Millbrae Joe DiMaggio celebrates 50th anniversary of state championship

Santora played for the 1973 championship team coached by his father, Tony Santora, who coached the program for more nearly 20 years and died in 1998. The players from that team are now in their mid to late 60s, so time is starting to run out.

But Friday, about 50 players from the Millbrae teams of the late 1960s and early 1970s got together for a reunion at Crystal Springs Golf Course, including 11 of the 15 members of the 1973 title team.

“We had 11 out of 15 and two have passed away,” Santora said. “So I guess we had 11 out of 13.”

Santora said it’s been years since that many former players had gotten together. He said small groups of guys had stayed in touch with one another over the years, but this was the first time that they had all been together in more than half a century.

And despite playing under the Millbrae umbrella, the teams was comprised of players from several different local high schools — including Capuchino, Mills, Burlingame and Serra. So it wasn’t like they were hanging out together at school.

Santora said most of the former players are scattered around the Bay Area. A couple made the trip down from Oregon and a couple up from Southern California. One former member flew in from Atlanta for the reunion.

Santora said he really started putting together the reunion in earnest this past spring. While finding a venue was not very difficult, corralling 50 people from around the Bay Area and beyond proved to be a bit harder.

Then there was chore of putting the whole shindig together.

“I had a hard time getting a hold of some of the guys. It was a little more work than I thought it would be, but I think the guys enjoyed it,” Santora said. “This was a better time than a high school reunion because the guys haven’t seen each other for 50 (or more) years.”

1973 was just the seventh campaign for the once prestigious Joe D summer league that launched in 1967. With a slate of teams that spanned the state, Los Angeles, coming off back-to-back state championships, entered the 1973 season as the ranking powerhouse. Pacifica was the only San Mateo County team to break through on the championship stage to that point, capturing the state title in 1970.

“Joe DiMaggio was very strong in pockets (around the Northern California),” Santora said. “The Peninsula was probably the best.”

But Millbrae was on the rise, much in part to Tony Santora taking over the team in 1969. This was also the year the Hernandez family began to define its legacy in the the San Bruno-Millbrae area, with John Hernandez coaching alongside Tony Santora as the Millbrae hitting coach.

“My dad was the coach, but he had a lot of help,” Santora said.

John Hernandez’s son Gary Hernandez played for Millbrae in 1969, and his younger son Keith Hernandez — who would go on to a prolific major league career, earning NL MVP honors in 1979, 11 Gold Gloves as the greatest defensive first baseman of his generation, and two World Series rings, one with the St. Louis Cardinals in 1982, and a second with the New York Mets in 1986 — joined the team in 1971.

Pete Santora also joined the team in 1971 and played three summers, including in 1973 when Millbrae earned its first of five all-time Joe DiMaggio League state championships.

“Gosh, there was great pitching,” Santora said of the 1973 team. “There were three left-handed pitchers that were really good.”

The three lefties were John Viera and Jeff Howard, along with Serra’s Ken LaHonta.

Millbrae rode that pitching staff to an unlikely path to the 1973 Joe D state championship, falling 4-1 to host Stockton in the quarterfinals at Billy Hebert Field. The Saturday loss was what would be the first of two doubleheader openers on consecutive days.

Millbrae bounced back Saturday evening with a 2-0 win over defending state champ Los Angeles, backed by a complete-game gem from Ralph Costanzo. With the win, the squad earned a rematch with Stockton, needing to beat them twice to claim the championship. Millbrae did just that, sweeping a Sunday doubleheader from Stockton, including a 2-1 victory in the decisive nightcap that saw closing pitcher Bruce Meyer strike out the final batter with the tying run on base.

Meyer endured quite a ride to taking the ball in the seventh inning of the championship decider. Meyer, a San Mateo resident, was a postseason addition to the Millbrae roster, by virtue of a longstanding Joe D rule that allowed playoff teams to add three out-of-city players from other non-qualifying teams to their rosters.

Due to an injury, however, Meyer nearly didn’t finish the postseason. In one of his first games with Millbrae, Meyer was batting and got hit in the head by a pitch. He wouldn’t return to the field until state championship Sunday.

“Bruce was a tough kid,” Santora said.

From there, Millbrae toughed out two playoff series with their backs against the wall, starting with the regional qualifier, a best-of-three series with Daly City at Marchbank Park. Millbrae won the opening game, defeating left-hander Steve Shirley out of Terra Nova, who would go on to be drafted in the second round of the 1974 MLB Draft by the Los Angeles Dodgers. Millbrae dropped Game 2, but bounced back in the series finale with a 5-3 win to punch their ticket to the state championship.

Second baseman Gary Bei went on to earn MVP honors in the state tournament.

Santora credited Millbrae’s perseverance to the team’s busy summer schedule, one that included as many as four games a week, at least one practice day, and hitting the field a vigilant five days per week, every week, throughout the summer season.

“It was a very advanced program for guys who wanted to move on (to play in college). We always had six or seven guys who would go Division I,” Santora said. “It was a lot of fun. We had come so close when Hernandez played with us ... 71 ... 72 ... then to finally win it was really exciting, just for all of us, for the city and the program, because we put so much time into it.”