Sylmar

Longtime rivals Sylmar and San Fernando are set to meet on Saturday at the Coliseum in a tripleheader for high school football.

The junior varsity teams will play at 2:30 p.m., followed by a girls flag football game at 5 p.m. and the varsity 11-man game at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $15 and available for purchase at each school this week, with $12 going back to the schools. Tickets also will be available at the Coliseum on Saturday.

San Fernando is an eight-time City Section champion with a rich history that includes its wishbone teams of the 1970s featuring the late Charles White, who won the Heisman Trophy at USC. Sylmar won City titles in 1992 and 1994 under coach Jeff Engilman.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for our student-athletes, families, alumni and the broader community to come together and celebrate the legacy and rivalry of two proud programs in a truly iconic venue,” Sylmar athletic director Wilquin Garcia said.

It will be a Valley Mission League game, with Sylmar 4-3 and 1-2 in league and San Fernando 5-2 and 2-1. In flag football, San Fernando is 7-6 and Sylmar is 4-5.

This is a daily look at the positive happenings in high school sports. To submit any news, please email [email protected].

Junior quarterback Nathaniel Cadet, who has a 4.5 grade-point average, is so passionate about football at Marshall High that the coaches sometimes have to order him to go home or they won’t be able to leave school.

“He’s one of those kids we have to beg to leave,” first-year head coach Jose Razo said. “I can’t name anyone who works harder. The kid has a drive I’ve never seen.”

Cadet tutors players on academics and football. His contributions have been key in Marshall going 6-0 entering its Northern League opener against host Eagle Rock on Friday. Cadet has passed for 691 yards and 10 touchdowns.

Razo has his own interesting story. He’s a 2007 Marshall graduate who spent 17 years as an assistant coach under three head coaches before getting the job this season. The Barristers have wins over Glendale, Sylmar, Contreras, Belmont, L.A. Jordan and Jefferson.

Eagle Rock will present the toughest challenge yet with its outstanding quarterback Liam Pasten and coach Andy Moran, who used to coach at Marshall and is the Barristers’ all-time winningest coach. Razo played for Moran, who has a 12-0 record against his former school.

Cadet gets to be in the spotlight to show off his strong arm. “Sometimes our guys can’t catch it because he throws so hard,” Razo said.

Before the varsity game, two of the league’s top flag football teams will play at 5 p.m.

This is a daily look at the positive happenings in high school sports. To submit any news, please email [email protected].

Roberto Delgado and his wife were praying the rosary on the night of Jan. 7 when they heard two loud booms that shook their Sylmar home. Then came a flash of light so bright that in the dead of night they could briefly see out their window the rocks and gullies of the San Gabriel foothills behind their house.

Seconds later, Delgado said in an interview, the couple saw flames under two electric transmission towers owned by Southern California Edison — even more shocking because they had seen a fire ignite under one of those towers just six years before.

“We were traumatized,” he said. “It was almost the exact same thing.” In both fires, the family was forced to race to their car and flee with few belongings as the flames rushed through the brush toward their home, which survived both blazes.

Edison’s maintenance of its power lines is now under scrutiny in the wake of January’s devastating Eaton fire, which destroyed a wide swath of Altadena and killed 19 people. Video captured by eyewitnesses shows the Eaton fire igniting under Edison transmission towers.

A lawsuit making its way through Los Angeles County Superior Court is raising new questions about Edison’s role in the 2019 Saddle Ridge fire in Sylmar and whether the company was transparent about the cause of the blaze. The fire killed at least one person and destroyed or damaged more than 100 homes and other structures. Firefighters were able to contain the more recent Sylmar fire, called Hurst, before any homes were destroyed.

The lawyers contend that both fires were caused by the same problem: an improperly grounded transmission line running through the foothills of Sylmar that Edison failed to fix, which the company denies.

In a court filing, the lawyers included a deposition they took of an L.A. Fire Department captain who said he believed that Edison was “deceptive” for not informing the department that its equipment failed just minutes before the 2019 blaze ignited, and for having an employee offer to buy key surveillance video from that night from a business next to one of its towers.

Edison has flatly disputed the lawyers’ assertions, calling their claims about the 2019 fire an “exotic ignition theory” based on “an unproven narrative.”

Kathleen Dunleavy, a spokeswoman for Edison, said that the utility had complied with the requests of investigators looking into the two fires and that “there is no connection” between the incidents.

