In a League of Our Own

Journalist Ron Gonzales talks about San Pedro’s Forgotten Baseball Teams

When you look at San Pedro in particular, baseball fields dotted the landscape, said journalist Ron Gonzales, co-author of a book about Mexican American baseball in the Los Angeles Harbor cities, along with 15 other writers and baseball history enthusiasts. The veteran journalist of four decades was being interviewed on the subject by Random Lengths News reporter and videographer Harry Bugarin.

There was a baseball field in Mexican Hollywood right down on the waterfront, he said. “If you’re not familiar, it’s a neighborhood that existed from about the 1920s to the ‘50s.”  

Gonzales continued recalling the local baseball fields, seeming to snatch the information from memory, family stories, and research.

“There was a field at O’Farrell and a street that existed then called Ancon, which is located right around where the cruise ship terminal is today,” Gonzales explained. “There was a field at Barton Hill. There was a field in the La Rambla neighborhood, where I grew up.”

Local baseball diamonds, like the one his grandfather helped drag with crates into existence on First and Patton, were used by a wide variety of teams from throughout San Pedro, including military teams, Gonzales explained. There are fields that no longer exist.  

For example, there used to be a container terminal at the base of Pacific Avenue (at roughly where Knoll Hill is today) that was developed for about 10 years as a diamond called Hollis field, and Mexican teams played there as well, Gonzales said. And there were just a number of other fields throughout the town along Gaffey, and probably right below where the old YMCA is located. 

“In a lot of ways, the environment then reflected what you see now … just a lot of facilities, where teams can play for these local communities at that time and offer a way for these Mexican immigrant men, and boys and women just sort of like prove their stuff out on the athletic field,” he said. 

Gonzales said that when he looks back at that period, he thinks, “What a macho environment this must have been.” The Mexican American teams in San Pedro were competing against Filipino teams and competing against Japanese teams. They were competing against Chinese teams. They’re competing against African American teams. They were competing against each other.

So in addition to creating leagues of their own, like the Mexican Bay league, for example, they were creating inner city leagues, where they would take on these other teams from other communities, Gonzales said. I imagine these guys being exposed to a large part of the world around them, the world that was shaping up to be the United States that we know today and they didn’t just play locally. 

The retired O.C. Register reporter noted that the local San Pedro teams would travel as far north as Ventura County, and sometimes into Santa Barbara. 

“It was very common for them to play in Los Angeles and East LA. There were frequent trips to Orange County, and also some trips to San Diego,” Gonzales said. “They were traveling far and wide in a very competitive environment… the Croatians too were a part of that and the Italians had teams.” 

The making of the book

Gonzales was part of a team of 16 writers, editors and historians who worked on the book entitled Mexican American Baseball in the South Bay, which looks at the history of American baseball in San Pedro, Wilmington and other communities in the Los Angeles Harbor and the South Bay over the past century. And the above was excerpted from an interview with Gonzales that was posted this past month on Random Lengths News’ YouTube channel. Mexican American Baseball in the South Bay is part of a series produced by the Latino baseball history project, a nonprofit project based at Cal State San Bernardino. 

Gonzales explained that the book series grew out of interest in documenting the experience of Mexican Americans in baseball and softball. 

“The founder of the baseball reliquary was a guy named Terry Cannon, who came up with the idea of creating an exhibit at Cal State Los Angeles in the early 2000s,” Gonzales explained.  “So that really launched this project and an extensive effort to document the history of baseball and softball and Mexican American communities in Los Angeles, Orange County, the Inland Empire and throughout California, and a number of communities throughout the United States.”

Gonzales grew up in San Pedro and played baseball as a kid and played way more as an adult, but he admits he was never very good at it. But he had a lot of friends who were really good.

“I always admired their skills and abilities,” he said. And that also prompted an interest in the art and the science of the sport… and what makes people good at it. 

Gonzales explained that that level of fandom played into the project as well. 

