Monterey County's MLB Dream Team
Filling the roster with local legends, phenoms and stars
By Joe Livernois
Monterey County’s first Major League ballplayer was a gangly kid from Monterey who competed with the Yankees back when the team played its games on an old rock pile in Manhattan. Harry Wolter is mostly a forgotten legend these days, but legends deserve to be remembered. Which is why Wolter is my Monterey County MVP, the player I’ve named captain of my personal Monterey County Dream Team.
If you’re scoring at home, my Monterey County Dream Team is composed exclusively of nine elite local athletes with the talent and determination to have worn a Major League Baseball uniform — if only for a game or two.
I scoured the immersive online baseball reference sites and found a couple dozen former MLB players who were born somewhere in Monterey County. But a lot of them had moved on to other communities to play their high school ball. My Monterey County Dream Team is composed of players who grew up here. They were the local phenoms, the kids who dominated the local Babe Ruth leagues and the high school diamonds. The local legends.
The 1980s and 90s really seemed to be the heyday for Monterey County baseball, and most of my Dream Team selections come out of that era. The 1982 All-Monterey Bay League team alone included two future Major League players and an Aldrete (Rich) who very nearly made it to The Show.
Each position on a baseball field is not reflected on my All-Star nine. Monterey County cranked out a lot of fantastic MLB pitchers, first basemen and outfielders, but not a single shortstop. So the Monterey County Dream Team has a stacked bullpen and a surplus of able outfielders.
The following is my personal Monterey County Dream Team:
Harry Wolter. P/OF. The son of Monterey pioneers, Harry Wolter was the first local to play Major League Baseball. He was a turn-of-the-last-century ballplayer, toiling in the dead-ball era when gloves were crafted from whatever happened to fall off the cow and when pitchers mended their arm injuries with baling wire, leeches and spit.
Wolter was a rarity in baseball; he was an accomplished pitcher with hitting skills and defensive abilities that kept him in the daily lineup on days he didn’t pitch. In that regard, he was an early-day version of Shoehei Ohtani, one of those do-everything talents who could pitch a shutout every fourth game and hit with power on the days between. Coaches and sportswriters in the early 1900s said Wolter was one of the best-looking ballplayers from the West Coast, a young talent destined for stardom.
But Wolter was a bit of a renegade; for most of his career he harbored a legitimate distrust of greedy team owners. His healthy skepticism mostly served to derail his career.
Wolter was a character in a world of sporting characters. The more I learned about him, the more I wished I could have known him. He’s among my favorite old-school hardcore ballplayers — and I wrote about his life and times in a story called “Monterey’s First Yankee.” You can read that story here.
Pete Incaviglia. OF. Pete Incaviglia was a big guy with big muscles and big power. One of the greatest power hitters in College Baseball, the local kid from Monterey High played for nine different MLB teams during a stellar professional career.
At Oklahoma State, he smashed 100 home runs in 203 games and led his team to three College World Series appearances. He remains the NCAA Division I all-time leader in home runs and RBI. He was elected to the College Baseball Hall of Fame in 2007.
Incaviglia was drafted by the Montreal Expos in 1985 and made news when he announced his refusal to play in the minor leagues. The Expos traded him to the Texas Rangers, where he hit 30 dingers during his rookie year. His offensive production tailed off from there. He never hit more than 27 homers after that — but he did lead Major League Baseball in strikeouts in 1986 and 1988. He also made a World Series appearance with the Phillies, in 1993, the year the Toronto Blue Jays won it all.
Incaviglia ended his career with 206 home runs, which makes him the Dream Team Homer King. D’Oh!
The MLB changed its rules after the Expos traded him, creating what was called the Pete Incaviglia Rule that prohibited teams from trading a player they have drafted until the player has been under contract to the club for at least one calendar year.
Incaviglia is now manager of the Tri-Valley ValleyCats in the Frontier League, an independent professional baseball organization in the northeast.
Pete O’Brien. 1B. Pete O’Brien was known around Major League Baseball as one of the good guys. “Pete’s a leader of men,” said Bobby Valentine, his manager for the Texas Rangers. “If he was on a jury, there would be 11 heads turned his way.”
Sports Illustrated once referred to O’Brien as a kid with youth, wealth and “strapping California good looks.” He was the youngest of seven children, raised in the Shell House in Pebble Beach by his father, Jimmy, a stockbroker, and his mother, Janice, a beloved environmental activist around town.