Dunleavy said Edison did not tell the fire department about the failure of its equipment in 2019 because it happened at a tower miles away from where the fire ignited. And she said it is common for any investigator to seek to obtain video that could aid in an investigation. “SCE’s investigator did not offer to buy surveillance video,” she said.

“We follow the law. Period,” she said.

Dunleavy said the company has completed tests that show the transmission line is safe. She declined to share the results and pointed to testimony by Edison’s expert in the case — Don Russell, a Texas A&M professor of electrical engineering — who said the line was properly grounded.

As for the Jan. 7 Hurst fire, the utility told regulators in a February letter that it believes its equipment “may be associated with the ignition” of the blaze. The letter said the company found two conductors on the ground under a Sylmar tower. The repairs, the letter said, included replacing equipment at several towers and more than three miles of cable.

Delgado and Perez say that on the night of the fire they heard two loud booms and a flash of light so bright they could briefly see out their window the rocks and gullies of the San Gabriel foothills.

(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)

Undergrounding of towers questioned

In dispute is whether the failure of steel equipment at the top of an Edison transmission tower on the night of Oct. 10, 2019, caused a massive power surge across the system, resulting in multiple towers becoming electrified and intensely hot.

The tower, where the steel part known as a y-clevis broke, sits just off the 210 freeway in Sylmar on land shared with a nursery. The Edison tower behind Delgado’s home where investigators say the 2019 fire ignited is more than two miles away from the nursery.

The attorneys said in court filing that Edison made a “cost-saving choice” when building the transmission line in 1970 to not include “any purposeful grounding devices” that would enable power surges to dissipate down the tower and into the earth. Instead, the company used “only insufficient concrete footings,” the lawyers said in their filing.

Mark Felling, an electrical engineer and paid expert in the case, testified that he found that the size of the cement footings under the towers along the line varied by a factor of 10. The size of the footings, he said,affects whether the tower is properly grounded.

Felling said he believed that a sudden power surge could cause some towers to become “electrified and potentially very hazardous.”

Edison has disputed that theory and said in court that the electrical surge caused by the failure of equipment at the tower by the nursery safely dispersed. The utility said it was scientifically impossible that the electrical surge caused a fire 2½ miles away.

“The undisputed material facts cannot support plaintiff’s theory that SCE caused the Saddleridge fire,” the company wrote in a motion this month, which asked the judge to dismiss the case. A hearing on the motion is scheduled for Oct. 6.

Edison’s motion included a copy of the L.A. Fire Department’s investigation, which included new details of how the company responded to fire investigators days after the 2019 fire.

Delgado said his rosary and prayers were important to surviving the fires.

(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)

Failure to report power surge

L.A. Fire investigator Robert Price arrived at the dirt road leading up to the hillside transmission line where the fire had ignited the night before to see the yellow crime scene tape lying on the ground and an Edison truck driving out, Price said in his report.

Price also wrote that Edison’s equipment recorded a fault that resulted in a surge of electricity about three minutes before Delgado reported the fire to 911 at 9 p.m. But the company did not tell the Fire Department about the fault, Price wrote.

Instead, L.A. Fire Capt. Timothy Halloran learned from a news report that Sylmar resident Jack Carpenter had recorded a large flash of light on his dashboard camera at 8:57 that night as he was traveling west on the 210 freeway.

Halloran traced the flash to a transmission tower built on land used by Ornelas Wood Recovery Nursery. Halloran interviewed employees at the nursery, who told him that an Edison employee had offered to buy the surveillance footage from the nursery’s camera, according to a deposition Halloran later provided to lawyers representing the victims.

A nursery employee also had taken photos of the broken steel equipment he found at the foot of the tower, according to Price’s report. The employee told Halloran that an Edison crew came the day after the fire and cleaned up the shattered pieces.

Halloran said in the deposition, according to a June court filing, that the company’s failure to report the fault and its offer to buy the nursery’s surveillance video made him believe that the company’s actions were “deceptive.”

Price said in his report that he also saw Edison crews cleaning the towers along the line three days after the fire’s start. An Edison employee told him that the utility cleans the towers once a year but had decided to clean them that day “because they were dirty from the smoke and fire,” Price wrote.

The cleaning did not prevent fire investigators from finding burn marks at the bottom of a second tower not far from where Delgado and his wife live, which Price said may be related to the “catastrophic failure” of equipment at the tower by the nursery.

In his final conclusion on the fire, Price wrote that it was “outside my expertise” to determine whether the failure of equipment at the tower above the nursery “could cause high voltage to travel back through the conductors … and cause a fire, possibly through the tower’s grounding system” more than two miles away.