Most of the research effort was focused on documenting the period between 1900 and 1960. Gonzales noted that local history is always impacted by what’s happening in the world. In this case, the time period is bookended by the Mexican Revolution from 1910 to 1917, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of Mexicans fleeing to the United States. While there are families in the Southwest and California who can trace their family heritage to the time when California was still a part of Mexico, it was the influx of immigrants between the 1910s and 1920s who brought with them baseball. 

Baseball’s history in Mexico is almost as long as its history in the United States, Gonzales explained. 

“It really started picking up popularity in the 1880s in Mexico,” Gonzales explained. “You can look at the experience of these Mexican immigrants who were settling in San Pedro, Wilmington, and the rest of the South Bay.” 

Oftentimes, they’re coming from other parts of the United States where they may have picked up baseball as well, they may have been miners in Arizona, and railroad workers across the Southwest.  They brought with them to San Pedro their ability to play and their passion for it.

Gonzales explained that in the period around 1930 there was an explosion of teams in Mexican neighborhoods across San Pedro, Wilmington and virtually every other community in the Los Angeles Harbor Area from Long Beach to San Pedro, from Wilmington to  Dominguez and Inglewood. 

Everywhere you can imagine there was a field, there was a team. Gonzales noted that there was also an interest in local media like the San Pedro News Pilot and La Opinion, the Spanish-language newspaper that had just opened its doors in the mid-1920s. 

The veteran reporter explained that in those days, baseball managers and coaches might slip their game scores or game summaries under the doors and the sports editors would write about these local games in the local papers. These stories played a role in egging on neighborhood rivalries in sports.

“There was already an audience for these stories about sports and I think it had contributed to building up an interest in these teams,” Gonzales explained. There were also a number of teams fielded by military personnel stationed in San Pedro as well as a number of women’s teams at that time. 

But in addition to that, there was also this military environment in which they played. In San Pedro in particular, there were teams that represented the Coast Guard, Fort MacArthur, the Marine Corps, and the Pacific Battle Fleet, which was based in San Pedro at that time. So you’d find these Mexican players taking on teams from battleships, aircraft carriers, and all kinds of support ships that oftentimes when you read about them, you’d recognize them as names made familiar by their service in World War II, and may even have been at Pearl Harbor.

Some of the teams that were produced out here in the San Pedro area and the local cities and neighborhoods, Gonzales said he would describe their environment as very fluid. So, teams would come and go very quickly. They might last a season, they might last several, and they might move from locale to locale around the harbor. 

Gonzales’ grandfather apparently managed three different teams around the late 1920s and early 1930s. It would be like the San Pedro Stars, the Palos Verdes Cubs, and the Atlas team, which was later acquired by the Mexican Recreation Club, Gonzales explained. These teams evolved into a sort of semi-pro pro-team. But by that point, Gonzales’ grandfather had already left that particular team. 

“This was basically one group of guys playing under different names, taking on different players at different times and evolving,” Gonzales explained. In the Mexican Hollywood area, there was a team called the Hollywood Mexicans and there was even a Hollywood Mexican girls team and they gradually evolved into the San Pedro Internationals and took on other names. 

“After that, there was a very famous team called the Terminal Island Toltecs and they eventually rebranded as the San Pedro Toltecs,” Gonzales explained. “They flourished for years throughout the early 1930s. So what you see is a serious kind of like a continuum of the same players playing for a team but maybe a different series of managers working with them.”

Gonzales went on to discuss the emergence of girls and women’s baseball teams in the Los Angeles harbor, four decades before the establishment of Title IX, and the local baseball heroes that rose from its dusty fields. Reporter Harry Bugarin skillfully navigates the conversation in such a way as to allow Gonzales’ depth of knowledge to shine through and cause the casual viewer to ask their parents and grandparents, uncles and aunts about their time on the baseball diamond.

To learn more about Mexican American Baseball in the South Bay, I suggest you pick up the book and look at the remainder of our 40-minute interview with Ron Gonzales at https://tinyurl.com/Gonzales-baseball.