute battle. We had to fight and fight and fight for what we achieved. But we were well on our way.

We didn’t look too intimidating when we came on the scene in 1990…wow…remember THOSE “uniforms”????

Now….the uniforms, the caps, the batting helmets with the matching logo of our caps. The basic look was there.

In ’93….we went from white pants to a grey pant. The grey pant had navy pipe striping down the outer inseam of each leg that matched the jersey.

And yeah….if we had played in ’94, Jack Tiernan and myself had already started designing AWAY jerseys that would have been in grey….to match that pant.

Could you imagine that? A Legion Team with home and away jerseys?!?!?!? Hahahahaha

But most important….the attitude. The swagger.

I wanted us to intimidate. And seriously….the size and athleticism of the dudes on our team…..all four years….It had to be nothing short of intimidating.

I remember at our reunion Ivan Moreno came up to me at one point. You know he doesn’t say much. He’s a head football coach at Canoga Park High School now. When you’re a head coach or a manager you just kinda see things a little differently. He came up to me and took a deep breath and looked around the room and smiled and said “How did you get all these guys to play for us?” Almost in disbelief. He was saying “look at all the great players in this room!”

I told him…”yeah I know…and not everybody is here either” I rattled off names of guys that couldn’t make it to the reunion (Turner, Cowsill, Parque, Bir, Evans) and that it made it even more staggering.

This was the kind of shit that was going through my mind and what I was scheming to build when I first went out to watch CV play a preseason game so I could see Canale throw an inning back when he was a sophomore. Back in early 1990. Before we even had a roster drawn up for our first season.

He was bouncing pitches…getting pissed out there on the hill. Wild. Angry. It didn’t look too good, but he uncorked a couple of deuces (“yellow-hammers” as I like to call ’em) that were fucking unhittable. Another guy was with me that day and he said as we made our way back to my car “well that didn’t look too good”…..

I said to the guy who was with me “I fucking love him…..I’m building this team around that guy”

And that’s what we did.

I look back and we did eventually create without a doubt the most feared team in the 20th District. What we will be writing about here now is watching the fear unfold. It was even more distinct in ’93. I think Haggs once told me “after we hit pregame in ’93….the game was over before it even started”

But we never won the 20th District. Or the State. We went 20-3 in the regular season in ’92 and finished in SECOND PLACE in our Division. We did win the Division in 93……but many could argue that “Yeah….They were good….but they never won the big games”

I disagree. In LEGION…..EVERY game is a big game. And now that we were 7-1…..All the teams around the league were throwing their number one chuckers at us.

If someone is adjusting their rotations to make sure they throw their number one hurler at us….it sure sounds like it’s a pretty BIG GAME to them. Right?

Look at our regular season record combined for 92-93…..it was 38-5.

That’s a lot of BIG GAMES we won.

So don’t ever let anyone tell ya Verdugo never won the BIG GAMES….

And I think I need to let you all know that you’re going to keep hearing the phrase “BIG GAME” a lot from this point forward.

Because We were now the target 🙂

We had come quite a distance from our humble beginnings in 1990. We didn’t even have a home field in 1990. Now….we had TWO.

We had stopped the Glendale team from picking off guys from CV to strengthen their Roster. Now….we were picking off guys from Glendale!!!!

Things I had envisioned in the early days were starting to come to fruition.

It felt good. But I had to work hard to keep you guys on the same page while we won all these big games. Because to us ….and me….it was just another game. But for many teams around the league….playing Verdugo was their biggest game of the year…..and just beating Verdugo could make their season.

They may have an abysmal season but they could still say “hey at least we beat Verdugo”

We didn’t let very many people say that did we?

I jokingly mentioned in the last post that it seemed like everybody was coming after us now….even Mother Nature.

But things change when you start winning. And things really start to change when you start dominating. It does seem, at times, like everybody and everything is coming at you. Everybody around the League wasn’t being quite as friendly to Verdugo as they were to us the first couple of years.

And I was fucking loving it. It was an absolute honor for me to watch us take this thing to the next level. We all did it…

I’m looking forward to writing about the remainder of ’92….

But this early part of the season and the great start we got off to? This was the turning point.

I was starting to see the fear in the oppositions eyes.