How Dan Ardells life came to be much more than

The second in an occasional collection of profiles on Southern California athletes who have flourished in their post-playing careers.

The growth Los Angeles Angels had been just 5 months outdated in September 1961 when the crew referred to as up three minor leaguers who would come to outline the fledgling franchise’s early years.

Jim Fregosi, a teenage shortstop, would go on to make six All-Star groups and win a Gold Glove. Right-hander Dean Chance, who turned 20 that summer season, would win the Cy Young Award and lead the American League in wins, ERA, shutouts and innings pitched. And Buck Rodgers would catch for 9 massive league seasons before managing at the minor and main league stage for the Angels.

But only Dan Ardell, a light-hitting first baseman who was referred to as up with them, would do one thing that had never been achieved before on Sept. 20 against the Detroit Tigers. In his first massive league plate look, Ardell blooped a single to proper discipline, only to see pinch-runner Ken McBride get caught rounding second base to finish the sport.

“I’m the only one to only get one hit. And the one hit was a walk-off loss,” he stated. “Not easy to do.”

There had been few witnesses since many in the group of 3,116 at Detroit’s Tiger Stadium had left long before the ninth inning. Ardell would seem in six more video games, 4 as a pinch-runner, and make six more plate appearances without a hit, putting out twice, strolling once and dropping down a sacrifice bunt to end with a .250 lifetime batting average.

It wasn’t good enough to get him a plaque in the Hall of Fame but you’ll be able to still discover him listed there, alongside the opposite 20,964 males who have performed in the majors.

“It’s a very low number,” Ardell stated, acknowledging the accomplishment. “Very low.”

Yet more than six many years later, Ardell seems to be back on his month with the Angels with neither delight nor disappointment. He has gone on to reside a wealthy life, one that has included well-paying jobs in banking and asset management, a 41-year marriage that produced 4 kids and six grandchildren, and completely no regrets about a baseball profession that was so short it’s remembered principally for a teammate’s baserunning blunder.

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1. Jim Fregosi during a game in Anaheim in 1965. (Transcendental intenses / Getty Images) 2. Dean Chance won a Cy Young Award with the Angels. (Associated Press) 3. Rich Rollins of the Minnesota Twins swings and misses as Angels catcher Buck Rodgers catches the pitch in a 1962 game. All three players were called up to the Angels in September 1961 along with Dan Ardell, whose career only lasted seven games. (Hy Peskin Archive / Getty Images)

“I never had a desire to be a major league ballplayer,” said Ardell, a retired real estate executive who made $1,250 for his big league cameo. “I loved playing baseball, but once I started playing professionally, I was bored. I was disinterested.”

In fact, the bookish Ardell probably never should have been there at all. But after winning the College World Series as a sophomore at USC, he accepted a $37,500 bonus to leave school five semesters short of a degree to sign with the Angels.

Still, he hedged his bets just the same.

“They wanted to give me $35,000 and I said I need $37,500 because that would give me the $500 a semester [tuition] at ‘SC that I needed,” Ardell said.

The newly born Angels had just two minor league teams, so Ardell was sent to the Dodgers’ Class D farm membership in Artesia, N.M. His supervisor was Spider Jorgensen, whose massive league debut in 1947 had been considerably overshadowed by teammate Jackie Robinson, who broke baseball’s coloration line that day. Since Jorgensen’s tools never made it to the ballpark, he performed third base that day utilizing an infielder’s glove he borrowed from Robinson.

The crew Jorgensen managed went 48-78 and completed final, 29½ video games out of first in the Sophomore League — so unhealthy that Sports Illustrated came to New Mexico to doc its mediocrity. Ardell completed that first season with more strikeouts (32) than hits (30) in 125 at-bats, but he was massive, left-handed and performed first base — three attributes that had been enough to get him a trial with an Angels crew that entered September 30 video games behind the league-leading Yankees.

“I basically played second string at ‘SC,” Ardell stated. “So I go from second string to Class D ball — which wasn’t as good as our ‘SC team — to the big leagues all within 60 days. At age 20, it was an incredible roller coaster.”

It was a journey he rapidly drained of. He didn’t drink and he was about to get married, so the frat home environment of a skilled baseball crew wasn’t one he partook of. After three more minor league seasons, he retired at 23.

“I learned a lot about myself,” he stated of those three principally sad summers.

It wasn’t that he couldn’t do it. It was that he didn’t need to do it. Being a massive league ballplayer might have been some youngsters’ dream, but it wasn’t his.

“I got no satisfaction out of it. And I was bored,” he stated. “It just wasn’t that interesting to me once I had to make my living doing it.

“If you don’t love what you’re doing, if you don’t appreciate and like what you’re doing, it becomes hard work.”

At 84, Ardell has an straightforward smile and a fast, self-deprecating wit he employs usually. He’s still at his enjoying weight of 190 kilos, but he says he’s misplaced two inches off a body that once rose to 6-foot-2. And he no longer strikes with the pace or grace that allowed him to steal seven bases in his first minor league season.

There is no memorabilia, no remnants of his short-lived profession in his hillside home in Laguna Beach’s Bluebird Canyon, about a half-mile from the Pacific Ocean. He gave his gloves away during a storage sale shortly after he stop enjoying and a grandson took down the few footage he had hung on the wall.

After retiring with a .252 average and 45 home runs in 389 minor league video games, Ardell went back to faculty, then studied real estate, working for Union Bank and Wells Fargo. He finally began a real estate asset management company with his twin brother Dave, an equally proficient baseball participant who performed at UCLA, where he was the crew captain.

