The San Antonio sandlot baseball scene has grown in one short year from one team to seven, a testament to the popularity of the easily accessible amateur sport.
To celebrate, six of San Antonio’s teams will join on Saturday for a season-ending showcase at Nelson Wolff Municipal Stadium, the home of the San Antonio Missions Minor League Baseball team.
For $5, spectators can watch three games. The first game starts at 10:30 a.m., pitting the San Antonio Roses against the Tigres de San Antonio. San Antonio’s original team, the Texas Dingers, takes on Los Slowpokes, the second team formed in the city, at 1 p.m., and a 3:30 p.m. game between the Arsenal Abejas and Los Monos follows the Dingers match.
The games will be complemented by food trucks, local beer, a vendors market and a DJ to enliven the proceedings.
The party atmosphere is part of the point, according to Joe Alderete, a firefighter who manages the Tigres team. “We’re throwing a party with music and food and vendors, and a baseball game just happens to be going on on the side,” he said.
And for the teams, at-bats and fielding at the stadium will create lifelong memories, he said. “It’s an opportunity to live out a kid’s dream, to play on a professional-level field.”
Partying with purpose
To secure the stadium, Alderete reached out to family friend Hope Andrade, former Texas Secretary of State and a member of the Missions ownership group.
Fellow member Reid Ryan, son of Major League Baseball hall of fame pitcher Nolan Ryan and a former baseball executive, got on board when he learned of the Tigres’ charitable efforts in raising scholarship money for area high school students through merchandise sales, Alderete said.
During the showcase, the team will announce $1,000 scholarships for two student athletes from Luther Burbank High School and John F. Kennedy High School.
“This is a culmination of all of the merch sales and beer sales and gate sales that we had processed through our first year and a little bit into this year,” Alderete said.
Alderete echoed the Fiesta motto when describing the example laid down by the Texas Playboys — the Austin-based team that started the sandlot revolution, as the growing phenomenon is known by enthusiasts — in donating money collected from games to selected causes.
“They always have a party with a purpose, and we’re just trying to follow that blueprint of creating that party atmosphere and philanthropic atmosphere,” Alderete said.
Community-building
Whether there’s enough of an audience for seven local sandlot teams — and the possibility of a rumored eighth new team — is an open question.
Crowds watching weekend games at Pittman-Sullivan Park have dwindled, along with an absence of food and beverage vendors, merchandise tables and even the makeshift chalkboard scoreboards that kept track of game scores.
Tanner Freeman, a sandlot enthusiast and member of San Antonio’s original team, the Texas Dingers, hopes the showcase will help revive waning interest among audiences and reinvigorate the community-building aspect that drives the game.
“The thing that we all love about sandlot is the spectacle of it, the experience of the patrons, and how people focus on the whole community, not just being the people on the field,” Freeman said.
But as local teams have been exposed to more competitive teams from other cities, skill-building has come to the fore for some players, he said, at the cost of the game’s accessibility for less-skilled players who just want to be part of the sandlot community.
“As we’ve skewed more competitive with Monday night scrimmages and stuff, we’ve lost a lot of the chefs and the artists,” Freeman said, speaking of the casual players that have populated most sandlot teams.
He’s initiated conversations among teams on how to strike a balance between the competition on the diamond and the community in the stands.
“Everyone wants to have something that friends and family can come to and it feels like there’s some hype around it, and they’re not just playing for their own gratification but also for a bigger community gathering,” Freeman said.
Saturday will be just such an opportunity, Alderete said. “We want to make sure that we’re promoting not only our philanthropic view but a good time for families to come out, grab a burger, grab a beer, shop at a vintage shop,” and maybe, should the crack of the bat or a hearty cheer draw attention, take note of the games being played on the field.
