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Saturday was opening day at the Encino Little League baseball diamonds, located at Hayvenhurst and Magnolia since 1954. John Scheibe, the author of "On the Road With Jim Murray: Baseball and the Summer of '79" and an editor in Sports at the L.A. Times, played there as a boy and returned for the annual ritual. He blogged:
The fields look the same, always immaculate, the grass cut and watered, the infields combed with a fine rake, the dugouts freshly coated with dark-green paint.Like baseball itself, the place is timeless. Some changes have been made since we played there in the 1960s. They've added batting cages behind the American League field. The trees have matured to give boisterous moms and dads plenty of shade on hot Saturday afternoons. The concession stand where my Tigers teammates and I would load up on real junk food, such as bubble gum, hot dogs and soda pop, usually all bought by our manager if we won our game, is still there.
Scheibe recalls when the Dodgers' Gil Hodges came to an opening day. Gets me thinking about the diamonds where I played, in a Northridge corn field at Balboa and Nordhoff. We weren't official Little League, just a knock-off called the Western Boys Baseball Association. But it was good enough to spawn future Angel Doug DeCinces. One year in the mid-'60s Don Drysdale and Willie Mays showed up at our opening day — I've always wondered whose parents had the connections to make that happen. Oh well. The baseball and corn fields long ago disappeared under a suburban tract.
Another new Valley blog: Hills of Woodland, which spotted Jay Leno tooling around Topanga Canyon Boulevard this weekend.