Watching From the Wings

Yakima's 1978 team came just shy of playing Series on its own home field
Randy White pitched for Yakima in both 1978, when the Beetles came up just short of qualifying for the World Series, and in 1979, when the team won the national title. Yakima Herald-Republic file

Tuesday, Aug. 21, 2001

By SCOTT SANDSBERRY
YAKIMA HERALD-REPUBLIC

Still-life images.

That's what the 1978 Yakima Beetles became in a matter of seconds, and what a transformation it was: from possibly the country's best American Legion baseball team to ... still lifes. Portraits of loss. Vases of dead flowers.

"At that moment," recalls shortstop Pat Allen, "every one of us, it was like our hearts just dropped right out of our bodies."
Says pitcher Randy White, "It killed us."

Some of them crumbled to their knees and cried. Others, like Allen, stood on the field in a daze, only peripherally aware of all those celebrating players from Corvallis, Ore. White shuffled all the way out to the wall in center field, sat down and stayed there.

The Beetles were one year away from becoming the 1979 Legion World Series champions ... and one play removed from having the chance to play in the 1978 Legion World Series in Yakima. At home. In front of their own fans, the ones who had rooted them on to a then-team-record 75 victories.

The killing play was not a dramatic homer launched over the fences there at the regional in Sheridan, Wyo., or even a throw that sailed wide of its mark. It involved, rather, a ball that didn't even travel 20 feet. And a throw that never came.

The play is recalled by many as having begun with a squeeze bunt -- as unlikely, with two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning of a 6-6 game, as that might sound.

White, who had the best view of all, says it was no bunt. "It was a swing," he says, "a topped ball the guy (Corvallis' Mike O'Donnell) barely got." The little nubber rolled down the line toward third base and Beetles star Kirk Komstadius. The Corvallis runner on third, Kurt Kemp, was breaking for home as Komstadius rushed to field the ball.

Komstadius

Komstadius was not fast. "It was the fact that I ran in one spot too long that did me in," he cracks now. "I could turn a triple into a double as quick as you please."

But that hadn't kept Komstadius from driving in a team-record 120 runs in 1978. Some believe he may be the best hitter the Beetles ever had -- author of screaming line drives that knocked third basemen literally off their feet. "I don't know how many times I saw guys carried out (after trying to field a Komstadius liner)," White says.

Komstadius fielded the nubber cleanly. With Kemp, to his right, streaking for home, Komstadius looked to the plate -- but catcher Donnie Ford was looking to first base, where most of the infielders assumed the throw would go. O'Donnell had great speed. By the time Komstadius looked to first, it was too late to make the play.

Some say Komstadius carried that 1978 team on his shoulders. Says he, "It kind of came on my shoulders at the end, too. I felt I might have screwed up there at the end."
His fault? Not a chance, say teammates.

"Without Kirk," White says, "we wouldn't have been there."

"He made the play," Allen says. "It just caught everybody by surprise so much that he had nowhere to go with it. No way, by any means, was it Kirk's fault. It was just one of those things that happen. It's just baseball."

First baseman Bryan Burleson, silently screaming for the ball, recalls seeing his teammate look first to home, then to him. "I think he was thinking 'They got me both ways,' " Burleson recalls.

"It was just the timing. That's what's great about baseball. Only choice you have is come up and come to first, and maaaaybe we would have got the guy. Gotta come up with the gun. Definitely a freak play, the way the guy chopped the ball and it wins the ball game."

So the Beetles lost 7-6 to a team that, only four hours earlier, they had trounced 14-1. They were going home, but not to play in the World Series. They were going home to wonder why their 75-win season -- with just 14 losses -- was over.

Maybe their regional outing was just ill-fated from the start.
Key players were nursing injuries. Then White came down with food poisoning and spent much of the second game -- in which he was scheduled to start -- on a motel-room toilet. The Beetles lost the game.

Two batters before the climactic finish, the normally sure-handed Allen -- who would be named American Legion Player of the Year the following summer -- bobbled an easy-out grounder that allowed Kemp to move to third base.

Finally, on the team bus after the season-ending defeat, the bus driver couldn't seem to release the emergency brake, turning the players' roiling emotions into outbursts of anger with each lurch-and-stall. It was as if they couldn't escape their own demise.

How good was that team? David Trimble, a star member of both that bunch and the title-winning '79 Beetles, thinks the '78 team was better. "They had," he says, "a lot more power."

David Trimble still believes the 1978 team, which missed playing in the World Series, was better than the 1979 team that won it all. Yakima Herald-Republic file

Trimble was almost certainly the best athlete on either team. A three-sport star, he was named first-team all-state in basketball at point guard -- ahead of a guy named John Stockton, whose Gonzaga Prep team was roasted head-to-head by Trimble-led Davis. He was versatile enough play two years of minor-league ball, then come back and play four years at wide receiver for the Washington Huskies.

But in the first half of the 1979 season, Trimble and his teammates were not playing up to their potential. After an early-July loss in Eugene, Trimble recalls the Beetles being taunted by North Eugene players.

"They were saying, 'You are guys aren't as good as your reputation,' " Trimble recalls. 'And I was thinking, 'They're right. I can't argue with them, because they're right.' "

At the time, the Beetles were scuffling along the way to a midseason 31-16 record -- already four more losses than they'd incurred in all of 1978. But this was a team no less close-knit than its predecessor, and coach Bob Garretson only had to get the players focused for them to be successful.

So he ran them.

Screw up on the road? You were dropped off miles from home on the drive back. You ran the rest of the way. "I ran 20-some miles one time for being late for a curfew in Lewiston," recalls Burleson.

Play lousy and lose? You and your teammates would be running postgame wind sprints between the third-base line and center field. "Doing that running," Trimble says, "you started thinking, 'OK, what could I have done to make us win?' "

"All of a sudden," Pat Allen says, "everybody looked at each other and said, 'We can play better than this.' "

Without power hitters like the departed Komstadius and Larry McCauley, the '79 team played a different game -- "small-ball," Allen says, "more like the Mariners are right now." Lots of steals. Great defense (a team fielding average of .942).

And ropes. They could still hit ropes.

"If there were whispers of our demise by virtue of losing the bat of Kirk Komstadius," recalls Curt Whiteaker, a standout Beetles pitcher from 1977 through 1980, "all it took was a few screaming line drives off the end of newcomer Alex Podruzney's bat to hush the doubters and round up the converts."

After that midseason wake-up call, the 1979 Beetles became all but unbeatable. They won 34 of their last 37 games, making it to the Legion World Series in Greenville, Miss., where the Beetles were clearly the class of the field. They dropped only one game -- largely because, in a last-minute change to accommodate TV coverage, tournament officials forced the Beetles to play back-to-back games in the Mississippi humidity.

Even the championship game against Barrington, R.I., was a Yakima showcase, a lopsided 13-6 affair.

With Barrington down to its last out in the ninth inning, pitcher Bruce Dunn -- who had played on the 1977 and 1978 teams that were knocked out in the regional final -- called time out.
He looked over to Allen, the second baseman, and called him over.

"You know," Dunn said quietly to Allen, "you've had two great tournaments in a row. You're going to be the American Legion Player of the Year. And now you're going to make the last out of the tournament."

Dunn said he was going to throw a knuckle curve over the outside of the plate, and that the batter was going to hit a two-hopper -- "right to you," Dunn told Allen.

And it would happen just exactly that way.

It's a singular image: The rest of the American Legion baseball world waiting and watching as two players stand behind the mound, talking quietly to one another.

A pair of still lifes ... on the verge of a championship.