Roar Still Echoes in Northwood

IRVINE — It has been 10 years but Steve Mendoza still remembers the exact moment when he realized he wasn’t just a 12-year-old playing baseball anymore.

It was a Saturday afternoon, and he and eight of his friends--the Irvine Northwood Little League team--trotted out to their positions on that manicured diamond in Williamsport, Pa.

They’d gone through the same motions several times already that week, watched and cheered each time by a few thousand parents and fans who had come to see them play in the Little League World Series.

But this time, the players were taking the field for the series final. The regular hubbub was replaced by the deafening roar of 35,000 cheering and chanting voices.

“We got on the field and it was like, phew! We were basically speechless,” recalled Mendoza, a senior this fall at San Diego State. “I was looking at everyone and you could see in their eyes they weren’t ready for that kind of attention.”

Ten years later, members of South Mission Viejo’s Little League team are amassing their own memories of the Little League World Series in what has become something of a regular event for Orange County.

This is the fourth local team since 1987 to make the trip to Williamsport. Prior to today’s game, of all those Orange County teams only Irvine Northwood made it to the World Championship game. A Cypress team in 1990 and a Yorba Linda team in 1995 lost in the U.S. Championship game. Teams from Long Beach won the World Championship in 1992 and ’93.

Irvine Northwood, which had all the markings of a juggernaut in motion, eventually seized up like an oil-less engine in the final game, losing to a team from Taiwan, 21-1.

Yet, the final results of those earlier runs for the championship do nothing to diminish the successes along the way. A bunch of kids played some great baseball for a lot of weeks, in each instance rallying their communities to new levels of civic pride.

If there can be such a thing as 22-year-old wizened veterans, then the members of that 1987 Northwood team would qualify. They remember the fun and excitement of winning their way through the tournament to the final game. They recall the rush that comes with being the center of attention, and the buoying strength of hearing strangers shouting out for their success.

But they also remember the boredom of being virtual captives, unable to move outside specified areas during the highly controlled World Series tournament.

“I remember being in San Bernardino at the regionals and we had a better time there,” said Aron Garcia, starting pitcher for the Northwood team and son of one of its managers. “We were allowed to go to the movies. We went to a water park. At Williamsport, you stayed in your room and you just watched everybody else play their games. There was nothing you could do. There was like a swimming pool, but the weather was so bad nobody went swimming. And they had that [Little League] hall of fame, but how many times can you go see that?”

Oddly, one thing team members say they don’t remember is a lot stress.

“I just remember a whole bunch of people,” said Erik Sobek, who didn’t start in the final game but played outfield for the last two innings. “The crowd was just roaring. It was pretty intense. There was a bit of nervousness.”

The one thing Sobek remembers thinking as he took the field: “Don’t mess up.”

“I don’t think we knew what pressure was,” said Mendoza, who was the team clown. “It all happened so fast, no one was really worried about it. We didn’t know how big it was, with all the cameras and reporters and all those things going on back home. We were away from home for three weeks. We didn’t realize it was so big.”

The pressure, it seems, was reserved for the parents.

Linda Jones, wife of one of the managers and mother of pitcher Ryan Jones (now playing minor league baseball in Knoxville, Tenn.), recalls sitting in the stands among thousands of strangers and scores of familiar faces from Irvine, but ultimately feeling very alone.

“It’s different for the coaches’ wives,” she said. “My husband, he stayed with the [team], and I was with all the other parents, so we couldn’t really share a lot. It was stressful, but I could hardly get a moment with my husband or my son. I was lucky to get a hug out of them at the end of the day.”

Still, Jones said, the memories are pleasant. After watching a televised Mission Viejo game this week, she pulled out videotapes from that 10-year-old trip.

“Probably, if I could do it all over, I would try not to be so stressed out,” she said. “They were 11 and 12 years old. They seemed so young [on the video] and we looked so intense. It’s stressful, and it should be fun.

“When you’re in the middle of it all, you don’t really think about that. But [the players] seemed to handle it fine.”

Garcia, now a United Airlines customer service representative and a football and baseball coach at Irvine High School, remembers the spotlight as simply part of the overall thrill.

“Playing in front of all those people probably made us even better,” he said. “We were trying to show off our talent.”

The team was shellacked in the first couple innings--Taiwan took quick advantage of pitching and fielding problems and put the game out of reach--but Mendoza doesn’t recall the team members being particularly upset.

“We were a bit depressed but also relieved to be finally going home,” he said. “It didn’t really hit. Now, looking back, it would have been great if we had won. But when I was 12, I didn’t really know what a championship was.”

Mendoza is uncertain whether the passage of time will translate into increased awareness by the current Mission Viejo players.

“Once you’re on camera, you’re no longer a straight-out athlete, you’re an athlete-entertainer,” he said. “You see the Mission Viejo kids and they have the eye black and the wrist bands. The only thing that we’d do that would come close to imitating a major leaguer would be a batting stance or how you blow bubbles [with bubble gum]. A lot has changed since then.”

Ultimately, the memories come down to mental snapshots, not emotions.

“Usually, there were not that many people watching, and you could talk with the center fielder in a normal voice,” Mendoza said.

Not so in the championship game. There was just too much crowd.

“You could see his mouth move but you couldn’t hear him,” Mendoza said. “That’s when the feeling of pressure came. But I don’t know if we were nervous or what. It was like a dream state.”

But a dream that lasts.

“It was just a thrilling experience,” said Sobek, 21, who leaves today for Texas A&M;, where he’ll be a junior and a member of the college’s baseball team. “It was just really memorable.”

Some of the memories are tangible. Sobek still has the baseball hat he wore in the championship game hanging in his closet. A collection of pins from the other teams in the tournament are squirreled away in a desk drawer.

“I’m going to just keep them there,” he said. “I’ll save them for my kids or something.”