The Boys of Indian Summer

Herbie Lewis was at his usual spot at second base, wearing the spotless white uniform of the home team. He was a little stiff in the morning chill, a little slow getting down on the warmup grounders.Then again, that’s to be expected from someone at the extreme end of a trend. Lewis is 89, and he’s senior man on a team where gray hair is more the rule than the exception.

Old guys -- and some really old guys -- are returning to baseball.

They’ve got paunches and they’ve lost a step or three, but at least they’ve got the familiar game of their distant youth. They get to face pitchers who still throw the curve and bring the heat on a regulation diamond. And so they show up Sundays all over the United States -- old guys who want nothing more than to line one over the shortstop’s head and, on a really good day, turn two.

Nationally, an estimated 45,000 players compete on 3,300 Men’s Senior Baseball League teams, and those numbers are climbing by several thousand a year. There are now teams in every major American city, with the preponderance of them in California, New York, Texas, Georgia and Illinois.

Nowhere has the MSBL become more popular than in California, particularly Southern California, where more than 300 teams play between Santa Barbara and San Diego. And because it’s Southern California, the games are played year-round, with most local leagues holding tryouts twice a year to fill and improve their rosters.

In October 1988, the MSBL held its first World Series at several major league spring-training facilities in Arizona. Thirty-eight teams and 500 players showed up for that first tournament, which now bills itself as the largest sports championship in the world. This year 360 teams and more than 6,000 players traveled to Arizona for the tourney.

On a recent foggy December morning in Santa Fe Springs, the players were linked by a common thread. All had participated at one time or another in a Dodger fantasy camp, then decided to stop fantasizing and just play ball.

One was Don Schwartz, 61, a history professor at Cal State Long Beach who specializes in Holocaust studies. Another, Jack Sills, 52, is a critical-care neonatologist. And Bryan Cranston, 48, who plays the father in the “Malcolm in the Middle” sitcom, was on deck for the next game.

And then there’s Lewis, described by his teammates as “the legend,” the octogenarian-plus-nine who resents a pinch runner, who’s been to 17 fantasy camps and battled severe midlife health problems before finally picking up a baseball again at 72. In the files of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., he is duly noted for his longevity.

“God almighty, I felt like a kid again,” he said while sitting out an inning. “I look forward to it. I can’t wait for game day. I don’t sleep the night before. I pray it doesn’t rain. You meet so many wonderful guys.”

So it is with many others who see their Sunday games as three hours of reprieve from their daily lives -- especially the parts they’d like to forget.

“And it’s cheaper than bowling,” said Dennis Swartout, who runs a 42-team league in Orange County.

One person who’s been playing for years is former Rep. Mel Levine, who helped start a Santa Monica team in 1971.

“There’s a whole subculture out here,” he said recently. “For me it’s, on one level, a remembrance of your past, that at my age I can play the same game I did as a child. Baseball continues to hold a mystical appeal for me at the amateur level.”

The tale of old guys playing hardball has a central figure in Steve Sigler, 56, who started what would become a national senior baseball program almost 20 years ago.

In 1985, he was coaching his sons’ Long Island Little League team when he realized he’d had enough of softball -- the conventional avenue for most players when their hardball days are over. In Sigler’s case, he’d hung up his spikes after a year of college ball more than 20 years earlier.

As spring was approaching the next year, Sigler -- father of actress Jamie-Lynn Di- Scala of “The Sopranos” -- placed an ad in his local newspaper, Newsday, seeking players.

“I needed someone to play with,” he said. “Little League inspired me to play baseball again.”

The response was enough to form four teams. Then a newspaper story about the teams provided a major breakthrough. The story mentioned an open workout for anyone interested in playing baseball the next season. More than 250 players showed up. Sigler was on his way.

“At the beginning, we were very fortunate that the press thought it was novel,” said Sigler, who 10 years later gave up his day job to work full time for his Men’s Senior Baseball League (motto: Don’t go soft. Play hardball). “So in a year’s time we had a huge story in Sports Illustrated and USA Today. I was on the ‘Today’ show and ‘Good Morning America.’ The notoriety reached people who would never have known this kind of league existed.”

The Sports Illustrated story included a phone number and address for Sigler. Huge bags of mail began to arrive at his doorstep. The phone rang off the hook.

