A new baseball era begins

Our season – and yours – starts now. This is our favorite time of year.

My brother Pat and I loved our formative years because they were simple: Sports, school, family dinners, and lots of friends gained throughout.

We grew up in Pacifica. We played every sport available to us, but baseball was always king in our house. And we were walking encyclopedias when it came to our knowledge of all sports, but baseball especially.

Long before ESPN was ever a thing, we got our sports information the old-fashioned way. We listened to the radio. We watched the Giants, Warriors and Niners – road games only – on the television and went to as many live events as we could get our late father Vinnie to take us to. 

But most of all, we read the newspaper.

We had four newspapers delivered to the house; the San Francisco Chronicle was our professional sports paper. The San Mateo Times was a combination of pro and prep sports. The Daly City Record had a prep sports focus. And then there was the Pacifica Tribune with legendary sports editor Horace Hinshaw at the helm. He covered everything from Little League Baseball and Pop Warner football to the two high schools in our town.

My brother and I couldn’t wait to get the paper each morning to crack it open and devour the sports section. Fights would take place regarding who got to read it first or where it disappeared to. In hindsight, that was the side story. He was the little brother so I always won those fights.

Reading the paper each day fed our love for the game. Not only did we find our names in the paper on a regular basis – always a thrill – we also became familiar with other Peninsula athletes. There was a sense of familiarity when we played against them. 

Our desire is to bring back those nostalgic pangs, while providing a new generation of athletes a glimpse of what we had, that feeling of what it used to be like to pick up the paper each day and have the final score of your game in the paper – or in this case, online.

My brother was a longtime sports journalist, while I was a butcher for almost 50 years. All that said, my writing will be edited, but just like in baseball, I will learn from my mistakes and strive to get better. You can’t line a gapper if you don’t swing the bat.

We won’t always be perfect, but we promise you a throwback to the past, when high school baseball mattered enough for people to write about it each day. At the risk of sounding even older than we feel, those were the good old days.

– Mike Sangimino, publisher