“Therefore the cause will be undetermined,” Price wrote.

Dunleavy said that Edison had notified the California Public Utilities Commission about the fire before it began cleaning up the broken pieces of equipment found under the tower at the nursery. That cleanup and the company’s repairs, Dunleavy said, were needed to “ensure safety and reliability” of the line.

She added that it was common practice for utilities to wash down equipment after a fire before the system was reenergized.

According to an L.A. Fire investigator, Edison’s equipment recorded a fault that resulted in a surge of electricity about three minutes before Delgado reported the fire to 911 at 9 p.m.

(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)

State utility investigators find violations

Also investigating the 2019 fire in the days after its start was Eric Ujiiye at the Public Utilities Commission.

The commission’s safety staff investigates fires that may have been caused by electric lines to determine whether the utility violated safety regulations.

Ujiiye said in his report that he found that Edison violated five regulations, including failing to safely maintain its equipment at the tower by the nursery.

Even though Price’s investigation for the L.A. Fire Department stated that the cause is undetermined, Ujiiye said in his report that he believed that the failure of equipment at the tower by the nursery “could have led to a fire ignition” at the pylon more than two miles away.

The commission’s staff asked Edison to perform tests to show that the towers on the line were properly grounded. According to a written response from Edison, the utility objected to the request as “vague and ambiguous.” But the company agreed to do the tests, which would be observed by the commission inspectors.

Terrie Prosper, a spokeswoman for the commission, said that the agency’s staff was planning to meet with Edison at the transmission line to witness the tests. However, COVID-19 pandemic restrictions delayed that meeting and the requested undergrounding tests. She said that commission staff later learned that Edison had performed similar tests soon after the fire. Those test results “sufficed,” Prosper said, and the company “was not made to re-do the tests.”

Prosper said the commission did not fine or otherwise penalize Edison for the five violations because the LAFD report said the cause was undetermined. She said company had corrected the violations.

April Maurath Sommer, executive director of the Wild Tree Foundation, which has challenged Edison’s requests to have utility customers pay for fire damages, questioned the commission’s handling of the 2019 fire.

“You would think that the Public Utilities Commission would use fines to address really egregious behavior in the hope it would deter future behavior that causes catastrophic fires,” she said.

Maurath Sommer noted that Edison has been repeatedly found to have failed to cooperate with investigators looking into the cause of devastating fires. For example, commission investigators said in a report that the utility refused to provide photos and other details of what its employees found at the site where the Woolsey fire ignited in 2018. The Edison crew was the first to arrive at the scene of the fire that destroyed hundreds of homes in Malibu. Edison argued that the evidence was protected by attorney-client privilege.

Edison’s Dunleavy said the allegation by commission investigators was later resolved. “We take our obligation to cooperate with the CPUC seriously,” she said.

Prosper of the commission said, “Public safety is, and will remain, our top priority,”

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1. Fire fighters kept an eye on the wild fire burning behind Olive View Medical Center. (Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times) 2. A firefighting plane drops red Phos-Chek, a fire retardant, to protect Olive View Medical Center from wind driven Saddle Ridge wild fire in October 2019. (Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times) 3. Interstate 5 and California State Rute 14 were closed to traffic through Newhall Pass due to the Saddle Ridge fire. (Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times) 4. Firefighters cleared brush and mopped up a hillside along California State Highway 14 due to fire in 2019. (Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times)

Another fire in Sylmar

At about 10:30 on the night of Jan. 7, Katherine Twohy heard a loud crack and saw a bright flash. Edison’s transmission towers in Sylmar skirt around the edge of the Oakridge Mobile Home Park, where Twohy, a retired psychologist, lives.

“I was just coming in my back door and there was just this incredible flashing of white lights,” Twohy said. “Incredibly blue-white lights.”

She walked to her living room window where she can see two Edison towers, which are separated by more than a hundred yards. Twohy said she could see flames at the base of each one.

“The fires had made little circles around the base,” she said.

Twohy said she saw flames under the same towers the night the Saddle Ridge fire ignited in 2019.

“I thought, ‘Oh my god, it’s just like last time,’” Twohy said.

In court, lawyers representing victims of the 2019 fire have seized on Edison’s admission that its equipment may have sparked the Jan. 7 fire.

“The evidence will show that five separate fires ignited at five separate SCE transmission tower bases in the same exact manner” as the 2019 fire, they wrote in a June court filing.

