Bronx Win Is ‘Total Bummer’ for Oceanside

With historic Yankee Stadium looming just over the smokestacks and rooftops, folks in this collection of gritty, ethnic neighborhoods across the Harlem River from Manhattan have always cheered themselves hoarse for their beloved Bronx Bombers.

Nothing’s changed this summer, except the South Bronx team that has stolen the hearts of bartenders, cabbies and truck drivers all across town aren’t those brash big leaguers in Yankee pinstripes.

They’re the boys who play for Rolando Paulino’s All-Stars. Better known as the Baby Bombers, they are the cream of the hundreds of youngsters who play in his ragtag league.

This collection of Spanish-speaking, underprivileged 12-year-olds is the first Bronx team--and only the fourth ever from New York City--to make it to the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pa.

Led by pitching sensation Danny Almonte--who has befuddled opposing hitters with a blistering 80 mph fastball and the earnest demeanor of a kid who hangs his baseball cap in a gloomy South Bronx tenement building--this scrappy team has them scratching their heads in amazement not only in New York but all over the country.

Yet nowhere has Baby Bomber Mania hit like it has here in the South Bronx, in places like Glenroy’s Tavern on 149th Street. On Thursday night, when Danny pitched a one-hitter to beat the team from Oceanside and move on to today’s U.S. championship game, the beer-guzzlers and shot-drinkers cheered as they hung up “K” banners behind the bar for each of his 16 strikeouts.

“Last night, for the first time anyone here can remember, we didn’t watch the Yanks on television,” said Glenroy’s regular Jose Colon, a slight man wearing a fedora and a sleeveless undershirt.

“We turned all three TVs to watch the Baby Bombers. These days, they’re the only game in town.”

Watching a replay of the controversial moment in Thursday’s game, in which a Baby Bomber missed touching second base on his way to scoring the game’s only run, the Glenroy’s crowd only shrugs its shoulders--offering the sheepish grins of fans who aren’t always used to getting the calls.

That’s just baseball, they say.

The success of these Little Leaguers--mostly Dominican and Puerto Rican players, kids who have taken on and beaten those from the richer suburbs--has brought some swagger back to the blue-collar South Bronx.

This is, after all, the former home of Fort Apache, the nearly lawless New York City Police Department precinct of the 1970s. Like Harlem, the South Bronx has enjoyed a bit of an urban renaissance. But for the most part, this remains a bleak landscape dominated by major industry, waste-transfer stations and other polluters.

“It’s the South Bronx. Nothing good is supposed to happen here,” said Glenroy’s bartender Angelo Arroyo, a smile creasing his lips like a Danny Almonte slider. “But guess what? Something good is happening here. And these kids are making it happen.”

On a steamy Friday morning, Latin music blared from car radios on streets where the business signs are mostly in Spanish, where police often open the fire hydrants to cool off the kids on the hottest summer days.

At Glenroy’s Tavern, the regulars are tired of hearing the complaints from losing coaches and parents that the South Bronx All-Stars, especially Danny, look and play like much older kids.

“They’re suggesting that we’re throwing ringers in there, which makes me mad,” said Colon, adjusting his fedora. “Maybe it’s because many of our kids are immigrants. But they got birth certificates, every one of them.”

The gentle force behind the Bronx Little League team is Paulino, a 38-year-old sportswriter for Noticias del Mundo, a Long Island-based Spanish-language daily.

After fielding a team in his native Dominican Republic, which made it to the Little League World Series in 1987, Paulino moved to the South Bronx to try to match the old baseball magic with a new roster of Latin American players.

But equipment and fields to play on proved hard to come by in this rough-and-tumble neighborhood.

So Paulino’s league, which grew steadily to 36 teams, picked up games wherever they could. League officials waited in line for permits to play on weed-choked lots in city parks, which were so overbooked that teams had to cut games short to make room for the next bunch of kids.

“The only fields we could find were so strewn with rocks and glass that if you fell, you got hurt,” said league organizer Joan Dalmau. “My son was riding to a game when seven guys took his bike away and beat him up. This isn’t the best neighborhood to be a kid.”

In those early days, most teams had no uniforms or, at best, wore mismatched jerseys.

League vice president Johnny King remembers how their organization started humbly, with only one baseball and one bat. And he recalls how many local businesses refused to sponsor the teams.

“Sometimes we wanted to forget about the whole thing,” said the 63-year-old King, who has led hundreds of fans on the four-hour bus ride to Pennsylvania for each Little League playoff game.

“Nobody wanted to give our kids a chance. We’d throw raffles and nobody would buy tickets. I think it hurt those kids to see that.”

Benji Soto, a 17-year-old who played in the league’s early years, recalls his discouragement at the lack of equipment or a place to play.

“For practice, we’d take a stick and throw beans and bottle caps,” he said. “We tried to improve our swings any way we could. And after you’ve learned to hit a bottle cap with a stick, a real baseball looks more like a big piece of bruised fruit coming at you.”

Now lots of South Bronx kids want to play like Danny, who so far has thrown a perfect game, a no-hitter and a one-hitter in the playoffs and has been nicknamed Little Unit, after his hero, Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher Randy Johnson, known as the Big Unit.

Eleven-year-old Brylen Eimentel waited Friday for a pickup game on a city field that featured a metal trash can lid as home plate. “My mom wants me to play in the Paulino league next year,” said the baseball novice. “I want to be a shortstop, to catch the ball and make an out.”

Win or lose, the All-Stars will return home for a parade Wednesday and free admission to Yankee Stadium to see the other Bronx Bombers play.

King--who now wears a pager to field calls from mothers seeking spots in the league for their sons and from Hollywood producers who want to tell the team’s story--says the Baby Bombers have something else awaiting them here.

It’s a new $3-million field at South Bronx High that has been underwritten by corporate donors. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” asks King as he peers through the chain-link fence at the lush green outfield.

“They’re calling it the Field of Dreams.”