Years after a Sacramento baseball coach went to prison for sex abuse, his players are suing

Tim Anderson was 12 or 13 and playing baseball in front of his family’s Rosemont home in the late 1970s. A man driving by stopped and started talking to him.

“I noticed that he had a baseball uniform on, and he mentioned to me that he had seen me playing Little League, thought I was good, and wondered if I would be interested in having him help me further my skills as a baseball player,” Anderson recalled.

The two began working out almost daily, spending hours practicing and using the field at Sacramento City College, where Anderson ended up attending summer baseball camps and later played college ball.

Anderson would go on to be drafted twice, once in the first round by the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1986, who signed him to a contract that led to him playing in the minor leagues for a time.

But he never played a day in the majors, he says, mostly because of that man — Mark Port — and the day Port saw him out in front of his house playing baseball.

“Little did I know that that meeting would probably be the worst day of my life,” Anderson said.

Anderson says Port, then about 18, began showering him with gifts, buying him Major League hats from all the teams and taking him to see the Oakland As and San Francisco Giants play.

“Anything that a young kid would desire,” Anderson said. “There wasn’t anything in my life that I wanted to do more than be a baseball player.”

Anderson is now 56, an entrepreneur and an El Dorado Hills resident. He has also joined two other men – fellow baseball camper Adam Barsanti and a third “John Doe” plaintiff – in filing two lawsuits against Port, as well naming SCC Baseball Camps and Los Rios Community College District, and seeking damages for negligence, sexual harassment and other claims.

They have filed in Sacramento Superior Court with a deadline approaching – the California’s Child Victims Act gives victims of abuse until Dec. 31 to file such suits.

“This case is about the tragic, preventable, serial childhood sexual abuse that spanned decades, destroyed lives, and forever tainted plaintiffs’ love of the game of baseball,” the suit says. “Port’s sexual abuse of plaintiffs and other young boys who attended SCC Baseball Camps’ summer baseball camps at Sacramento City College’s (‘SCC’) baseball practice complex in the 1980s and 1990s turned their Field of Dreams into a Field of Disillusionment.

‘There were multiple assaults’

Today, Mark Joseph Port, 61, is a registered sex offender living in South Carolina after serving nearly three years for a conviction on lewd and lascivious conduct on a child under 14, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Anderson said Port began sexually assaulting him more than four decades ago him in a series of attacks that continued for years.

“There were multiple assaults,” he said. “There was a Disneyland trip where I was assaulted. I was assaulted at his home.

“There were lots of things that went on relative to showering. He would always watch me shower, would ask me if I’ve ever had sex. A lot of pornography at his home, where he would be masturbating and I would be sitting there not knowing what to do. Just a lot of things that psychologically just ruined me as an individual.”

The lawsuit alleges that “the baseball camp run by SCC Baseball Camps was so intertwined with SCC and its Hall of Fame Baseball Head Coach Jerry Weinstein that the SCC baseball team roster and coaching staff was almost indistinguishable from the list of staff at SCC Baseball Camps’ baseball camps.”

“Weinstein founded SCC Baseball Camps, and his athletes and coaching staff directed and worked for the SCC Baseball Camps summer baseball camps,” the suit says.

Allegations ‘incredibly troubling’

Port, reached by phone on Dec. 2, expressed surprise at the filing of the suits, which The Bee sent to him by email. He did not respond to a subsequent request for comment.

Los Rios spokesman Gabe Ross provided a statement on behalf of the district and Sac City calling the allegations “disturbing and incredibly troubling.”

“The current Los Rios and SCC administration is just being made aware of these allegations, and will be working with legal counsel to respond appropriately,” the statement added.

And Weinstein, one of the most prominent figures in Sacramento’s storied baseball history, said he was not aware of Port’s abuse of campers until Sacramento sheriff’s detectives arrested Port in 2003.