Sigler’s wife, Connie, learned that Tom Hayden, a onetime California legislator and 1960s radical, was playing in a baseball league in Los Angeles. Sigler called Hayden, and they made arrangements for an East-West tournament.

Hayden had quit baseball after high school, but, like Sigler, he’d caught the bug again when he coached his son in Little League. He attended several Dodger fantasy camps before finding an organized team dubbed the Hollywood Stars -- the one started by Levine.

“I was seized by the desire to play again,” Hayden said. “I don’t think that feeling ever really goes away.”

Hayden recently turned 65 and, despite a heart attack several years ago, still plays baseball on the weekends.

Most senior leagues are divided both by age and ability, though most of the players have had at least some high school playing time, said Jack Provost, who runs one of the Los Angeles leagues.

But others made it all the way to the bigs. Two-time Cy Young Award winner Bret Saberhagen plays in a league, though officials prohibit him from pitching. Not that he even wants to anymore. Saberhagen’s mother, who shows up to keep score just as she did in his Little League days, prefers to see her son at shortstop.

“She loves baseball,” Saber- hagen said. “She loves to watch me play short.”

Having a team that’s top-heavy in former pros doesn’t mean automatic success.

“I had five ex-major leaguers on my roster this year,” said Mark Webb, who directs another league. “But we finished second in the league. The team that beat us were all recreational ballplayers, but they were great for one night.”

Senior league hardball does tip its hat to the advancing age of players. There are courtesy runners for those who can’t make it around the bases the way they used to, and unlimited defensive substitutions are often allowed. It’s also American League ball gone wild -- the batting order sometimes includes multiple players who don’t play the field.

But that does not dilute how seriously some take their teams and their games.

“It consumes my life at this point, which is absolutely fine,” said Bob Sherwin, a lawyer and former college player whose teams have won four MSBL national championships. “Baseball has always been my true love -- since I was a little kid.”

Over time, Sherwin began to focus more on the World Series than local competition. He put together teams of aging stars, much like the elite traveling teams for young players. Now, three-fourths of his players are from Southern California, and the rest live in places such as Milwaukee and Detroit.

Not all teams play at that level, or even close to it. Leagues have divisions in which players who want to return to the game can get started. Provost warns, however, that returnees shouldn’t expect miracles.

“I tell guys who were mediocre in high school not to expect to be better players now,” he said.

The major hurdle preventing these leagues from expanding even more is the lack of fields, even in a baseball mecca like Southern California. Though most communities have small fields for youth leagues, it takes a high-school-size diamond to accommodate adults. Swartout, who runs the Southern California Men’s Senior Baseball League, said he spends a lot of time every week looking for suitable sites.

“It is so hard to get fields,” he said. “No one wants us to play on them.”

Swartout says part of the problem is that high school baseball programs often do not benefit directly from senior league play, because the field rental money goes into a school district’s general fund. And he said newly hired coaches sometimes try to sabotage previous field arrangements. Odd things begin to happen.

“Sprinklers suddenly start on Saturday and soak the field so we can’t play on Sunday,” he said.

The game this day in Santa Fe Springs was not a pretty sight. Routine grounders and fly balls were muffed, just as they were next door where the Little Leaguers were playing. Lewis didn’t get the ball out of the infield. Neither did Schwartz, who was not pleased with his performance.

But that didn’t stop the history professor from telling his best story about playing in the World Series earlier this year in the 58-and-over category. He was facing former major league pitcher Bill “Spaceman” Lee, who is noted for such wisdom as, “Baseball’s a very simple game. All you have to do is sit on your butt, spit tobacco and nod at the stupid things your manager says.”

Schwartz dug in, he said, only to have Lee deliver a curveball that looked as though it would hit him in the head, but broke for a strike.

“So I turned to the ump and said, ‘That’s the best curveball I’ve ever seen in my life.’ And the ump said, ‘Son, that’s the best curveball I’ve ever seen in my life.’ ”

Schwartz’s team went on to win, 18-5. The best hitter this day was shortstop Paul Raymond, a 51-year old Newport Beach lawyer who went four for five and drove in four runs.

As the game ended, he handed over his business card.

It was a laminated picture of him on the mound, dressed in Dodger blue.