O’Brien played ball at Carmel High and Monterey Peninsula College, before moving on to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He was drafted in the 15th round by the Texas Rangers in 1979, and was one of Incaviglia’s teammates with the Rangers in the late 1980s.
O’Brien was mostly known for his defensive skills, but he popped 169 home runs and ended his career with a .261 average over 12 years with three teams.
In 1986, O’Brien learned that his father had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. “It’s not so bad really,” Jimmy O’Brien told Sports Illustrated. “Who more than a first baseman’s father deserves to have Lou Gehrig’s disease.”
Ernie Camacho. RP. The pride of Alisal High, Ernesto Carlos Camacho spent a decade in the Major Leagues as a relief pitcher who saved 23 games for the Cleveland Indians in 1984, his best season.
He was drafted out of Hartnell College — not just once, but three times — and signed with the Oakland A’s in 1976. He played for six Major League teams, including the San Francisco Giants in 1989 and 1990.
His 23-save season for the Indians was, at the time, a club record. Camacho was a tough but brash young icon for a team long known for hilarious mediocrity. During one game in 1984, against Detroit, Camacho was hit on the left wrist by a line drive. He assured his coaches he could still throw, even if he couldn’t catch with his gloved hand. So after each pitch catcher Ron Hassey threw the ball back to the third basemen, who handed it over to Camacho so he could throw his next pitch.
Camacho tossed 100 innings in 69 appearances that year, and the wear and tear on his arm resulted in an injury that limited his action the following season. Camacho told reporters that the Indians’ management thought he was being a prima donna, that the throbbing elbow was psychosomatic.
The team doctor found nothing wrong with his arm despite the clicking sound the right-hander’s elbow made every time he bent it. Camacho sought an independent opinion elsewhere. “The Indians said I'd embarrass the team by seeing a fancy doctor, that I was acting like a baby instead of a man,” he complained to a UPI reporter. “They told me — they told everybody — I was a head case.”
His 1985 season was a bust; he only threw three innings and he called the year “a painful waste.” But he finally got the treatment he needed, and he picked up 20 saves for Cleveland the following season.
With 45 career saves, Camacho is the Monterey County Dream Team saves leader.
After retiring from baseball, he returned to East Salinas and became an electrician and plumber for the Alisal Elementary School District. He also set up a scholarship foundation, granting scholarships to students and holding baseball clinics around East Salinas.
Mike Aldrete. 1B. The Aldrete family of Monterey cranked out stellar ballplayers, and lefty Mike Aldrete’s talent as a pure hitter stands out among the best. Aldrete was an elite athlete at Monterey High who led the Toreadores’ football team as a quarterback. He was also on the wrestling team. But he made his mark on the diamond.
It was baseball that got him into Stanford University, and he was drafted by the San Francisco Giants in 1983. He spent the first three years in the MLB with the Giants. A natural first baseman, he was moved to the outfield because Will Clark had first base covered.
Aldrete eventually moved through five different teams during the next seven years.
He ended his playing career with the New York Yankees, where he was able to get an at-bat as a pinch hitter in Game Four of the 1996 World Series. He grounded out to the shortstop, but how many of us can say their final plate appearance came in a World Series for the Yankees?
Aldrete is still in baseball, and now serves as the hitting coach for the Oakland A’s.
Xavier Nady. OF. A phenom at Salinas High, Xavier Nady was one of the country’s top prospects during his storied high school career. He turned down a contract after he was drafted by the St. Louis Cardinal’s in the fourth round to accept a baseball scholarship to Cal.
Nady was named National Freshman of the Year after hitting .404 during his first season in Berkeley. Known as X, Nady with the San Diego Padres after being drafted in the second round in 2000. He was given his first Major League at-bat in the final Padre game of the 2000 season. He stroked a single and scored a run in his debut, but then spent the next three years in the minor leagues.
He returned to the Padres in 2003 and showed moments of brilliance. During one unforgettable stretch in 2005, Nady hit home runs in four consecutive games for the Pads.
But much of his career was derailed by injuries and illness, including recurring elbow problems and an appendectomy in 2006. He played seven games with the Yankees in 2009, but his season ended with an injury. Nevertheless, he was given a World Series ring after the Yankees won the series that year.
His career spanned 12 years with nine different teams. He was a steady .268 hitter, and he hit his 101st career home run while a San Francisco Giant, in 2012. Nady also won a World Series ring that year with the Giants; he was on the active post-season roster, but did not appear in any World Series games, as the Giants swept the Detroit Tigers.
