They started playing L.A. Municipal softball 50 years ago. They’re still at it

As Al Michel and Mike Sugerman tell it, the first rendition of their L.A. softball team was overflowing with “geeks,” “nerds” and “goofs.”

So they took a name straight out of National Lampoon, a humor magazine that featured “Doc Feeney’s Scrapbook of Sports Oddities,” showing outfielders making catches 40 feet in the air and providing tips to swimmers on proper drowning maneuvers.

“I’m thinking, we’re not a bunch of athletes — we’re a bunch of geeks,” said Michel, the team’s co-founder, current coach and catcher, reflecting on the loose band of UCLA law students, aspiring actors, accountants and other semi-athletic misfits. “Sports oddities? I thought, well, that’s not going to work… Let’s go with ‘All Stars.’”

And thus, in the spring of 1976, Doc Feeney’s All Stars was born. Fifty years and thousands of runs later, six of the original players still take to the diamond nearly every Sunday, swinging for the fences. And if out-of-towners are visiting, the ranks of the older timers swells a few more.

On a recent humid Sunday afternoon, the score was 16-16 going into the final inning. A booming home run at the bottom of the sixth by Aaron Krug — at 36, a youngster by Doc Feeney standards — had tied the game against the Six Pack at the Sepulveda Basin Sports Complex in Encino, one of the many fields across L.A. the Feeneys have graced in the last half-century. The cohort of mostly 70-something players in the dugout rejoiced, waving their caps and hollering.

This wasn’t any old Sunday matchup in the L.A. Municipal Softball League: The Feeneys’ jerseys featured black patches embroidered with “JBK” for Jamie Bailey Krug, the first of the original founders to make it back to home base in the sky.

This game was a memorial dedicated to Krug, the patch a reminder that being a Feeney has never really been about sport anyway.

“Jamie taught me what a best friend was,” said second baseman Richie Greenberg, another Feeney progenitor. “I never knew a best friend was someone you’d never get tired of, or never stopped missing.”

Jamie’s son, Aaron, belongs to a new generation of All Stars — some of whom grew up watching their fathers’ games from kiddie strollers or their mothers’ arms.

“Every city in this country has a group of morons who get together every Sunday and who have done it for a lifetime, who love each other and love each other’s kids, and who, for some miraculous reason, believe that this will continue with the next generation,” Greenberg said. “We are bound to this thing… It sustains us.”

Feeney history, as told by the founders

The first season of Feeney ball was a resounding success, despite all the strikeouts and bobbled catches in between. The championship game was a struggle of lawfare: Michel, then an attorney in training, noticed that one of the opposing team’s hitters was using a baseball bat instead of the regulation softball bat with a smaller barrel. He kept this fact close to his chest, until the other team went up in the seventh, the last inning.

“The other team is celebrating, thinking they won the championship, high-fives all around,” Michel said. “We call a time out, point out the bat, and the ump comes over and says, ‘Oh yeah, that’s illegal’… It counts as an out and we win the game.”

“The only way to win like a Feeney,” Sugerman added.

Doc Feeney’s All Stars pose for a team photo, circa late 1970s.

(From Doc Feeney’s All-Stars )

Another season, outfielder Craig Simon, knowing he was weak at the plate, intentionally struck out so he could avoid an impending double play, much to the dismay of the opposing team.

“Another Feeney classic,” Greenberg said.

Nobody expected that the Feeneys would go on for half a century, but every winter and spring that passed, the team would be back on the diamond, albeit with a rotating cast.

Krug, Michel and Greenberg were near Sunday constants; Sugerman moved to San Francisco to become an award-winning correspondent on Bay Area radio, but always got a spot when he visited; Howard Lesner and Matt Kaplan became regulars in the 1980s; and other Feeneys faded to time, stuck as a memory of whichever decade they called it quits.

In L.A. Municipal Softball, there is a grading system to facilitate fair competition. The Feeneys oscillated between C and B over the years, a plus or minus coming depending on how much time had passed since the founding. A decade or so back, the team was blown out by a B-minus team in their first game after being upgraded, realizing that the elder’s eyes could no longer keep up with the heat coming off the B-minus bats.

“Couldn’t even see it coming,” Michel said.

Doc Feeney’s All Stars players, from left, Jonny Ehrich, 36, Richie Greenberg, 72, Joel Gerson, 37, and Aaron Krug, 36, warm up before a slowpitch softball game. Greenberg has been a mainstay on the team for 49 years.

(Gary Coronado / For The Times)

Because the team has survived so long, every Feeney has had their day: double plays, home runs and batting averages — think .450 — that would make Shohei Ohtani look like a Triple-A backup. But that’s not what kept players coming back.

