Hope Diamond

There is a freeway beyond the right-field foul line. Screeching police cars behind the left-field fence. Jumbo jets descending high above the pitcher’s mound.

Yet here on this patch of south Los Angeles lawn, it is strangely quiet.

A bird flutters into the deep green grass. A foot shuffles through the warning track gravel. A bat taps home plate.

So quiet, you can hear a kid dream.

So quiet, you can hear an old man sigh.

“A sanctuary,” says scout Phil Pote, shuffling toward first base on a recent clear morning at the corner of Imperial and Western.

No longer a harebrained scheme, no longer a political trinket, but, finally, a sanctuary.

A brand-new baseball field. Smack in the middle of our city. The first one built in these parts in more than 50 years.

Last week, it became official. Painted right there on the press box. Yeah, there’s even a press box.

Dennis Gilbert Field.

It rose from the vision of longtime bird dog Pote, from the influence of youth baseball guru John Young, and from the wallet of former agent Gilbert.

Yeah, a guy once famous for taking money from baseball owners on behalf of such clients as Barry Bonds and Jose Canseco just gave some of it back.

More than $1 million, his donation sprawled out grandly behind L.A. Southwest College today with bullpens and bleachers and, eventually, lights.

There’s even a raised pitching mound.

You laugh?

For years, our inner-city schools have failed to produce top pitchers because many of them play on recreational-park fields that don’t have mounds.

“We’d take a kid out to a tryout on a real field, and he’d get dizzy pitching off a hill,” recalled Young.

There’s also even a regulation backstop.

You laugh again?

This city has also had trouble producing catchers because those recreational parks have enclosed, overhanging batting cages to prevent the loss of foul balls.

“We’d bring catchers to tryouts and somebody would hit a high pop foul behind home plate and the kid would corkscrew himself into the ground trying to catch it,” said Young. “Because the kid had never seen something like that before.”

The absolutely best part of Gilbert Field, of course, is the infield.

Yep, it’s grass, which is no big deal unless you’ve ever tried to field a ground ball out of the dust.

Growing up in Gardena, Gilbert reached high school before he ever played on a grass infield. Later, after a minor-league career inspired him to become an agent, Gilbert would try to help other inner-city infielders who had also never played on grass.

“No matter what,” Gilbert said, “this infield was going to be grass.”

And no matter what, the fences enclosing his field were not going to be too tall.

“We had to have fences around the whole place, of course,” Pote said with a smile. “But they aren’t so big that kids can’t climb them with their bats and gloves.”

This is the fifth time this space has been used to describe this field.

This is the first time, though, that there has been a real field to describe.

The previous four stories have recounted crazy idealists and impossible bureaucracy and silly baseball caps.

The baseball caps story was the first one, five years ago, introducing Pote and a dream that stretched back twice as far.

It was March 1996. It was one year before the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s major league debut. Folks were already bemoaning the decreasing number of minorities in our national pastime, even as those numbers were soaring in other sports.

How could this be? I called Pote, a Panama hat-wearing Seattle Mariner scout in his mid-60s who had spent his life coaching and teaching baseball in south Los Angeles.

Pote invited me to a game involving Locke High, the alma mater of hall of famer Ozzie Smith and Eddie Murray.

Watching the game on a scraggly field in front of a handful of people, the first thing I noticed were the Locke baseball caps.

They were different colors. They had different logos. Turns out, each player was wearing a cap from his favorite major league team because the school couldn’t afford to buy them Locke caps.

“I guess this is what they mean by diversity,” Pote said with a laugh.

Across the dugout from Locke was Fremont High, a team that at one time had produced more major leaguers--23--than any other high school in the country. But on this day, its field had a hole behind home plate and bases with more mobility than the baserunners.

“This is why we need a field,” Pote said. “We have to give more of these kids a chance.”

He said he had this idea since 1989. He said he had even called Universal Studios and asked if he could call his project “Field of Dreams.”

The studios said no. So Pote decided to call it “Dream of a Field.”

He found a vacant lot on the campus of L.A. Southwest College. Officials there tentatively agreed to allow Pote to build a field if he could pay for it himself.

Being the sort of hardscrabble baseball guy who lives with a buddy near Dodger Stadium and has neither cell phone nor fax machine, Pote is not much for money.

So he started asking around. And everyone turned him down. With all the worries over police and schools and health care, who wanted to give money to a game?

He even attended a town meeting once to discuss a proposed tax in which the residents would pay $12 a year to help defray the costs of the field.

After being shouted down by one large man, Pote reached into his wallet and shouted back, “Here, I’ll give you 12 bucks to shut up so I can talk!”

He was finally able to scare up about $50,000 in seed money from Vons, Universal Studios and the Whittier Foundation.

He was also joined in his quest by Young, the locally based founder of the nationally successful Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities (RBI) program.

“We had a lot of kids playing in South Central, but we had no place to play,” Young said.

Then they contacted Gilbert. The wealthy agent now lived far from his boyhood neighborhoods. Yet they knew he remembered growing up in south Los Angeles with the likes of Bob Watson, Bobby Tolan and Reggie Smith.

“I realized, kids weren’t coming out of there to play baseball anymore,” Gilbert said. “I wanted them to have the same chances I had. I realized, a field was the perfect idea.”

In 1997, community college officials approved the building of the field.

Yeah, nearly five years ago.

Since then, good-guy Gilbert has more than tripled his original investment while fighting through a maze of community college red tape that included dealing with one construction bidder who wanted $100,000 to build a bullpen, obviously not knowing that a bullpen is simply a pitching mound down the foul lines.

“The guy thought a bullpen was a dugout,” Gilbert said.

Then, just when it was about to open, the field was shut down for another year when officials realized that foul balls were landing on the 105 Freeway. A huge fence down the first-base line was required. Another huge check was needed.

Said Gilbert: “For a while, I thought this was never going to happen.”

Said Pote: “I started to worry that I wasn’t going to live long enough.”

Finally, Gilbert found a friend in Warren Furutani, a community college official who helped him navigate the final miles.

That trip has ended with a field whose use will be shared by RBI kids and local community colleges ... but whose infield grass is being cut by parents.

“This is about everybody,” Young said.

While some RBI teams began play here last summer, the official opening was last Sunday, a splendid day featuring a few celebrities and about 80 VIPs.

Those being, the neighborhood kids. They sat through the ceremonies, then what did they do?

“What else would they do?” Pote asked.

They played ball.

*

Bill Plaschke can be reached at [email protected].