The state baseball tournament has come full circle, with Baldwin atop the mountain.
With the Star-Advertiser’s All-State baseball team coming out Sunday, here is a look at the All-State teams from 1959-69.
The first HHSAA tournament began in 1959 and Tamotsu Omoto‘s Bears won the first two behind the heroic performance of Glenn Oura. Oura went 3-0 and pitched 21 of 24 innings for the Bears in 1959 and repeated it in his senior season by pitching 29 1/3 of his team’s 30 innings after being taken out in the 12th inning of the state championship game against Saint Louis.
His two-year total was 6-0 with a 1.07 earned run average in 50 1/3 innings. The HHSAA implemented a pitch limit for the 1961 tournament after he graduated.
Oura was the first big star of early prep baseball, but a new name seemed to pop up every year. He was followed by the likes of Norbie Mendes of Punahou, Farrington’s John Matias (who set an unbreakable record with four home runs in a state tournament game in 1962 when they played nine innings) and Keith Kasperovitch of Punahou (17 strikeouts in a game in 1968).
All-State teams didn’t begin yet, so the following are all league teams from Oahu. Some names to be found include Mike Lum of Roosevelt as well as Punahou’s Pal Eldredge and Norman Chow.
Doubleclick the images to zoom in.
Subscribers to the Star-Advertiser can search full-page archives going back two years for free (pages are not available on the archive for 30 days after publication) at Newspapers.com. To access digitized newspapers from farther back — all the way to 1840 — subscriptions to staradvertiser.newspapers.com are available for $7.95 per month or $29.95 for six months.
Hawaii Prep World will publish the remaining decades at random times before Sunday’s All-State team comes out in the newspaper.
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