We are native Northern Californians, born in San Francisco, raised in Pacifica and exposed to all the Peninsula has to offer – baseball included.
Mike Sangimino, a former All-North Peninsula League second baseball at Oceana High in the late 1970s, played a little college baseball before taking a job in meat cutting – an industry in which he thrived for nearly 50 years. Along the way, the lifelong relationships made on the baseball diamond never waned. When two former teammates talked him into helping to coach their youth league team a few years back, he was hooked.
PeninsulaPrepBaseball.com is his brainchild, a way of living out his retirement years watching high school baseball, while giving today’s athletes a glimpse of the kind of media coverage young ballplayers were once privy to each day.
Pat Sangimino was not nearly the ballplayer his brother was, but he used his love of the game to pursue a career in sports journalism. He worked his way through college by covering games for the San Mateo Times in the 1980s and moved to Kansas City to cover the National Football League and Major League baseball.
He retired and returned to the Peninsula last fall after nearly four decades in the newspaper industry. This spring, his first novel, Dogs Chase Cars, a fiction about the downturn in the newspaper industry through the eyes of a longtime sports columnist, will be published and made available through every major online book vendor.
Mike & Pat, Mike, Pat
Mitchell Ingstad, Pat’s son-in-law and the only non-native Californian invited to this party, is a website designer by trade and provides the creative inspiration to the PeninsulaPrepBaseball.com online look. Mitch, born and raised in Iowa and a Northern Iowa University graduate, came up through the Iowa youth baseball programs and played some travel ball in the summers following the high school season.
He’s a lifelong Chicago Cubs fan and a resident of San Diego, where he lives with his wife Kaylin and their two cats.
Steven Rissotto is a producer at 95.7, The Game, the flagship radio station for the Golden State Warriors. He is a newly minted San Francisco State graduate who pitched at Archbishop Riordan. He has a baseball podcast and oversees PeninsulaPrepBaseball.com’s social media accounts.
A special thanks to Mike Biancalana, who provided many of the graphics – and the design for the banner you’ll see at some of the key high school games you’ll attend this year. Biancalana, a former catcher and Oceana teammate of Mike Sangimino, oversees the operation at John the Sign Guy in Pacifica.