“I’ve had a great life and an enjoyable life, but no sense of bond and family,” Kaplan said between innings as dust from home plate lingered about, tears welling up from who-knows-what. “This became my family… This gave me what I was missing.”

The legends surrounding the team can, at times, become muddled. On a recent day outside of the Apple Pan burger joint — a Krug favorite — Michel, Greenberg and Sugerman, all nearly halfway into their 70s, litigated Feeney history:

“Who was it that got kicked off the team for being too competitive?”

“Did he marry the girl in this picture?”

“He never hit a home run in his life.”

“That guy was kind of a jerk.”

“You think so? I thought he was nice.”

But all of these questions led to the same, inevitable conclusion.

“Who cares, he was a Feeney.”

Doc Feeney’s All Stars veterans, Richie Greenberg, from left, Todd Lesner and Jeff Koppelman, all 72, sit together as team rookie Matt Michel, 33, works on the lineup. The trio has played on the team for nearly 50 years.

(Gary Coronado / For The Times)

The new generation of All Stars

The weekend he died last May, Jamie Krug had planned to play Sunday after attending his grandson’s musical performance Friday and going out to dinner with his wife, Simone, and friends Saturday. Krug heard the music and enjoyed a lovely night out, but he never made it to Sunday’s game.

The All Stars won, but learned Monday that Krug had gone to sleep and never woken up. Heart complications.

Family and friends remember Krug as many things: a reliable laugh, a saint of a father, a hell of a second baseman, a competitive but altruistic coach. At his funeral, his wife recalled, almost every speaker called him their “best friend.”

While some of the wives wouldn’t bother coming to games every Sunday, Michel said, many of the children saw the Feeney fathers as proper heroes. When she finally turned 14, Krug’s daughter, Ali, broke Municipal League barriers when she became the first woman to make an appearance as an All Star.

“My whole childhood was centered around baseball,” Ali said, recalling playing with her dad. “He’d set up these scenarios that were like, two outs, bottom of the ninth, World Series, bases loaded; he’d hit a huge fly ball and I’d catch it.”

From left, Matt Michel, 33, Aaron Krug, 36, and Joel Gerson, 37, high-five after a Doc Feeney’s slowpitch softball game. Michel’s father, Al, and Krug’s late father, Jamie, are both original members of the team.

(Gary Coronado / For The Times)

Aaron — whose homer brought the Feeneys back into the memorial game — also joined the team at 14, playing alongside his father whenever he wasn’t too busy with his own sports schedule.

“Playing with your dad,” he said. “It’s hard to not get romantic about it.”

Michel’s son, Matt, has sought to modernize the team with a score-keeping app that has proved more reliable than Michel’s antiquated paper method.

“They used to pay me $20 to keep score,” Matt said. “I don’t have to pretend anymore, though.”

The game plan in a modern Feeney game revolves around strategically placing the elders in the batting lineup to avoid having two quick strikeouts or slow runners on base. Even though the Feeneys have gotten more competitive under the junior Michel’s management, the rascal-on-the-field ethos of the original team still prevails.

“The combined age of every Feeney in the infield could be 350 at any given time,” Lesner said before heading to the infield.

Winning like a Feeney

Due to some sloppy defensive errors from the silver-haired infield, the Feeneys allowed more runs in the top of the seventh. The Six Pack led, 18-16.

The Feeneys were in precarious waters as Greenberg stepped up to the plate with two outs. For the memorial game, the Feeneys had reverted to their old batting order, so after Greenberg, the lineup would be wholly composed of Feeney elders.

For the first time the whole game, all the players glued their eyes to the plate, conversations and catch-ups stopped mid-sentence.

Greenberg tried his best to ignore an irritating ankle injury that had plagued him the last couple of weeks and grimaced under the hazy sunlight as the pitcher, probably 20 or more years his junior, stared him down.

The high-arc pitch went up.

Jeff Koppelman, 72, drives a single during a slowpitch softball game. He has been a member of Doc Feeney’s All Stars for 48 years.

(Gary Coronado / For The Times)

Greenberg yanked his bat back, looking like a young Ken Griffey Jr. He struck the ball hard, but sent a one-hopper straight toward a third baseman no older than 40. Greenberg made it only about halfway up the basepath.

Out at first.

The Jamie Krug memorial game ended in a loss.

But instead of kicking up dust, breaking bats or throwing fits, the Feeneys coalesced in a green-and-yellow mass behind the dugout. They all high-fived, asked about each other’s families and went to dote on Ali’s 1-year-old daughter — Krug’s granddaughter, Eloise — who wore a shirt that traversed 50 years of family and friendship. It reads: “Littlest Feeney.”

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