A Big Surprise... and Another Surprise. The first was the appearance of a local television network (Channel 8) to which we had never subscribed. A few years before, Channel 8 had made a bid for San Francisco's local cable company, Bay-to-Bay, and the Federal Communications Commission eventually awarded it to them. But their TV broadcast center in Bakersfield remained in the hands of the original owners, who were still receiving a "carrot" from Bay-to-Bay for continuing to use the center as the television station's broadcasting home. I was pleased to see Channel 8 back on the scene in San Francisco, and I had no idea it would become even better by adding a local sports show each week—in Russian!
This one had not come from me. During the six years that I'd been involved in local broadcasting, it never crossed my mind to invite an Armenian sports columnist or an Armenian baseball writer to join us for a weekly show. But one day when we were talking about how great it would be if one day they broadcast an Armenian sports program, one of our Armenian members, an amateur radio operator, suggested I contact someone I might know who lived in Bakersfield and ran a weekly sports program for KVEC, the local Bakersfield TV station. I reached out and he said he would welcome the chance.
To this day, I'm not quite sure how we were able to arrange it. But a few months later, we had our first Armenian sports show, with Art Sandoval on KVEC-TV. Our show became quite popular in the local Armenian community, since Sandoval had spent his entire career in pro baseball, including a decade with the Kansas City Royals, and was widely known as the ultimate gentleman of the game. The shows were so popular that we continued them long after we left Channel 8, and it wasn't too many years before Sandoval eventually joined our staff as the program's producer.
What we didn't realize at the time was that our presence at Channel 8 would create the opportunity for even greater things to happen. Just three weeks after Sandoval first appeared on KVEC, the Bay-to-Bay people decided to sell Channel 8 and had no real interest in the sports show. As part of their "dump," they proposed a one-time cash payment to the original owners of the TV station, who owned KVEC. It was a lowball amount, but we used it to purchase KVEC from its owners—and that's how we ended up with the sports show.
If that hadn't happened, we wouldn't have had the opportunity to buy KVEC in the first place. But by then, Sandoval had already convinced Bay-to-Bay that their local sports program needed a translator. We hired a young Armenian who was in his first term at San Francisco State, Vardan Ajemian, and he went on to be one of the preeminent sports broadcasters in Northern California. In 1990, with Ajemian now on board, we were ready to move KVEC from a low-wattage signal that barely reached the outer reaches of the Bay Area to a full-blown Bay Area sports station.
The first sports program that KVEC had shown, though, had not even been translated. So the first order of business for Varsano and me was to make sure that one of the first shows we aired was a very special event—the All-Armenian Game of the Century.
The original "Armenian Game of the Century" was an annual high school baseball game that originated in Bakersfield during the 1930s. A local Armenian businessman in the oil business happened to be friends with a high school coach, so he persuaded his company to sponsor the game, and over the years the number of players grew until it reached an attendance level that would be unheard of today. The most recent contest, in 1987, had a turnout of more than eight thousand fans. It was such a huge event that it was televised live on Channel 8. The day after we broadcast it, there was a photo in the San Francisco Chronicle of the All-Armenian Team sitting in the dugout for their pre-game interviews. That's what sparked the idea for our game of the century, the one that's been the pride and joy of the community ever since.
And if you look back at the history of Armenian baseball, you'll see why. When I began to write about Armenian baseball, I discovered something very important—that the Armenian National Baseball League, founded in 1962 and now known as the American Amateur Baseball Association, was not created by or for Armenians. It was created by and for Armenians who had no Armenian heritage but who knew they wanted to join an organization. Armenians in California were among them, and so were many other non-Armenians. I also discovered that, despite the presence of Armenian names on the front page of the league roster, it wasn't an all-Armenian league at all—in fact, only about half of the players were from what I call "The Homeland."
Of the four Armenian communities in the United States, the three in San Francisco, Boston, and Fresno were among the best-organized. Boston was a bit ahead of the curve in creating a league when its Armenian Baseball Association was founded in 1971. But it wasn't until 1982 that the Fresno Armenian Baseball Association was founded, and it was in Fresno that I was first introduced to Armenian Americans who didn't happen to be from the Armenian homeland.
Fresno at the time was home to many non-Armenians. There were quite a few people from Armenia, but there were also Armenians who came from Lebanon and Syria and many other nations. In a word, the Fresno community was more cosmopolitan than the other three. The Armenian National League eventually took over the Fresno players, bringing the membership of Armenian Americans in the league to more than sixty.
The league was started to give the growing number of non-Armenians in Fresno an opportunity to play baseball. They needed a way to play with one another, but they couldn't play with the other Armenian teams. In the end, they got that opportunity. But when the league closed down operations in 1994, the Armenian American players had never played a game with the other teams in their homeland, even though most of them had ancestors who had played baseball in Armenia before the Armenian Genocide in 1915.
The San Francisco-based Armenian American community had a similar situation, but there the problem was a shortage of players. There weren't many Armenians in San Francisco who lived near a baseball field or who wanted to play, which is why the leagues formed teams in Boston and Fresno instead of in San Francisco.
The last reason for our game was an unusual one. When I started writing about the Armenian National League, I learned that the president of the league was the son of the Armenian Ambassador to the United States. At the time, the former ambassador was about to leave for a new assignment as president of a large non-profit organization based in Mexico City. To honor his father and to have his own name immortalized in the record books, he had a son named Armand join the team for the 1987 game.
Armand is one of the smartest baseball players I ever saw. He knew I was watching, and when I told him that I liked his play, he said, "Then you should come watch my father play. He knows everything about baseball, just like you do." They had the same understanding of every aspect of the game. Of course, Armand was a catcher who could pitch, just like me. He pitched in college and professionally, including during his two-year major league career in the 1990s.
The game that day was a blowout, but it wasn't just about winning. It was also a great cultural event—one of the best things I've ever been associated with in sports. After the game was over, we retired Armand's uniform number on the fifty-third anniversary of Armand's father's appointment as Ambassador to the United States. I'm happy to report that I've never seen another baseball player named Armand, although I've never made a pilgrimage to Mexico City.
And that brings us to where we are today. Now that the San Francisco community is well organized and very involved, the people who created the Armenian National League in Fresno are also active and thriving. Today they're called the American National Baseball League. I was lucky enough to have attended the league's championship game in Fresno, where I saw an all-star team from San Francisco and Fresno compete for the title, which the team from Fresno won.
The Fresno area is now where we keep our archives for the history of Armenian baseball, and in 2007 we started working with our Fresno community to produce an annual all-Armenian basketball game for the community—something the city hasn't seen since the 1930s. We also have a national tournament that's held annually, on a rotating basis, in Los Angeles, Fresno, and other parts of California. We do an Armenian Cultural Day every year at the Armenian Genocide Memorial near Fresno's Union Station. And we are working on another event that will have a national impact and could possibly become a new national holiday.
My story with the league isn't just a book about baseball—it's also a book about our culture. Through baseball, I found my people. It was a journey that began with something much more powerful than an ice cream cone, to be sure. It began