Delgado’s home sits next to the dirt road leading up to the towers. The Jan. 7 fire melted his backyard fence but did little more damage. In the days after the fire, he found that some of the same Edison employees he spoke to in 2019 as a witness reappeared.

“I saw the exact same people from Edison show up,” he said. “I told them your towers almost killed my family again.”

Times staff writer Kevin Rector contributed to this report.

Players from six Valley League football schools came to Granada Hills Kennedy High on Monday for a media day, and you can say without any doubts that Van Nuys senior quarterback Carlos Herrera has been changed by his experiences.

When he decided to try football for the first time as a freshman, he said he knew little about the sport such as putting on shoulder pads. By last season, he was the City Section Division III offensive player of the year after passing for 2,158 yards and 23 touchdowns and running for 807 yards and 12 touchdowns.

“It never crossed my mind,” he said of his football success. “It’s changed my life physically and mentally. It helps me mentally. When I go into the real world, nothing will be as tough a challenge.”

Cousins Diego Montes (left) and James Montes of Kennedy.

(Eric Sondheimer / Los Angeles Times)

Defending league champion Kennedy has the Montes cousins, quarterback Diego Montes and defensive lineman James Montes. Diego has a 4.6 grade point-average, made All-City and is known for his versatility.

“Every time I try to sack him, he runs away,” James said.

Kennedy lineman Lazara Barajas has made big changes physically.

Last season he weighed 298 pounds. Now he’s 262 pounds after he stopped eating chips and used better cardio techniques to drop weight.

First-year Reseda coach Ed Breceda is a Reseda grad and former Regent assistant.

(Eric Sondheimer / Los Angeles Times)

First-year Reseda coach Ed Breceda, who graduated from the school in 2006 and was an assistant coach under former head coach Alonso Arreola, is going back even further, bringing back smash-mouth football from the days of coach Joel Schaeffer. He brought three running backs to the media day — Innis Marquez, Erick Figueroa and Jonathan Orantes.

Many of Reseda’s players are enrolled in the school’s police magnet program. Orantes also is part of the school’s cheer team.

Canoga Park coach Lucius Mills has spent months trying to convince one of his school’s top soccer players, Gabriel Trigueros Estrada, to join the football team. He finally arrived this summer and is showing promise as a senior safety with no football experience. Mills is hoping if Estrada has a good experience, other soccer players will follow in future years.

San Fernando coach Charles Burnley played for the Tigers and is always reminding his players about their strong football tradition. San Fernando produced a Heisman Trophy winner, Charles White.

The Tigers have been strengthened by two transfers from Heritage Christian, quarterback Julian Zarzo and running back Brandon Marshall. But the player to watch could be 6-foot-4, 290-pound junior tackle Paul Villegas.

San Fernando 6-4, 290-pound junior Paul Villegas.

(Eric Sondheimer / Los Angeles Times)

Only 16 years old and part Samoan, he’s gaining physicality and adding strength. And what about his eating skills?

“What didn’t I eat,” he said.

San Fernando plays Sylmar at the Coliseum on Oct. 17.

Brothers Rayleo (left) and Elizeo Reyes of Sylmar might be small in stature but they play with heart and toughness.

(Eric Sondheimer / Los Angeles Times)

Brothers Rayleo and Elizeo Reyes are key players for Sylmar as defensive backs. Never doubt their toughness, for Rayleo is a 5-6, 150-pound senior and Elizeo is a 5-5, 149-pound junior.

“We like to fly around and hit people,” Rayleo said.

Both can’t wait to play at the Coliseum. “I’ve always been a USC fan,” Elizeo said. “It’s a dream come true.”

Panorama is excited about sophomore safety Brandon Hernandez, who ended up starting as a 14-year-old freshman last season.

Asked how do you get someone so young ready to play on varsity, coach Adrian Beltran said, “You make them be best friends with the linemen. He hung out with them at lunch, after school.”

Southern California Edison’s admission that its equipment may have ignited the Hurst fire in the San Fernando Valley on Jan. 7 is being seized on by lawyers suing the utility company for another fire in the same area nearly six years earlier.

Both the Saddleridge fire in 2019 and the Hurst fire this year started beneath an Edison high-voltage transmission line in Sylmar. The lawyers say faulty equipment on the line ignited both blazes in the same way.

“The evidence will show that five separate fires ignited at five separate SCE transmission tower bases in the same exact manner as the fire that started the Saddleridge fire,” the lawyers wrote of the Hurst fire in a June 9 filing in Los Angeles Superior Court.

