Big Hearts and Strong Hands Build a Ballpark

The staunch old man from Michoacan paused for a rare break in his work, with a hint of pride in his rheumy eyes. Behind the crowd, he stood alone and unnoticed, watching children practice on the field he has tended every day from dawn to dusk, much like his small patch of land back in Mexico.

The rain had rolled in the night before and soaked the baseball diamond at Garvanza Park. The teams were getting ready to play. A mariachi band warbled under the clouds as dozens of parents and players ate hot dogs and nachos, waiting for the mud to dry.

But Creyes Reyes, who is 83, could now rest. As bedraggled as opening day was this weekend, the Little League field he and his neighbors had been fighting to build for years had finally become the showpiece they wanted--where families would gather in this quiet bit of Latin America set in northeast Los Angeles.

The new snack bar stands like a monument under the hillside of teetering bungalows--Italian stucco, ceramic tile and porcelain in a part of town where most parks feature steel toilets and cinder-block facades.

And Reyes’ landscaping--the bougainvillea climbing the chain-link fences, the ambling cobble sidewalks and pruned shrubs--offer a stark contrast to the giant dirt pit that defined this vacant Department of Water and Power lot for years.

His work here is just one example of how the community came together to bring Little League from the suburbs to a humble part of urban L.A.

Joe and Cathy Molina started the effort in 1995. A baseball fanatic, Joe had been coaching for almost a decade, but had to take his children to Alhambra to play because there were no fields in his Highland Park area. Eventually, he started his own team.

“We were the nomadic Little League,” Molina said. “We were chartered but didn’t have a field, so we’d travel around.”

When the city removed the Highland Park Reservoir from the lot across the street, Molina began a campaign to bring his team there. He petitioned city staff and eventually reached the DWP general manager, S. David Freeman. Known for his cowboy hats and down-home persona, Freeman quickly took to the idea of a ball field on the property.

“We owe a lot of this to the electric cowboy,” Molina quipped about Freeman.

Although the department wanted to donate the lot on Meridian Street, it could not do so to a private entity, he said. So after some years of bureaucratic wrangling, Molina worked out a deal in which DWP would lease it to the parks department, which would, in turn, lease it to his Los Angeles Little League team.

But even with large donations from the city and Little League Baseball Inc., there was much work to be done. The neighbors had to raise more than $100,000 and do much of the labor.

Although the ball field itself was completed two years ago, the surrounding area was just dust and weeds. They wanted to make it more inviting.

Molina trolled around different construction sites asking contractors to dump extra dirt on the pits behind the bleachers, where a park would be. He petitioned City Councilman Nick Pacheco to acquire money for trees and landscaping.

Meanwhile, with no maintenance crews, mowing the outfield with a push lawn mower took entire weekend afternoons.

A former player on Molina’s team, Diego Garcia, stepped up to that task. After working all week as a UPS supervisor, the 22-year-old spent his Saturdays pacing up and down the grass with the Snapper, row after endless row.

To his relief, the organization just got a ride-along mower.

“With the tractor mower, it takes about two hours to do the outfield now,” he said.

Other neighbors donated their kitchens as temporary snack bars. When they got the money to build a real one, Jess Esparza, 67, didn’t like that it was going to be a bare concrete box. So the general contractor got his crews together to make the building a point of pride. He subcontracted the tile roof and worked to get European stucco and other materials at cost.

Now, the tile and porcelain bathrooms would befit any business office.

But it was Reyes, the quiet, diminutive man, who devoted all his time to the field in the last year. And even at 83, he can break men a quarter of his age working side by side.

Reyes came from Mexico to stay with his daughter in an apartment across the street. The subsistence farmer who can’t spell his name was accustomed to waking up long before dawn on his ranch in the hills. In Highland Park, he was not comfortable sitting inside, so he spent the days walking around the then-vacant lot picking up cans.

When the ballpark was built, he stumbled upon a project that has made this field his occupation--and source of joy--ever since.

Molina and his friends had been trying to pick away at a hard, giant mound of clay to plant a redwood tree and a bit of lawn. “We couldn’t make any headway on it,” Molina said.

On a hot day, Reyes, who is not quite 5 feet tall, grabbed the pick and started swinging away. “We saw him walk up and we said, ‘That old man is going to die,’ ” Molina recalled.

But Reyes kept at it and moved the entire hill.

“He’s worked other guys to death here,” Molina said. “All the maintenance around here. All the gardening. He does everything. He’s the backbone of this organization.”

A man of few words, Reyes’ weathered face just breaks into a smile when Molina talks about him.

Now, the old campesino unlocks the gates at 5 every morning and begins his work. He built two cobblestone paths, one in the shape of a rattlesnake. When other volunteers started to plant the bougainvillea, he taught them how to wire it up against the fence so that it would grow upward. All day, he is on the field, pruning, picking up trash, watering and tinkering on the swaths of dirt that still need to be landscaped.

His pay is an occasional six-pack of beer, a $20 bill here and there--nothing approaching a salary. On opening day, he was so excited that he shaved and put on a borrowed USA sweatshirt that would be more fitting on a college student.

“It’s coming along,” he said. “Poco a poco.”