HOLLYWOOD — Summer league keeps no standings that anyone official will vouch for, which is why Ruben Salcido was able to spend Sunday afternoon insisting the record did not matter while knowing it to the decimal.
“Ten and four,” he said, before anyone asked. “Which does not matter.”
Hollywood High closed its summer season with a 6–2 win over a team from Eagle Rock, in front of the usual sixty or so spectators arranged, as they have been all summer, behind the backstop rather than in the thirty bleacher seats that face the afternoon sun. The game was tidy and short and the Sheiks played it the way they have played all fourteen: patiently at the plate, and almost without incident on the infield they regraded themselves in April.
The final accounting on that infield is the number Salcido will actually carry into the fall. One error in fourteen games — a throw pulled wide in late July that he classifies, on review, as “a decision, not a hop.” Two summers ago the program charged eleven errors to the field itself, in his own private ledger of grounders that struck low spots and became doubles. This year the ledger is empty.
“Every ball came up where the glove was,” said Marcus DeLeon, the rising senior shortstop who spent his April pushing wheelbarrows and his summer being rewarded for it. “By July I stopped flinching. You don’t know you’ve been flinching for two years until you stop.”
The other development of the summer stands about six feet tall and throws left-handed. The sophomore who finished the July opener with a wet towel on his neck finished the season Sunday with two innings, three strikeouts, and a 2–1 curveball thrown without so much as a glance at the dugout — the pitch Salcido spent eight weeks granting him permission to believe in.
“In June he threw it like he was borrowing it,” Salcido said. “Now it’s his. That’s the whole summer. That’s worth more than the ten wins, which, again, do not matter.”
What the summer did not fix, because nothing has, is the northeast corner of the outfield, which drains badly, grows what a groundskeeper would generously call a mixed surface, and swallowed one otherwise catchable fly ball in August. There is no money for the corner. There is no plan for the corner. Asked about the corner, Salcido looked at it for a while.
“Next spring,” he said. “I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it until it’s embarrassing for somebody other than me.”
The field now passes to the fall. The football program has the mornings, the girls’ soccer program has the afternoons, and the diamond gets the winter to itself. Salcido sent his players home Sunday with a handshake apiece and no speech, on the grounds that the speech was the infield, and they had already heard it seventy times this summer, every time the ball came up true.