HOLLYWOOD — The new infield at Hollywood High smelled of fresh clay and diesel on Monday, the day before the Sheiks were to open their summer-league season on a diamond that, until six weeks ago, drained about as well as a parking lot.
For years the field between the campus and the freeway had been the kind of home surface a team apologizes for. Low spots pooled after any rain and stayed soft for days. A bad hop at shortstop was less a risk than a scheduling matter. Ground balls did unnatural things, and visiting teams learned to expect them, which is a strange advantage to hand an opponent on your own field.
“You can’t teach a kid to field a grounder true on dirt that lies to him,” said Ruben Salcido, the Sheiks’ coach for eleven seasons, leaning on a rake he had clearly used himself. “Half our errors weren’t errors. They were the field making a decision the kid couldn’t.”
The rebuild was not a district project with a ribbon and a budget. It was, Salcido said, “a spring of begging and shoveling.” A parent who runs a landscaping crew donated a weekend to regrade the infield for drainage. A retired groundskeeper from a college program drove out twice to advise on the clay mix. Players spent April afternoons that might have been batting practice instead moving wheelbarrows, laying the base paths by hand, and learning, several of them for the first time, what a well-built infield is supposed to feel like underfoot.
“I’ve played on this field three years and never seen it look like this,” said Marcus DeLeon, 17, the Sheiks’ shortstop, who took a few grounders at dusk purely, he admitted, to feel the ball come up clean. “First one hopped right into my glove like it was supposed to. I almost didn’t know what to do with it.”
The summer league is a low-key affair, a handful of area schools keeping their rosters sharp through the off-season on fields that are often, elsewhere, in rougher shape than the teams. For Salcido the season is less about the standings than about a group of returning players getting reps on a surface that, for once, will tell them the truth about their defense.
Expectations are modest. The Sheiks graduated their best pitcher, the roster is young, and the summer schedule is unforgiving of teams still finding themselves. Salcido is untroubled by any of it. He has spent eleven years measuring the program by things that don’t show up in a box score, and this spring he added a new one: a field his players built, and will therefore refuse to lose on.
At dusk the grounds crew — three teenagers and a coach — dragged the infield smooth one last time before the opener. Salcido looked it over the way Marlene Kessler looks over a pie, and turned off the lights. Tomorrow the field would finally have to answer for itself.