San Pedro High Baseball Coach Aims to Return to Championship

At springtime, 26 years ago--when John F. Kennedy was in the Oval Office and the baseball players at San Pedro High School wore baggy gray flannel uniforms and black leather spikes--Jerry Lovarov coached his last L. A. City championship game.

His San Pedro team, which had finished 15-3 that season, had a strong-armed catcher named Elias Gomez behind the plate, a hard-throwing southpaw named Terry Richards on the mound and a lineup of hot hitters that included shortstop Larry Spangler, second baseman Nick Lovrich and outfielder Danny Piper.

Unfortunately, San Pedro’s prom was the night before the game. And at 10 a.m. on a Saturday at La Cienega Playground (now Jackie Robinson Stadium), in the playground restroom, the Pirates changed out of their tuxedos and into their demure, black-lettered button-up uniforms.

San Pedro lost that game, 7-6, to Washington High. Washington scored the go-ahead run on a double in the seventh inning after the umpire ruled that Spangler “phantom tagged” second base on a double play relay. The double play would have gotten San Pedro out of the inning with a 6-5 lead.

Lovarov claims to this day that Spangler touched the bag. But that was 1962. Now, after stockpiling 14 league titles and a 359-160 record over 27 years at the San Pedro helm, Lovarov may be poised to take the Pirates back to the City championship this year.

The names are different, but with a 7-0 start and the championship of the Westside Tournament under their belts, this year’s Pirates are the odds-on favorite to win the Marine League.

“I’m still having fun,” said Lovarov, 58. “The day I get out there and it’s not fun for me, I’ll hang it up. I still like the challenge. For me, coaching is the fun part of the game.”

It’s been fun for Lovarov, even though the last 27 years have been an endless succession of long bus rides, hours of raking, watering and lining the field, hitting fungoes and lugging equipment. There also have been lots of bitter cold afternoons out on San Pedro’s wind-swept baseball diamond, which since 1936 has nestled on its current perch atop a terrace overlooking the dry docks and turning basin of Los Angeles Harbor.

Would Lovarov trade in any of it?

“I’ve never asked the kids to get on the end of a hoe or pull weeds,” Lovarov said. “I don’t know if that’s good or bad or stupid. But all I do is ask the kids to play the game and play hard.”

This year’s team plays the game hard and well. After seven games, six Pirates are hitting over .350--outfielders Jamey Stellino, Art Castaneda and Ken Carpentier, catcher Dale Johnson, first baseman Grant Beachley and pitcher-designated hitter Rodney Garcia.

Garcia is hitting .545 and has two home runs and 10 runs batted in. Carpentier leads the team in RBI with 17 and hit a grand slam against Locke on Wednesday.

This team is molded in the classic form of a San Pedro team in the Lovarov era: stocked with line-drive smashing, outfield gap-busting hitters.

“I’ve always had the kids that can rip the ball,” Lovarov said. “My philosophy is that every kid likes to hit. San Pedro has always had the big strong kids that could drive the ball.”

One of those big strong kids was Alan Ashby, a graduate of the San Pedro class of ‘69, who has had a 15-year career as a catcher in the major leagues with the Cleveland Indians, the Toronto Blue Jays and currently the Houston Astros.

Garry Maddox, who logged 14 years in the National League as an outfielder with the San Francisco Giants and Philadelphia Phillies, is another San Pedro alumnus.

Eddie Jurak, a journeyman infielder, and Brian Harper, a catcher-outfielder, are both San Pedro grads from the mid-’70s and they’re both battling for positions on the Oakland A’s this spring.

Lovarov said he remembers games in the late ‘60s when as many as 40 scouts would gather behind San Pedro’s backstop to watch Maddox and Ashby in action.

Maddox, Lovarov said, had all the tools to be a big league success when he graduated from San Pedro but lacked maturity. Maddox signed a pro contract out of high school, but after his first summer in the minor leagues, became discouraged and joined the Army. After a tour of duty in Vietnam, Maddox decided that chasing down fly balls in the big leagues would be a safer occupation than chasing after the Viet Cong.

He later went on to hit a home run in the 1983 World Series against the Kansas City Royals and won a series of Golden Glove awards as a center fielder.

Ashby was a third baseman when he entered high school, but Lovarov turned the switch hitter into a catcher. Last year, when he was honored at a special recognition assembly at San Pedro, Ashby said it was Lovarov’s decision to convert him into a catcher that allowed him to stay in the big leagues so long.

“(Ashby) said he wouldn’t have earned a dime in the majors at third base, but he didn’t send me any money,” Lovarov joked. “But, seriously, I think part of my success here has been due to putting players in the correct positions for their skills.”

Lovarov never posts the lineup for a game until after infield and outfield practice are over.

“If you put that card on the wall any earlier the kids don’t hustle if they know they’re not starting. My way, they hustle all the way until that card comes up,” he said.

Dressed out in his standard uniform of a black San Pedro windbreaker and black pants and shoes, Lovarov is an easy man to spot on the Pirate bench. He never coaches the bases, preferring to help his hitters analyze pitchers from the on-deck circle instead. And he advises them to swing away.

“This team’s mainly a hitting team,” said junior shortstop Matthew Rasband. “That’s been (Lovarov’s) way for so long. It’s kind of strange--I mean, he could have coached my dad. But the game doesn’t change. It’s still throw the ball and hit it. Nothing fancy. That’s Lovarov’s way.”

Garcia, a senior who is also the team’s leading pitcher with a 3-0 record, looks to Lovarov to settle him down in pressure situations.

“If you do something right, he’ll clap his hands and smile,” Garcia said. “If you do something wrong, he’ll just look down and shake his head. He always knows what’s gonna happen. After that many years, he’s got them all down.”

Lovarov, who played basketball and baseball at San Pedro in 1948, began coaching junior varsity baseball in 1954. After Bob Bell stepped down in 1961 from the varsity baseball post to coach the Pirate basketball team, Lovarov took over.

Before Lovarov’s first game that year, San Pedro gardeners Bill Green and Tad Kawabata put a big potted plant on top of the mound to initiate the new varsity coach. The plant must have been a good luck charm--Richards threw a 1-0 shutout in Lovarov’s debut and the coach has been a fixture at San Pedro ever since.

In the meantime, hundreds of players have come through his program. And Lovarov is proud of the fact that only two players in his 28 years have lived outside San Pedro. “We’re not busing them in from the inner city,” Lovarov said.

Lovarov’s baseball program has also produced several successful coaches, including Andy Lopez, who is head baseball coach at Cal State Dominguez Hills. Two former players, Jerry Garcia and Mike Walsh, coach San Pedro’s junior varsity team.

“These kids gotta have a career,” Lovarov said. “I tell ‘em to come back and take my job. And I tell you there’s three or four waiting for it.”

It might be a long wait.

“Every day I hit hundreds of fungoes to the infielders and outfielders,” Lovarov said. “If I didn’t hit fungoes one day, I’d probably be lost on the way home.”