Shaikin: From Sherman Oaks Little League to Game 1: Jack Flaherty's local ties shine bright
The weathered white banner is attached to a fence. The batting cage is behind the fence. The snack shack is a few feet away.
The banner honors a 2005 championship team — called the Dodgers, no less — at Sherman Oaks Little League. The banner lists the 12 players on the team, including Jack Flaherty.
For the thousands of kids who play youth baseball at Sherman Oaks and elsewhere every year, the actual Dodgers are the aspiration, the dream, the goal.
For the first time in 58 years, a pitcher who grew up in Los Angeles will start a World Series game for the Dodgers. Flaherty is the Dodgers’ Game 1 starter Friday at Dodger Stadium, about 17 miles from Sherman Oaks Little League.
Flaherty follows Hall of Famer Don Drysdale, whose childhood home was about three miles from the Sherman Oaks fields. Drysdale, a Van Nuys High alumnus, made World Series starts for the Dodgers in 1959, 1963, 1965 and 1966.
Flaherty was not overly sentimental in explaining what starting Game 1 for his hometown team means to him.
“I get to pitch first,” he said. “It will be fun. It will be exciting. I’m looking forward to it.
“There’s no bigger stage than this. It is what we all wanted as kids. It is the position we wanted to be in.”
Giancarlo Stanton, the New York Yankees’ slugger, played at Notre Dame High, one mile from Sherman Oaks Little League. In 2014, during his time with the Miami Marlins, he said all his childhood friends would ask him the same question: When are you coming home, to the Dodgers?
“All the time,” Stanton said then. “They’re like, ‘You need to come play for us.’
The Yankees quashed that, trading for Stanton in 2017. The Yankees also signed pitcher Gerrit Cole as a free agent in 2019.
Cole, who grew up in Orange County and spurned bids from the Dodgers and Angels, is the Yankees’ starting pitcher in Game 1.
It would be overly dramatic to say Flaherty was destined to pitch for the Dodgers. They are his fourth major league team, after all.
However, on the day the Dodgers traded for Flaherty in July, his mother, Eileen, posted a picture on Instagram: Jack as a toddler, dressed in a Dodgers romper and an oversize Dodgers cap.
What doesn’t a mother do for her child? On the outside of the snack shack at Sherman Oaks Little League, a plaque honors “the incredible volunteers who have put out countless hours to help create an amazing place for our children.” One of the honorees: Eileen Flaherty.
When it came time for Little League Night at Dodger Stadium, Flaherty joined in.
“We’d sit in left field,” he said. “It felt like it was always against the Giants. [Barry] Bonds would just get booed left and right. That was something.”
Even Bonds said that. In 2005, the same year Flaherty and his Little League teammates won that banner, this is what Bonds said: “Dodger Stadium is the best show I ever go to in all of baseball. They say, ‘Barry sucks’ louder than anybody out there. And you know what?. . . You’ve got to have some serious talent to have 53,000 people saying you suck.”
Flaherty was 9.
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Mark Hartman, the coach of that Little League championship team, said Flaherty was a jovial kid off the field, but never on it.
“He’s always been very intense, with a passion for baseball,” Hartman said. “From 7 years old, at that age, he almost intimidated adults, because he was so intense. He had this aura about him.”
Flaherty said some of his Little League teammates were in the crowd for the National League championship series. He counts them among his circle of family members and close friends who can relieve any pressure by changing the subject to the NFL and college football.
“It feels like you’re 15 years old again,” he said.
Doug Urbach, whose son Tyler played with Flaherty at Harvard-Westlake High, said he and Eileen Flaherty shared carpool duties until the boys were old enough to drive.
Urbach said he was surprised and touched when, while battling lymphoma in 2019, Flaherty wrote his name on the ‘Stand Up to Cancer” cards distributed to players and shown on national television. (Urbach said his cancer treatment was successful.)
Hartman’s son, Jack, played with Flaherty on that Little League championship team. Hartman said Jack even lived with the Flahertys for a while one summer. So, of course, Jack Hartman is 100% behind Jack Flaherty in this World Series.
Except, well, not quite 100%. Jack Hartman played college ball at the University of Pennsylvania. One of his teammates: Jake Cousins, now a reliever for the Yankees.
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
