They started playing L.A. Municipal softball 50 years ago. They're still at it

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Set us as preferred As Al Michel and Mike Sugerman tell it, the first rendition of their L.A.softball team was overflowing with “geeks,” “nerds” and “goofs.” So they took a name straight out of National Lampoon, a humor magazine that featured “Doc Feeney’s Scrapbook of Sports Oddities,” showing outfielders making catches 40 feet in the air and providing tips to swimmers on proper drowning maneuvers.

“I’m thinking, we’re not a bunch of athletes — we’re a bunch of geeks,” said Michel, the team’s co-founder, current coach and catcher, reflecting on the loose band of UCLA law students, aspiring actors, accountants and other semi-athletic misfits.“Sports oddities? I thought, well, that’s not going to work… Let’s go with ‘All Stars.’”And thus, in the spring of 1976, Doc Feeney’s All Stars was born.

Fifty years and thousands of runs later, six of the original players still take to the diamond nearly every Sunday, swinging for the fences.And if out-of-towners are visiting, the ranks of the older timers swells a few more.On a recent humid Sunday afternoon, the score was 16-16 going into the final inning.

A booming home run at the bottom of the sixth by Aaron Krug — at 36, a youngster by Doc Feeney standards — had tied the game against the Six Pack at the Sepulveda Basin Sports Complex in Encino, one of the many fields across L.A.the Feeneys have graced in the last half-century.

The cohort of mostly 70-something players in the dugout rejoiced, waving their caps and hollering.This wasn’t any old Sunday matchup in the L.A.

Municipal Softball League: The Feeneys’ jerseys featured black patches embroidered with “JBK” for Jamie Bailey Krug, the first of the original founders to make it back to home base in the sky.This game was a memorial dedicated to Krug, the patch a reminder...