From LBPOSTSports.com: This is a Long Beach story. Fifty years ago, a scrappy group of young ballplayers from Whaley Park made it to Pennsylvania for the 1959 PONY World Championship game, which they won. The players and coaches proudly toted the trophy home, only to have it disappear for half a century…
A few weeks ago, Long Beach’s Mr. Baseball, Ken Jakemer, asked us to post a notice asking our readers to help find players from that roster, since they scattered to the four winds in the interim. Happily, over half the team has been located and will be able to participate in the fifty-year reunion party PONY is throwing them, where they’ll all be flown out to this year’s World Championship. And, we’re happy to report, their long-lost trophy will be with them.
At some point, as the coaches retired and the players graduated high school and moved away, the trophy made its way into a storage bin at Whaley Park, gathering cobwebs and dust—not too long ago, when the bin was cleaned out, Dave Muhleka found it, and gave it to fellow St. Anthony baseball coach and Century Club member Rod Mendoza. The hope was for the Club to display it somewhere—since there isn’t a physical location (yet!) for the Club’s Hall of Fame, Rod kept it in his garage, where the beautiful old trophy added to its cobweb and dust collection, and waited.
Then, when Rod saw the article on our site, he brought the trophy to me at a Century Club meeting at Naples Rib Co., where I hefted its impressive weight in the closest thing to winning a World Championship I’ll ever experience. The base is solid wood, the cup actual thick metal—it smells like victory. Well, victory and cobwebs.
After a short stay in the backseat of my car, covered by a jacket to prevent any would-be thieves from adding to its already storied journey, it finally made its way home, as I visited Whaley last Saturday to give it back to Ken Jakemer, who accepted on behalf of Long Beach PONY. Now the trophy will ride back out to PONY Headquarters in Pennsylvania, along with the boys (now men) who won it. And maybe PONY will be kind enough to keep it in their Hall of Fame display, perhaps with a copy of this article, as a reminder of how easy it can be to lose track of something so valuable.