Point Reyes Light - October 9, 2003
League champion Point Reyes Venados
By Ian Fein
The San Francisco Giants and Oakland A’s may have disappointed local baseball fans with their recent playoff meltdowns, but on Sunday the Point Reyes Venados earned a champagne celebration of their own – winning the title game of the Amigos Unidos Baseball League.
Behind the dominant pitching of Matt Love and the clutch hitting of catcher Jake Haladay, the Venados upended the defending champion Mayas of San Rafael in a dramatic 7-6 come-from-behind victory at Tomales High School’s Chris Clahan Field.
Trailing 5-0 in the top of the fifth inning, Haladay’s third three-run homer in as many games put Point Reyes on the board and sparked the inspired comeback. The Venados carried a 13-9 record into the postseason, but won six of eight playoff games to claim their first-ever championship.
Our time
"It felt like it was our time, like we were due," said Haladay, 26, of Tomales. "But it was nice to put it all together. It wasn’t handed to us – we took it and we earned it."
The 16-team league extends from as far north as Windsor to as far east as Richmond, with teams in Petaluma, Santa Rosa, San Rafael and West Marin. The other Point Reyes team, the Indios, was eliminated by the Mayas in the first round of the playoffs.
Amigos Unidos was started in the mid-1980s to give young Latinos coming out of high school another venue to play ball, but, in keeping with its name, has grown to become quite diverse.
Inverness resident Dylan Horodko, who has played in the league since 1991 and has coached the Venados for the last five years, said the players are about half Latino and half Gringo.
"We all get along," said Horodko, a Guatemalan native whose team also includes players of Spanish and Mexican descent. "We’re all friends and have known each other for years."
Amigos Unidos players vary not only in ethnicity, but also in age. 56-year-old Fred Rodoni Jr. of Point Reyes Station is the oldest Venado, while, at age 22, teammate Greg Eastman is 34 years his junior.
Inducted into the Marin County Athletic Hall of Fame for accomplishments at Tomales High in the 1960s, Rodoni went on to play football and baseball at the University of Hawaii. He hadn’t played baseball in about 30 years when he started joking about his hitting ability with an Amigos Unidos manager a few years ago.
Rodoni’s bluff was finally called one weekend, and he has been hooked on the league ever since.
Local legends, local following
"It’s like riding a bike," said Rodoni, who was an outfielder in high school and college but now plays first base. "I got in the game and just like that got a hit on my first swing."
"Fred is awesome," Haladay said. "To me that’s amazing to have a guy like that on the team. I know that we wouldn’t have gotten as far as we did without Fred."
"It’s really been a lot of fun," Rodoni said. "Especially playing our home games here at Love Field, it’s become such a great community event. Sometimes we’ll have 100 fans out there."
The West Marin teams have developed such a following that Point Reyes Station-based community radio station KWMR, which has broadcast Venados and Indios games for the last three seasons, this year developed a technological kit that allowed the station to broadcast away games from as far as Windsor.
"[Announcing the games] is like a dream come true," said KWMR’s Charlie Morgan of Dillon Beach, a former semiprofessional second baseman who coached some of the Venados’ players in Little League. "It was great to bring the listeners through the entire season, and it was just icing on the cake that the local team won."
Fanbase crucial
"The reason [the championship] felt as good as it did was because of our fans," Haladay said. "What Jim [Love] has done with the field is just such a great thing for the community, and the radio station makes it feel like we’re living a baseball fantasy."