San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Lessons from baseball camp
Did you have strange dreams during this unsettling, crazy California summer? Me, too. Mine compressed time and space. In dreamland, I toggled between the anxious claustrophobia of summer 2020 and memories of the sunsplashed Santa Barbara County baseball camp I attended as a kid in the mid1980s.
I’m not sure what took me back to Ken McMullen Baseball Camp in the hills above Carpinteria. Maybe it was because most summer camps were closed, and my three young sons were stuck at home, having lost all interest in everything but looking at screens and fighting with each other. Maybe it was the terrible absence of youth baseball during the pandemic; our family connects to community and to each other via Little League — the boys play, I coach and my father keeps score.
Maybe it was the power of geographical suggestion. Desperate to get out of our house, the boys convinced us to sneak away for a pair of fourday stretches to a shockingly cheap lodge on the edges of coastal and cool Cambria, in San Luis Obispo County. Or maybe those dreams of those summers past came to me because the spirit of that camp, and of the old ballplayer who ran it, seem especially precious right now.
Ken McMullen was a solid, hardworking third baseman who played for five teams and hit 156 home runs in his career, from 1962 to 1977. He wasn’t a star. He was someone who knew his role, and obsessed over the details so he could do his job for the team.
In other words, Ken McMullen is the sort of person who is never in charge of anything anymore. Dodgers fans remember him as a skilled pinchhitter for the team that won the National League pennant in 1974. Some also recall his openness and grace that same year when his wife died of breast cancer, just months after the birth of their third child.
Late in his career, he started a summer baseball camp for kids in and around his hometown of Oxnard, where he’d been a high school baseball and basketball star (McMullen’s in the Ventura County Sports Hall of Fame), and where his father had run a service station. His family members and his friends from the baseball world were constant presences at the camp, though the location moved around, to wherever he could find fields and dorms.
“I wanted to run it just like a spring training camp, and so it was a boarding camp — and you had to stay there,” Ken McMullen, 78, told me earlier this summer by phone from Oregon, where he lives parttime. “That way you could have the camaraderie with the kids, and it wasn’t just us teaching them. The kids could coach each other.”
In the 1980s, McMullen cut a deal with the Cate School to use the fields and dorms on its campus above Carpinteria. My parents were fortunate enough to be able to send me for one week each summer, accompanied by my Pasadena Southwest Little League buddy, Brendan. We were just 10 my first year there — it was my first, and only, sleepaway camp — and I remember feeling nervous about going.
The feeling didn’t last long. The McMullen family members, and other coaches couldn’t have been more welcoming. They also kept you busy. The toughest football coaches are famous for “twoadays,” or practicing twice a day. At the Ken McMullen Baseball Camp, we practiced three times a day — morning, afternoon and early evening, when we took batting practice until it was too dark to see the ball.
Never, not even during four years at Harvard, have I ever been instructed as thoroughly as I was at the Ken McMullen Baseball Camp. They taught all the small but vital details, from how to grip the baseball to where to touch each base with your foot.
And while all coaches preach teamwork, the camp taught the mechanics of actually practicing it — the myriad ways you back teammates up, and communicate on the field and on the bases. At each week’s end, campers were sent home with written report cards, listing all the things you needed to work on.
The report cards pointed out that I was a smart aleck, on the path to becoming a wiseass, who challenged other players and even coaches. But the camp’s coaches said my personality could be a good thing, if used in service of the team. They encouraged me to put my critical energy into watching the game intently, and showed me how to identify pitches before they were thrown, and how to read bats to anticipate where the ball would be hit.
In essence, the camp wasn’t just teaching us baseball; it was teaching us how to teach others. Brendan and I started coaching a Little League team together as eighthgraders, using drills we learned at the camp, and never stopped; we’re still coaching our own kids today. A few campers played professionally, but many more became coaches and educators.
I moved on and the program eventually ended, but Ken McMullen Baseball Camp never left my brain. In one dream this summer, I watched McMullen hit line drives out to the eucalyptus trees in left field. Then I was playing in the campersversuscoaches game — which he often seemed to win with a pinchhit — and flying out to rightcenter field.
Then I woke up, still stuck at home. I’d rather be on base, playing ball in the summer sun.
Ken McMullen was a solid, hardworking third baseman who played for five teams and hit 156 home runs in his career, from 1962 to 1977.