The lawyers said the January wildfire is “further evidence” that a transmission pylon known as Tower 2-5 “is improperly grounded.”

Edison told the state Public Utilities Commission in February that “absent additional evidence, SCE believes its equipment may be associated with the ignition of the Hurst Fire.” But the company denies claims that its equipment sparked the 2019 fire, which tore through Sylmar, Porter Ranch and Granada Hills — all suburbs of Los Angeles — burning 8,799 acres.

“We will continue to focus on facts and evidence — not on preposterous and sensational theories that only serve to harm the real victims,” said Edison spokesman David Eisenhauer. He declined further comment on the case.

The Saddleridge wildfire destroyed or damaged more than 100 homes and other structures, according to Cal Fire, and caused at least one death when resident Aiman El Sabbagh suffered a cardiac arrest.

Edison is being sued by insurance companies, including State Farm and USAA, to recoup the cost of damages paid to their policyholders. Homeowners and other victims are also seeking damages. A jury trial for the consolidated cases is set for Nov. 4.

In their June 9 filing, the plaintiffs’ lawyers also claimed Edison wasn’t transparent with officials looking into the cause of the 2019 fire. One fire official characterized the utility’s action as “deceptive,” the filing said.

Edison discovered a fault on its system at 8:57 p.m. — just three minutes before the blaze at the base of its transmission tower was reported to the Fire Department by Sylmar resident Robert Delgado, according to the court filing.

But Edison didn’t tell the Los Angeles city Fire Department about the fault it recorded, the filing said. Instead the fire department’s investigation team discovered the failure on Edison’s transmission lines through dash cam footage recorded by a motorist driving on the 210 Freeway nearby, the filing said.

When Timothy Halloran, a city Fire Department investigator, went to the location of the flash shown on the motorist’s camera, he found “evidence of a failure on SCE’s equipment,” the filing said.

Halloran said in a deposition that employees of the business located where the evidence was found told him that Edison employees “attempted to purchase” footage from the company’s security camera on the night of the fire, the filing said.

“The video footage shows a large flash emanating from the direction of SCE Transmission Tower 5-2,” the filing said.

Halloran testified in his deposition that he believed Edison was trying to be “deceptive” for attempting to purchase the security camera footage and not reporting the system fault to the Fire Department, the lawyers said.

Halloran didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Edison’s maintenance of its transmission lines is now being scrutinized as it faces dozens of lawsuits from victims of the devastating Eaton fire, which also ignited on Jan. 7.

Videos showed that fire, which killed 18 people and destroyed thousands of homes, starting under a transmission tower in Eaton Canyon. The investigation into the cause of the fire is continuing.

Victims of the 2019 fire say they’ve become disheartened as Edison has repeatedly asked for delays in the court case.

“Many plaintiffs have not yet been able to rebuild their homes” because of the delays, wrote Mara Burnett, a lawyer representing the family of the man who died.

Burnett noted that Aiman El Sabbagh was 54 when he suffered a fatal cardiac arrest during the incident. His children, Tala and Adnan El Sabbagh, “feel they were robbed of things they treasured and worked hard for with no apparent recompense in sight.”

Both the Saddleridge and Hurst fires included a similar chain of events where a failure of equipment on one tower resulted in two or more fires igniting under different towers elsewhere on the line, according to lawyers for the plaintiffs.

Edison designed and constructed the towers that run through Sylmar in 1970. They hold up two transmission lines: the Gould-Sylmar 220 kV circuit and the Eagle Rock-Sylmar 220 kV circuit.

In the case of the Saddleridge fire, investigators from the Los Angeles Fire Department and the California Public Utilities Commission found that at 8:57 pm on Oct. 10, 2019, a Y-shaped steel part holding up a transmission line failed, causing the line to fall on a steel arm.

The failure caused a massive electrical fault, lawyers for the plaintiffs say, that sparked fires at two transmission towers that were more than two miles away.

State and city fire investigators say the Saddleridge fire began under one of those towers. And they found unusual burning at the footing of the other tower, according to a report by an investigator at the utilities commission.

The utilities commission investigator said in the report that he found that Edison had violated five state regulations by not properly maintaining or designing its transmission equipment.

This year’s Hurst fire ignited not far away on Jan. 7 at 10:10 p.m. It also began under one of Edison’s transmission towers.

According to Edison’s Feb. 6 report to the utilities commission, the company found that its hardware failed, resulting in equipment falling to the ground at the base of a tower.