After retiring with a .252 average and 45 home runs in 389 minor league video games, Dan Ardell returned to faculty at USC, then studied real estate, working for Union Bank and Wells Fargo.

(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)

That anybody remembers he performed at all is both flattering and befuddling for Ardell, who receives about a dozen autograph requests in the mail each 12 months.

“I mean, how do they even know my address?” he requested.

Still, he solutions every letter. Some followers ship outdated pictures or baseball playing cards that are essentially home made since Ardell never bought a Topps bubblegum card of his own.

“In those days anybody who signed a bonus, Topps would sign,” he stated. “So they came to Artesia, where I was playing, and said ‘we want to give you a Topps card. And we’ll pay you five bucks’.

“I said, ‘I think I need 10.’ So I’m the only only major leaguer who never had a Topps card.”

Which isn’t to say Ardell has no mementos from his profession. A fastball he didn’t see on a poorly lit discipline in San José slipped under the invoice of his batting helmet and struck him flush in the top one evening.

“I woke up the next day. You could see the seam where the baseball hit. I still have a dent,” he stated with a chuckle, pointing to a spot in the middle of his brow.

It wasn’t until three many years after he walked away from the sport that Ardell came to respect what he had achieved — and only then after marrying Jean Hastings, who would shortly grow to be a nationally acknowledged baseball educational and author.

Ardell and Hastings — a Brooklyn native who had at all times been a baseball fanatic — had been residing in the identical Orange County neighborhood when a mutual pal prompt they exit on a date.

“She had just read ‘Ball Four,’” Ardell stated, referencing Jim Bouton’s e-book about the raunchy, less-seemly aspect of baseball. “So she said no, baseball players are to look at, they’re not to touch.”

Dan Ardell says he receives about a dozen autograph requests in the mail each 12 months, with some followers sending outdated pictures or home made baseball playing cards since Ardell never bought a Topps card of his own. “I mean, how do they even know my address?” he stated.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

She went on the date anyway, then married Ardell a couple of years later in 1981. Jean, 79, died in 2022 after a short, ferocious battle with leukemia, but in the more than 40 years she spent with Ardell, she slowly rekindled his love for a sport he had all but forgotten.

They went to conferences and symposiums, where Jean spoke on the magic and the poetry of baseball. They visited the Hall of Fame, traveled to Arizona for spring coaching and attended numerous Angels video games, watching on TV those they couldn’t attend in particular person.

“It was definitely part of her,” grandson Garrett Tyler stated.

Jean not only helped Ardell put his baseball profession into perspective, she helped put his life in perspective. Shortly after they married, “I decided to have a mission statement,” Ardell stated. “And my mission statement was to make a difference in the lives of others.”

“Ten years later,” he added “I changed it to make a positive difference.”

He noticed that need at work in Jean, a political liberal who, in addition to her baseball writing, also labored with a nonprofit referred to as Braver Angels that seeks to bridge the political divide by bringing Democrats and Republicans collectively. It was a philosophy she lived by marrying Ardell, a lifelong Republican who solid his first presidential vote for Barry Goldwater but later drove a car sporting a “Republicans for Obama” bumper sticker.

Ardell was already working with Opportunity International, a world nonprofit that alleviates generational poverty by microfinancing neighborhood tasks both in Southern California and overseas. But now the bridge that he and Jean constructed turned obvious through the distinction being made — not only in those affected communities, but in his own soul as properly.

Tyler stated he grew up enjoying catch with his grandfather, who attended all his Little League video games. But it was his grandmother who instructed him about Ardell’s skilled profession.

“He was always a little bit reluctant to talk about it. My grandma was the one that kind of opened him up,” stated Tyler, 25, who adopted his grandparents into baseball, where he works as supervisor of concessions for the Amarillo Sod Poodles, the double-A affiliate of the Arizona Diamondbacks.

“I’ve talked to him a lot about that. He told me that he just didn’t have the confidence. He knew that he was good, but I don’t think he really understood it. I don’t know if he necessarily misses it or feels like he missed out. I think he was more appreciative of the journey that it took him on and how he’s evolved into a different love for baseball.”

As he has grown older, Tyler stated that’s the half of his grandfather’s journey that has caught with him; the mission assertion half that says it’s not about the vacation spot or the accomplishments, but about the affect you may have on those you meet along the best way.

In that approach, he stated, Ardell’s short profession is now having an outsized affect.

Tyler mentions a pal who is principally enjoying for free, stranded below the longest rung of the minor league ladder. But he still places on a uniform every day.

“He plays for the love of the game and just because it’s all he knows,” Tyler stated. “One of the things that Dan asks me that I ask my friend is, ‘do you like what you’re doing?’ And at that point it’s not about your career longevity or how much money you’re making.

“As long as you’re happy playing and you’re making ends meet, then go for it.”

Ardell wasn’t joyful enjoying, so he walked away. Three many years later with the love and help of a spouse who noticed baseball not as a sport but as a metaphor for life, as a sport where the aim is to get home safely, Ardell started to perceive the magic too.

His one month in the majors led him to a profession affluent enough that he may help others, one that still fills his mailbox with letters from followers and one that has given him the knowledge to counsel different 23-year-olds to keep placing on the uniform as long as it matches.

Make a constructive distinction in the lives of others.

“It was a very inconsequential part of my life that was very consequential to other people,” Ardell stated of his one month in the majors.

“I think of it every day.”