HOLLYWOOD — Opening day arrived on Saturday under a sky that had finally dried out, and the league’s problem was on full display before the first pitch: more children in uniform than the field could comfortably hold.
The neighborhood Little League, which draws players from the flats south of the hills, registered more than two hundred children this spring, its biggest sign-up in at least a decade and the second straight year of growth. League officials count that as a triumph and a headache in equal measure, because the number of diamonds available to them has not moved. It is one, shared three ways, with a rotation posted on a laminated sheet that the coaches study like a subway map.
“We turned nobody away, and I’m proud of that,” said Ruben Escamilla, 52, who has run the league’s board for six years and coaches a division of eight-year-olds himself. “But proud doesn’t get you a second infield. Right now the tee-ballers practice in a parking lot with cones because the real field is booked from the minute school lets out until it’s too dark to see the ball.”
The squeeze is a Hollywood story as much as a baseball one. Flat, open land is scarce and expensive, and the few public fields in the area are shared among leagues, schools and pickup games that all want the same after-school hours. The league has looked into renting practice time at a private lot and found the rates well beyond a budget that runs on registration fees, a snack bar and the occasional car wash.
For the families, the crowding is a small price. Delia Okonjo, whose two sons play in different divisions, said the league had become the thing that organized her family’s spring, for better and worse. “Some weeks I’m at that field five days out of seven,” she said, laughing. “But they’re outside, they’re with their friends, and they’re learning to lose gracefully, which is the hardest part of the sport and the most useful.”
Opening ceremonies kept to tradition. Each team was announced and jogged out along the baseline, the youngest players in caps a size too large, and a local pastor threw a ceremonial first pitch that bounced twice. A moment of silence honored a longtime volunteer umpire who died over the winter and for whom the league has named its sportsmanship award.
Escamilla spent the morning moving between three games and a parking-lot practice, radio in hand, sorting the small crises that a shorthanded league generates by the hour. He said the board would spend the season making the case to the city for more field access, a fight he has lost before and intends to keep losing until it works. For now, he said, the kids do not know the field is too small. They just know it is finally warm enough to play.