“I am shocked and saddened to learn of these allegations,” said Weinstein. He is not named as a defendant but is accused in the lawsuit of not taking action against Port or alerting authorities to his behavior.

“I had no knowledge of any abuse by Mr. Port prior to learning of his arrest.,” he said.

Normally, the deadline for filing such lawsuits would have passed decades ago.

But the 2019 passage of California’s Child Victims Act reopened the door. Anderson said he first learned of the possibility of pursuing legal action after reading a story in The Bee earlier this year about a similar lawsuit against Sacramento’s Capital Christian School and a former teacher there accused of abuse from 40 years ago.

Now, the same law firms in the Capital Christian suits, Greenberg Gross LLP and Jeff Anderson and Associates, are pursuing legal action in the decades-old baseball abuse cases.

Two men describe how coach ‘groomed’ them

Barsanti, 39, is a Caltrans analyst and a Roseville resident. Anderson and Barsanti described the abuse they endured – and the similar methods Port used to groom them as young boys – in a joint interview in The Sacramento Bee newsroom last month with attorney Daniel Cha.

“When they were children, the plaintiffs and their families should have been able to count on venerated local institutions such as Sacramento City College and Sacramento City College Baseball Camps to provide coaching, development, and instruction in a safe environment,” Cha said. “Instead, they provided Mark Port years of unfettered and unsupervised access to minors, despite his criminal history and ongoing glaring red flags of misconduct, collectively resulting in decades of abuse.

“Tim Anderson and Adam Barsanti bravely came forward in 2003 to have Port criminally convicted and required to register as a sex offender. Now the time has come to also hold accountable the institutions that failed in their basic obligation to keep kids safe.”

Anderson said he believes he may have been Port’s first victim, and Barsanti said he was victimized in 1990 when he was 8 or 9 and Port turned his attention to him.

Port, who the suits say coached at the camps and at Sac City from about 1981 to 1997, had been a lifelong friend of the Barsanti family, attending high school with Barsanti’s father and playing and coaching with him at Sac City college.

“I was almost like hand delivered, because he was already a part of the family,” Barsanti said. “He had spent time with my parents during their early 20s, their teenage years, their dating years.”

And, like Anderson, Port began giving Barsanti gifts, offering trips and paying special attention to him at the summer baseball camps, where the lawsuit says Port “began de facto running SCC Baseball Camps’ baseball camps as well as serving as a third-base coach for the SCC baseball team.”

Barsanti started out as a bat boy for the camps, and then around the age of 11 or 12 started practicing with Port, he said.

“We’d go over to his house, we’d work out in the same sort of fashion,” Barsanti said. “I was a catcher and he was a catcher, so there was a commonality there. So we would practice those drills to improve my abilities.

“And, you know, I think at 13 years old, that’s when he would sit me down and we would watch pornography... and started in really, really the same fashion...On the way to his house, he would ask, ‘Do you want me to stop and get a video?’

“And, as a 13-year-old going through puberty, it’s like you don’t really know how to answer the question.”

Port abused Barsanti “multiple times,” Barsanti said, watched him shower and kept him close by during the summer camps, always making sure that Barsanti ate lunch with him rather than with the other boys.

“I can’t recall one time that I ate with the other campers,” Barsanti said. “I always, always ate in the coach’s office...

“All the campers would eat and play video games and all that stuff, and they would socialize. I can’t remember one instance where I did that.”

Are there others?

Now, the two men say they believe there are other victims who have yet to come forward or aren’t willing to. And they ask why no one said anything about such behavior, why no one reported it, and why no one knew that Port “had been arrested for repeatedly committing indecent exposure with young boys” prior to becoming a coach at the camps, according to the lawsuit.

“On information and belief, in approximately 1979, several young boys reported that a man was approaching them in his vehicle and masturbating in front of them,” the lawsuit says. “The boys described the man’s vehicle and explained that these incidents had occurred approximately 5 or 6 times.

