Tears welled in his eyes as Les Cassie rejoined some of his players from more than 50 years ago at the dedication of a new baseball scoreboard at San Diego High.
An estimated 100 well-wishers and members of great Caver teams of the past listened to Bob Kluck review the great accomplishments of the late Mike Morrow and Cassie, both of whom the $12,000 scoreboard honors. Volunteers collected enough to also cover maintenance expenses.
Their coaching accomplishments are legendary. Morrow’s teams (1927-50) won 367 and lost 97 and Cassie’s dominant clubs posted a 200-28 record during his tenure. He was also a New York Yankees scout for 17 years.
Morrow’s teams won 15 league titles and ten Southern California championships. Sixty of his players signed pro ball contracts.
“This is one of the happiest days of my life,” said Cassie. “I haven’t seen some of these guys in 50 years.
“[I] started teaching in the fall of ’48 and coached the junior college team for two years until Morrow wanted to work with older players.” So they just switched assignments.
“It was the luckiest thing ever to happen to me,” he said.
The morning was filled with greetings: “Hello Louie, nice to see you…wonder if Floyd (Robinson) will be here?…hi Tom, how are you?….hey, what do you say, kid? how are you…Feel pretty good for an old guy” (He’s 89).
Robinson (52-54),who came later, and the late Deron Johnson (54-56), were two of his players who reached the majors although almost half did sign pro contracts
“Bobby Thorpe (an outstanding pitcher) would have made it, but as an apprentice electrician he was electrocuted on a job at MCRD,” Cassie said.
Standout pitcher Bob Borovicka and pitcher-infielder Rick Venzor praised Cassie for the way he made all that talent play as a team. “On top of it, he was a good guy and a great motivator,” said Tony Asaro, a third baseman. A badly broken wrist from football curtailed what might have been a promising professional career for Asaro.
Borovicka (1951-52) said he had 12-2 and 15-1 seasons.
“We finished second to Grossmont, who won everything in 1951,” Borovicka recalled “The next year, we won everything, the SCIF, Pomona 20-30 Tournament, Lions Club tourney…swept the board and finished 35-2.”
Cassie left to become vice principal at Hoover in 1960 but found time to coach a Connie Mack team with some of his San Diego High players.
He was captain of the 1946 San Diego State baseball that posted, he says, the best won-lost record in school history.
In his initial year at the old Gray Castle, Cassie was able to acquire some of the Yankees’ old uniforms for his players.
“I remember when big Charlie Powell got Charlie Keller’s old uniform and it was still too big for him,” said Cassie. Powell shortened his career by boxing professionally and playing defensive end for the San Francisco ’49ers.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Tears welled in his eyes as Les Cassie rejoined some of his players from more than 50 years ago at the dedication of a new baseball scoreboard at San Diego High.An estimated 100 well-wishers and members of great Caver teams of the past listened to Bob Kluck review the great accomplishments of the late Mike […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":726,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"SDHS scores new sign for baseball field","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[11600],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-296918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sdnews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/726"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296918"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296918\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}