Eric was born in Oakland, California in 1965. His family moved to Davis in 1973 and that is when his baseball career began. Eric played two years of little league ball in Davis, and three more in Crescent City, California. Those early years were highlighted in 1977 when Eric was a national semi-finalist in the inaugural “Pitch, Hit, and Run” competition and performed the hitting part of the competition in front of 16,000 fans at the Kingdome during the Mariners expansion
season. Despite hitting over .800 his last year of little league, Eric gave up hardball in 1978 when his family bought a business in the very small town of Klamath, California and he would not play organized hardball again for 27 years.
College saw Eric return to Davis and begin over two decades of a “legendary” softball career where he played dozens of games annually all over California and Arizona. Eric worked throughout college as an umpire and spent nearly every fall and spring afternoon on the intramural fields either playing softball, umpiring games, or supervising other umpires (instead of going to class). Eric loved the years he played softball, particularly those years when he was
on teams with both his dad and brother. Some of his individual highlights included a 13 RBI game in an Arizona tournament and a 3 HR, 9 RBI game against a team of district attorneys (when Eric was a young public defender) that is still talked about in the courthouse over twenty years later.
On a whim, Eric answered a newspaper ad in 2005 and tried out for a local Sacramento hardball league. The next year, Eric’s team won the Sunday league championship (his first of TEN). Eric began playing in the SMSBL in the Spring league in 2008 with the Nationals and has since played in the SMSBL Spring/Night leagues with the Bears, Timberwolves, Phillies, Pirates, Solons, Cubs, Riverdogs, most recently with the A’s Legends, and most notably with the Seals.
Eric has a reputation of playing through injuries - he’s had a torn ACL since 2006 that he’s never had repaired because he did not want to miss six months of baseball, and he’s also played nearly his entire career with a torn rotator cuff in his throwing shoulder - only getting it fixed when it completely tore loose from the bone in June 2022 (but he played and pitched for another five months first). Eric’s favorite hardball memories are the ten Sunday championships, particularly the last five with the Bulldogs (especially the 2015 “Miracle at Mahany”) and winning a handful of night league titles with the Seals, particularly Summer 2018 when Eric started all three playoff games on the bump (in eight days) and won them all, including throwing two complete games.
Eric has had many other memorable moments as a starting pitcher where he’s notched over 130 wins (including a no-hitter) and more than 1100 strikeouts. Eric’s favorite pitching memory is an 84-pitch shutout in Arizona in 2017 caught by HOFer Dave Absher. Eric has also amassed more than 1100 hits batting over the years (over 300 of them for extra bases), including 26 home runs. Eric will play his 900th adult baseball game later this year.
Eric continues to represent the SMSBL and its teams at both Regional and the MSBL World Series in Arizona and proudly served on the SMSBL Board of Directors from 2014-2019.
It is completely surreal to think that someone with essentially no baseball experience could walk into a tryout at the age of 38 and, nineteen years later, manage to join such a prestigious group of men and women. Eric is truly thankful to be inducted into the SMSBL Hall of Fame and humbled to receive this tremendous honor, but he is also grateful to have had the opportunity to have been a teammate (at one time or another) of 35 of these outstanding individuals. The greatest part of these past nineteen seasons is (still) learning the game - most of it from these tremendous teammates.
Finally, Eric would like to thank the one person without whom he would not be receiving this honor: the love of his life, the Honorable Danielle Ramirez. She literally saved his life and his baseball career truly blossomed once she became a fixture in his world