“A Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department detective matched the vehicle to Port, and the minors identified Port as the culprit. On information and belief, Port was arrested for indecent exposure as an 18 year-old adult. On information and belief, Port pled guilty to a charge of ‘disturbing the peace’ as a result of these incidents.”

The suits say Port was hired at the camps despite the previous conduct, and that after one boy’s parents reported that Port “was inappropriately and constantly calling their son” Port was “allowed to quietly leave his position at SCC Baseball Camps and Los Rios CCD.”

“No one from SCC Baseball Camps or Los Rios CCD ever alerted authorities to Port’s inappropriate interactions and abuse of minor children, nor did anyone from SCC Baseball Camps or Los Rios CCD reach out to any of the other boys or young men (or their parents) whom Port had taken a suspiciously excessive interest in in order to warn of or investigate Port’s behavior,” the suit says. “Ultimately, the failure to report Port’s abuse of children led to Port’s continuing sexual abuse of Barsanti.

“Port got a job at a produce company, and he arranged them to hire Barsanti as well. During this time period, when Barsanti was approximately 15 to 16 years old, Port escalated his sexual abuse of Barsanti.”

The suit also alleges that Weinstein’s wife “reportedly noticed Port’s red flags and commented to her husband that she suspected Port was a pedophile/child molester.”

That comment came from a call Weinstein made to Anderson after he tried suicide and “Weinstein acknowledged that Weinstein’s wife had always known that Port was a pedophile,” the suit says. “This acknowledgment, of course, was much too little, much too late.”

Anderson said that as the years went by he never told anyone what had happened to him, even as he found himself unable to take advantage of opportunities in life. He walked away from spring training camp with the Oakland A’s in 1989, and later was accepted as a cadet at the California Highway Patrol academy.

“I got in there for two days and just mentally broke down, and that was something I really wanted to do,” Anderson said. “So there were things like that that have happened in my life that have caused me to run away from it.

“And it all goes to that first sexual assault and the trauma of a kid not knowing why, why is an individual on the back of me in the middle of the night?”

‘It was the death of my soul’

Anderson said he could not bring himself even to watch a baseball game until a couple of years ago, and that he did not “confront my demons until 2003,” when he had a mental breakdown and was hospitalized. He said he tried to take his life and finally confided in his wife what had happened to him as a boy.

Then, he emailed Barsanti’s uncle to tell him what had happened with Port, and eventually family members called sheriff’s detectives and Port was arrested.

Port was sentenced in September 2003 to three years and released on parole May 24, 2006, California prison officials say.

All three plaintiffs – Anderson, Barsanti and “John Doe” – say they have suffered since childhood because of Port and because no one stepped in to ask why an adult was spending so much time with children at the baseball camps.

“Since I was a child, I have carried with me the anger, shame, and humiliation that Mark Port caused when he sexually assaulted me,” “John Doe” said in a statement to The Bee. “I will bear that burden the rest of my life.

“Compounding his immediate damage, I have felt betrayed by the adults at SCC and SCC Baseball Camp who failed to take any action on the many red flags of his behavior, including letting Port divert me from a school-sponsored internship at SCC that was supposed to be for high school credit. To later learn that I was referred to as Port’s ‘new Tim’ behind my back underscores the obvious inappropriateness of Port’s behavior, and makes inexcusable the failure to act by any other adult who should have been looking after the safety of the kids.”

Barsanti remembers that Port referred to the boys as his “little buddies.”

“We want to prevent other ‘little buddies’ with the story that we’re telling,” Barsanti said.

Anderson, who has two teenage twin daughters with his wife, said he plans to tell them what happened to him as a child and that he is “on high alert at all times” against anyone who could abuse his girls or anyone else.

“It was the death of my soul when this happened,” Anderson said. “And I want to prevent it from ever happening to another kid, because the damages are lifelong.”

This story was originally published December 18, 2022 at 5:00 AM.