Little League Manager Tells Players He’s Out

GARDEN GROVE — A Little League manager who was injured in a brawl this week with coaches from a competing team said Friday that he has led his last practice.

With his pint-size players gathered around him on a quiet baseball field where they were to practice for a game today, Larry Gomez Sr. said he’s quitting the league and pulling his three foster sons off the 13-child team. The team’s two assistant coaches also are quitting, taking three more children with them.

“It’s really embarrassing,” assistant coach Ron Menchaca, 18, said of the scuffle at a league board meeting Tuesday night, which turned into a five-man pile-on, brought the police, and sent Gomez to the hospital with a gouged head.

“I can just imagine what people think. Maybe in major league locker rooms you get into fights, but in Little League? We’re all supposed to be adults.”

But despite their chagrin about the fisticuffs, the coaches were unrepentant about what led to the scuffle: a dispute over their team’s standing, which they and the other adults involved in the league take deadly seriously.

Other teams had called for the team, the Athletics, to forfeit the first six games of the season because its star pitcher is too old to play. The forfeit would cause the team to lose its first-place standing in the Northeast Garden Grove Little League.

The player’s age came to light before a baseball game a week ago, when league officials say they discovered the boy’s mother falsified his birth certificate as part of a child-custody battle. The boy turns 12 today, and league rules bar players who turn 12 before July 31 of the season.

“We have sports and we have rules in sports because people like to cheat,” league president Blaire McCullogh said Wednesday. “It’s unfortunate that the parents are getting that far involved, rather than letting the kids play.”

On Friday it was clear that the kids who make up the Athletics won’t be playing together as a team again any time soon. The league’s board has yet to reach a decision on whether the team will have to forfeit its games, but the point is moot given the coaches’ decision to pull nearly half the children off the team.

“We all talked it over, we discussed it, and I said, ‘I don’t want my kids to play. I don’t want them in this league to be told by the other kids that they are cheaters,’ ” said Nick Saldich, 72, who has traveled from San Pedro six times a week for the last six years to coach the team.

“We got to the point where, hey, enough is enough,” said Saldich, known as Grandpa Nick. “I don’t care what they do. They can stop us from coaching or managing in their Little League if they want. That’s fine. But it will be too late, because we’re gonna be gone.”

Gomez said he told his players they were the best he has coached in his 25 years in baseball. After pitching to them in a final, late afternoon workout, he stood under a shade tree and fingered the healing cut on his head.

“It’s not fair to the kids because any time they get out on the field there’s a controversy,” Gomez said. “If the other kids want to play, I’m sure they’ll find a manager or something. I’m taking my kids out and finding another league. The kids jell so well together it’s really a shame. But that’s the way it has to be.”

With the coaches pulling out, parents of most of the players on the team said Friday that they won’t bother to bring their kids to today’s scheduled game.

And kids on the team said that, with all the adults fighting all the time, they don’t want to play anyway.