Opening-Day Shivers, Not Jitters, Catch Players by Surprise

It was cold in Ventura on Friday. Omar Malave of Cumana, Venezuela, the Ventura County Gulls third baseman, began shivering an hour before the season-opening game. The chill and dampness pierced his baseball uniform and gave him goose bumps.

Then he got out of the car.

For the next four hours, dense clouds kept the sky over Ventura a dreary gray, the type of gray you’d expect to see at a Russian fashion show. The temperature hovered around 54 degrees, and a biting north wind whipped across the field. It was the type of day that prompts robins to use ice tongs to pick up worms.

For Malave and 11 other Gulls from South America and Central America, the weather on the first day of the Class-A California League season seemed like a cruel joke.

“They say ‘You’re going to California,’ and I think ‘hot,’ ” Malave said. “Then I get here, and it’s cold. Really cold. At least cold for me. In Venezuela, where I lived, it never gets this cold. I didn’t expect this.”

Two other Venezuelans are Gulls this year, including coach Alfredo Ortiz. Nine others are from the steamy Dominican Republic. For those 12 men, the coldest winter they have ever experienced may turn out to be spring and summer in Ventura.

The field at Ventura College is located just two miles from the Pacific Ocean, and the weather can turn nasty in a hurry. Longtime Ventura resident Bruce Quillen, bundled up in a heavy jacket, remarked, “It gets like this a lot up here. But only through August. If they think this is bad, wait another month when the fog comes in. Then it can really get cold.”

All of which Malave and his foreign friends on the Gulls want to hear as much as they’d like to snare a line drive with their teeth.

“It gets worse than this?” Malave asked. “Fog? Oh, man. I don’t like that.”

During the game, the Venezuelan and Dominican players could be easily picked out among their American teammates--many of whom are from places like Pennsylvania, Washington, Connecticut, Northern California, New Jersey and even Canada. The South and Central Americans were the ones constantly moving, in the field and in the dugout.

“I see all the guys jumping up and down and hitting themselves and I know they are cold,” said coach Ortiz. “I tell them during the game, ‘Forget the cold.’ Then they run back onto the field and I say to myself, ‘This is cold.’ ”

Ortiz, who pronounces the word “hot” as “hat,” spent most of the game in the dugout, protected from the shrieking wind by a cement wall and from the cold by a heavy, dark blue Gulls’ warm-up jacket.

“I come here, I expect it to be hat ,” Ortiz said. “Real hat . But it is not hat . It is cold. In South America is is never cold like this. It is always hat . Even in winter ball, it is hat.

“We all hear about California, about sunshine and beaches. Well, where is the sunshine? You go to beach on a day like this, you will die, I think. Freeze to death.”

More than 1,400 packed the bleachers at the college stadium, and together they endured--and talked about--the cold. Above their heads, snapping in the wind, were hundreds of red, white and blue used-car-lot-type pennants and banners. The blue seemed to match the color of many of the faces below.

“Next time I’ll get with it and wear my long underwear,” one fan said.

And Malave, who thought he would be playing baseball this year in the Endless Summer but instead has found himself in the Big Chill, might be out shopping for a pair himself.

“The same thing happened last year,” he said. “They sent me to South Carolina and I figured South Carolina, it must be hot. I was wrong. It was cold there, too.

“And now I come to Southern California, and again I think hot , and again I am wrong. I told somebody last year that I was cold, and they said, ‘So that means you don’t want to play in Toronto, right?’ And I said, ‘No, no. I play anywhere in the major leagues.’ And ever since then, I don’t complain no more about cold.

“But this, this is real cold today. Maybe it gets hotter in a few weeks.”