Tuesday, March 29, marks the final game of spring training before most of the boys of summer leave Arizona to open another Major League Baseball season.

But throwing out the first pitch of the March 11 game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim kept the memories fresh in the 82-year-old mind of Village of Oak Creek resident Carl Maggio.

“I didn’t expect to do this,” Maggio said. “It wasn’t because I was famous or anything like that. My arm is shot.

“This Phoenix writer who did a magazine article on me, she won this first pitch at a fundraiser. She said, ‘I can’t throw a ball. You’ve got to do it.’”

The privilege also provided a reunion of Maggio, a 1951 American Legion national champion as a 17-year-old at Crenshaw, Calif., Post 751, and his teammate Billy Lachemann, who still coaches Angels catchers.

“We grew up on this huge playground, like 10 acres,” Maggio recalled. “Billy was our catcher. Billy Consolo was our third baseman.”

Lachemann’s brothers, former MLB managers Rene and Marcel, were batboys, Maggio added, along with head coach Benny Lefebvre’s son, Jim.

“He was always on the playground,” Maggio said. “Marcel went to USC and was a pitcher after me. They were just kids.”

As was their shortstop and most famous teammate, the late Hall of Fame manager George “Sparky” Anderson — the subject of Maggio’s second book, which comes three years after his debut novel about his American Legion experience from June 1 through Sept. 9, 1951.

That summer, from a field of 16,300 teams, Crenshaw advanced from regional championships in Winslow to the national championship in Briggs Stadium in Detroit.

“This was all by train,” Maggio recalled. “It was right after the war. All the veterans came back. There were thousands of posts in the U.S., and they all sponsored baseball teams. So that brought all these players together at an unprecedented time that never will happen again.”

Anderson, 33 years later, would win his final World Series title, with Consolo as bench coach, in the renamed Tiger Stadium.

“American Legion was the only game in town at that time,” Maggio said. “There was no Babe Ruth League, there was no Pony League.

“There wasn’t even a Little League: The 12-year-old league was called Midget League at the time. Not politically correct, but in those days, they didn’t care.”

Two years later, Maggio would go on to play in the College World Series as a right fielder at the University of Southern California under head coach Rod Dedeaux, who had introduced Anderson to baseball a decade before as a batboy.

After a 40-year career as a Los Angeles Realtor, Maggio retired to Sedona in 2000.

“Since our 50-year anniversary, 2001, I had five years of reunions in Sedona with those guys,” Maggio recalled. “We had such fun times playing golf — twice — playing poker, going on Jeep rides — they loved being in Sedona.

“They’d drive a three-car caravan from California, and when they got here, I had dinner for them. A lot of them slept on my floor. I had a little bed for George in one of my four bedrooms.”

Otherwise, golf, local radio interviews and the occasional speaking engagement have contented Maggio since moving behind the 14th hole of the Sedona Golf Resort in 2006.

“I first came through here when I was 25 years old, and I said, ‘This is where I’m going to retire,’” Maggio recalled. “For me, there is no other location in the U.S. that can replace Sedona. It’s a top-three destination in the world.”

Since the 2008 death of Consolo, followed two years later by Anderson, reunions have been replaced in Maggio’s life by reminiscences.

“He and Billy were really close,” Maggio said of Consolo, who went on to play with the Boston Red Sox, pinch-running for Ted Williams near the end of his career. “Billy was the best high school player Sparky had ever seen. He was L.A. Player of the Year two years in a row.

“When you meet people at that time in your life, they become your best friends for life. You become bonded in a way that you can’t get from just playing ball with somebody.

“Sparky came to me after Billy’s death and told me, ‘I just can’t do it anymore,’” Maggio recalled. “He didn’t have the heart for it.”