Who Says Baseball Agents Never Help the Game?

There will be a shiny home plate, real bases, foul lines that are sobriety-test straight.

There will be a pitcher’s mound that is really a mound, infield grass that is grass, a backstop that stops.

Yet the best thing about Dennis Gilbert Field will not be what it looks like, but what it sounds like.

The best thing will be the children.

From around the area of Imperial and Western they will come, from places where baseball is often played amid potholes and apathy.

From dozens of South Los Angeles neighborhoods they will come, those who ignore our national pastime as much as it ignores them.

Together these children will come to a place that might seem as foreign as the moon but will eventually fit like an old leather glove.

Scout Phil Pote dreamed it.

Youth baseball pioneer John Young agreed to it.

Agent Dennis Gilbert bought it.

Then Wednesday afternoon, the Los Angeles Community College Board of Trustees approved it.

With $300,000 from Gilbert, it agreed to build the inner city’s only quality baseball field, to be completed by early 1999 on the campus of Los Angeles Southwest College.

“This is something that is not only good for the college, but for all the youth of the community,” said Southwest interim President Dr. Mary Lee.

It is a project conceived by a 64-year-old man, engineered by lawyers, approved by trustees, purchased by a rich baseball agent . . . strictly for the benefit of inner-city children.

When is the last time that happened?

“Dream of a field,” Pote said.

He has been calling it that for eight years, on street corners and weathered bleachers throughout the South Los Angeles area where he has coached and scouted for 40 years.

He called it that twice in stories in this space, stories that strongly hinted this crazy old man would never get that dream.

He called it that so often, people stopped calling him back.

Then Wednesday, it all made sense.

The community college honchos, fueled by Pote’s passion and Gilbert’s money, finally realized they had a deal they could not refuse.

Gilbert--with help from Von’s, Universal Studios and the Whittier Foundation--will fund the field on their property. The college will own it. It will run it. It can organize a school baseball team to play there.

With one stipulation.

“The neighbor kids have to have priority,” Gilbert said. “It has to be for the neighborhood.”

Many of those kids will come from Young’s RBI youth baseball league, giving this project informal but important community approval.

Through all the red tape, the community college board finally saw those kids.

In that boardroom Wednesday, Lee gave Gilbert two autographed baseballs, one to use for the first pitch at the dedication ceremony.

“This is testament to you that you have a long memory,” board member Kelly Candaele said.

Gilbert, who grew up playing on dirt fields five miles from the Southwest site, choked back tears.

“For years I’ve been looking for a way to make an impact,” Gilbert said. “When Phil and John came to me with the idea, I thought, yeah, this is it.”

Gilbert is best known as the agent for several dozen stars such as Barry Bonds and Mike Piazza. But he sometimes looks at his clientele and thinks of who is not there.

Not one is from inner-city Los Angeles.

Not one is from a community that once developed Eddie Murray, Ozzie Smith, Bob Watson, Bobby Tolan, Reggie Smith, Dock Ellis and, more recently, Darryl Strawberry and Eric Davis.

Gilbert grew up in that neighborhood, a Gardena High outfielder who made it as far as double A.

“Back then, everybody in the neighborhood played,” he said. “It was a special feeling, everybody hanging out, at the field all day, playing hearts together at night.”

Today, a look at the rosters of the four remaining teams in the major league playoffs reveals that only one player--Davis--is from inner-city Los Angeles.

There are no quality fields, few fans, half-filled teams, high school players wearing caps they brought from home, a strong few fighting a long-lost battle against the riches of basketball and marketing of football.

Thanks to the new facility, some of that could change. Baseball may never become cool again, but if it once again becomes an option that leads one athlete to a better life, then Phil Pote’s eight years have been worth it.

Who knows, there could soon be more kids like Adam Kennybrew, featured twice before in this space, the talented pitcher for Locke High who resisted his friend’s urges to become a full-time quarterback.

Well, maybe not exactly like him.

Kennybrew recently transferred to a school with better facilities in Beverly Hills.

Like the old scout said, a dream of a field.