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Field of dreams? Yankee Stadium shadows rundown park
Updated: Thursday October 26, 2000 8:01 AM
By Tom Rinaldi, CNNSI.com BRONX, N.Y. -- The field looks like it could be in anywhere, America. But look a little closer to find out where you really are. Where first base is a rock... Where the outfield is, conveniently, a parking lot... And where the shadows fall a little early, cast by that bigger ballpark just across the street. Macombs Dam Park might be next to the home of the Yankees, but here look in the dirt and you won't even find home plate.
"Currently, there's a lot of money being allocated to fix up downtown Manhattan," said Julio Vives, a Little Leaguecoach. "But when it comes to the inner-city parks, I haven't seen any upgrading in any park in a number of years." One of the local players, Luis Inoa Jr., 13, adds thes park is in need of repair. "Sometimes I see them fixing up the field, like the leaves and picking up the garbage that they leave. But I've never seen no one fixing the field." Macombs Dam Park is part of the Yankees Neighborhood program. One of 97 baseball fields in the Bronx, it is likely the most valuable - not for its grass, but for its ground. For 15 years, George Steinbrenner and city officials have been trying to turn the park into a parking lot for fans coming to Yankee Stadium. So far, they've failed. The field survives, and in a borough where little leagues have waiting lists, that's all that matters to its players.
"A lot of people in my building and in my neighborhood like baseball," said Anthony Peralta, 14, "and a lot of us just come down here and practice." And for many of them, like 10-year-old Julian Vives, it's a game of make believe. "When you are playing on this field and there's a real ballgame going on and you hear all the players' names being announced, when you're batting over here you pretend you're one of them." On most fields, you'd have to pretend. In the borough of the team that has 25 world championships, the Little League team that won this year's New York state championship played here, on a sandlot on Webster Avenue a few miles from the stadium. The Rolando Paulino All-Stars came within one win from going all the way to the Little League World Series in August, the best in Bronx history. Yet they wouldn't have competed beyond the boroughs at all, if not for a $10,000 grant from Bronx City Councilman Alberto Carrion, Jr. "The schools the kids go to don't have their own fields," Carrion said. "The little leagues don't have home fields and they have to kick and scratch and jockey with other teams to get playing time in the City of New York, just to practice, let along during the winter. You realize the kids here are the real champs." Macombs Dam Park isn't very different from many other parks in the Bronx. In fact, it may be better. But sitting here, so close to Yankee Stadium, should it somehow be more? In the borough where so much of baseball's history has been written, does the sport itself have level playing fields on which its youngest teams can compete? "This is a park right here next to the Yankees," said the elder Vives. "They have a wonderful field over there...but yet where the kids practice at, my son and other kids here, is just abandoned. It's not well kept the way it should it be." City councilman Carrion thinks the Yankees should do more. "They do have an organization that gives grants out to non-profits and youth organizations. It doesn't do enough." Young Inoa wishes somebody would fix the field and he has some suggestions. "Like cut it straight, fix the dirt, help the grass," he says. "It could be a good field." It's a popular notion that baseball is dead in America's cities. If that were true in the Bronx, would there be a field to bury it in? Not here, anyway. A home run away from Yankee Stadium, this field may not be a diamond, but it's in use.
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