Chris Prieto. CF. His Major League career lasted three days, with the Los Angeles Angels in 2005. He had been slogging through the minor leagues for 13 years, and finally got called up after he turned 32 years old. Chris Prieto made three plate appearances during an Angels’ road trip to Detroit and Cleveland. He laid down a successful sacrifice bunt, but ended the season — and his MLB career — with no hits in two official at-bats. His brief appearance in the Majors was his payoff after grinding it out for so long in so many different minor league towns.
Born in Carmel, he played local ball and landed at the University of Nevada, Reno. Prieto was drafted by the San Diego Padres in the 24th round. What followed was a succession of minor league stops, punctuated here and there by three seasons in the Mexican league, where he played for Hermosillo, Oaxaca and Mexico City.
He got a taste of the Big Leagues, and he’s grateful for that. But he’s said he would have liked to have come out of the experience with a batting average.
“I would have liked to get that one major-league hit, but it didn’t happen,” Prieto told the Tampa Bay Times. “In my mind, I always felt like I could play at the major-league level. Looking back now, you see how talented players are at this level. And it’s like, man, I was talented, but maybe, definitely, not enough to stick it out for any substantial amount of time at the big-league level.”
Prieto has remained in baseball, and his latest jobs allow him to spend significantly more time in Major League ballparks. Hired by the Seattle Mariners as a bench coach in 2020, Prieto took a job as first-base coach for the Tampa Bay Rays and was released by the Rays after last season.
Victor Cole. P. He dropped in for eight games with the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1992, in a rather forgettable Major League whirlwind. But Victor Cole, a Monterey High alum, earns a spot on the Monterey County Dream Team because he was — and will remain — the only Big League player ever born in the Soviet Union.
Cole’s father, a native of Sierra Leone, studied medicine in Russia and married a Russian woman. Victor was born in Leningrad four years later. The family moved to Africa for four years, immigrated to Canada and ended up in Columbus, Ohio, when Victor was 10. “That’s where I first picked up a baseball and fell in love with the game,” he told a podcaster several years ago.
Victor Cole led the Monterey Toreadores on the mound during his high school playing days before throwing for Santa Clara University. He signed with the Kansas City Royals as a 14th-round draft pick and he played professional ball for the next 14 years in a career that took him from Buffalo to the Salinas Peppers to Taiwan to Korea — and seemingly all points between.
Cole was called up by the Pirates and struggled through eight games before being sent back to the minors. His MLB stats show an 0-2 record with a 5.48 ERA over 23 innings.
After retirement, he was asked to play for the Russian National Team, which was barnstorming across the northeastern seaboard of the United States at the time. He then spent at least another decade trying to get himself affiliated with the Russian team, believing that he could promote the game and improve the skills of players from that country. Russian laws kept him from participating (he refused to renounce his U.S. citizenship) so he coached high school teams. In 2019 the laws were relaxed, and Cole was invited to coach the team in Russia.
“We’re obviously trying to climb our way up the rankings” in international play, he told the podcaster, Peter Caliendo, in 2020. The long-term goal, he said, is getting to the Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028.
Gordon Dillard. P. Another Alisal High star, Gordon Dillard was called up to the Bigs for a couple of cups of coffee, first with the Baltimore Orioles in 1988 and then with the Phillies in 1989.
Back when he was pitching for the Trojans of East Salinas, a Californian sportswriter hung the “Flash” nickname on him — as in “Flash” Gordon — after watching the lefty throw a one-hitter in a postseason playoff game. He finished his senior year at Alisal with an 11-2 record.
Like Incaviglia, Dillard played for Oklahoma State, by way of Hartnell and a college called Connors State in Oklahoma. Dillard was drafted four different times — and was a second-round pick for the Texas Rangers in 1984. He ultimately signed with the Orioles in 1986. Two years later he was called to The Show for a couple of days in August, throwing three innings for the Orioles and giving up a home run to Jose Conseco. Nine months later he was in a Phillies uniform, where he tossed four less-than-impressive innings.
After getting released, he ended his playing days in 1991 for the Salinas Spurs, the local team, at the age of 27.
Much credit should go to the local journalists who dedicated their careers to the Monterey County youth sports scene. I’m talking about George Watkins and Jim Albanese at the Salinas Californian, and about the sports desk at the Monterey County Herald, especially Tom Tebbs and Dave Leonard — and especially John Devine.
I got my start at The Herald stringing for the sports department. I called in high school games late at night. Once I was hired full time at The Herald, I got stuck covering politics, government and stupid water issues. But I always paid attention to local sports, and I thank George and John and all the others for keeping me in the loop with their coverage.