The lawyers for the plaintiffs say that they now have more evidence of the fire’s start. They say that investigators found that the hardware failure set off an event — similar to the 2019 fire — that resulted in five fires at five separate transmission tower bases on the same line.

One of those fires spread in high winds to become the Hurst fire. Officials ordered 44,000 people to evacuate. Air tankers and 300 firefighters contained the fire before it reached any homes.

Whatever Canon King of Venice High had done earlier this season — he had six home runs — his performance on Tuesday night in the City Section Open Division semifinal game against Sylmar at Cal State Northridge earned him a lofty place few others have attained.

He was five for five with three RBIs and scored the winning run in the eighth inning of a 9-8 victory.

“It felt amazing,” he said. “My approach all day, get on base.”

He repeatedly looked for holes in Sylmar’s defense and sent the ball wherever they existed. It was an amazing display of bat discipline and knowledge. He had a single in the first inning, a two-run single in the second, a single in the fourth, a single in the sixth and a run-scoring double in the eighth.

Now he gets to play in the Open Division final against El Camino Real at 1 p.m. Saturday at Dodger Stadium. He’s committed to Cal State San Marcos and is a three-time Western League MVP.

“Best hitter in the City in my time doing this,” Westchester coach Joshua Saperstein said.

This is a daily look at the positive happenings in high school sports. To submit any news, please email [email protected].

There was pure joy as Canon King ran toward his Venice High teammates standing outside the dugout after touching home plate to complete a home run. He launched a group chest bump with Dylan Johnson, who went tumbling through the dirt like a kid playing in a sandbox.

“This feels great,” King said later. “We’ve worked so hard for four years.”

Venice (27-2) is tantalizingly close to earning a trip to Dodger Stadium to play for the City Section Open Division baseball championship. The Gondoliers play Sylmar at 6 p.m. Tuesday at Cal State Northridge in the semifinals. The other matchup as part of a doubleheader has El Camino Real facing Birmingham at 3 p.m.

In many ways, these two games impose far more pressure on players than reaching the championship game, because each player so badly wants to make it to Dodger Stadium to fulfill dreams of a lifetime.

“It’s magical,” King said.

To see King’s smile and excitement last week after hitting his sixth home run in a 4-1 playoff win over Chatsworth offered a hint of his value and importance to a surging Gondoliers team. He’s a three-time Western League MVP.

He’s committed to Cal State San Marcos, has gotten all A’s for four years on his report card except for one B in chemistry freshman year and one B in AP Spanish. He’s a born leader and “loves” being named Canon by his father, a high school teacher and former amateur rapper whose best friend had Canon as his last name.

“The energy is infectious,” he said of the team’s success. “It’s all coming together. Our team chemistry has been high. Our practices have been so productive.”

Canon King of Venice hit his sixth home run last week against Chasworth.

(Craig Weston)

Coach Kevin Brockway has 16 seniors on the roster. The Gondoliers haven’t won an upper division championship since 1972 and are trying to follow the same improbable path as last year’s champion, Bell, which hadn’t been to a final since 1953.

Venice was given the No. 1 seed even though El Camino Real and Birmingham came from the stronger West Valley League. But the Gondoliers went 18-0 in the Western League and have the defensive prowess to do well, with a solid catcher in Charlie Nisbet, a dependable shortstop in Daniel Quiroz and King in center field.

Sylmar, the Valley Mission League champion, went to Dodger Stadium two years ago for the Division I championship game. Pitcher Alex Martinez remembers starting at third base as a freshman.

“It’s crazy,” he said of the atmosphere. “Overwhelming for sure. It looks different, even when the ball is up in the air. It blends in.”

He threw a shutout last week in Sylmar’s Open Division win over Cleveland. Coach Ray Rivera has come to rely on him as a pitcher and hitter.

“He trusts me with the ball and in special situations,” Martinez said.

He thinks the Spartans are coming into Tuesday’s game feeling good about themselves.

“This team is special this year,” he said. “This team can beat anyone if we play our game.”

Venice knows the challenge ahead, first having to get past Sylmar, then one of the two West Valley League powers, El Camino Real or Birmingham.

Whatever happens, King is ready, though he’s thankful the games are 6 p.m. on Tuesday and 1 p.m. on Saturday. The Gondoliers don’t do well with morning games.

“We’re notorious for Saturday morning games,” he said.

He’ll get everyone to go to bed early the night before. None of them will sleep well anyway thinking of the possibilities.

“Surreal,” is how King put it if the Gondoliers can make it to Dodger Stadium on Saturday.