Replica Stadiums Bring Dreams to Life

CATHEDRAL CITY, Calif. — Who needs New York’s Yankee Stadium? Here in Southern California, a place that has always had a knack for illusion, Little Leaguers and softball teams play on a replica of the House That Ruth Built.

As that other playoff, the World Series, marches toward a conclusion, guys who have to work day jobs in the morning are playing their own championship games in this desert town next door to Palm Springs.

The mini-Yankee Stadium sits next to the brick and ivy of a three-quarter sized Wrigley Field and a scaled down Fenway Park with quirky dimensions that include the ballpark’s towering Green Monster left field wall.

Luis Lopez, a 33-year-old Cathedral City resident, plays on eight different softball teams just so he can take the field several times a week.

“The first few times you’re out there it’s very emotional,” said Lopez, an avid sports fan, which is evident by the name of his 5-year-old son, Shaquille Lopez. “It’s like you feel something inside when you play on these fields.”

The walls and arches at the Big League Dreams sports complex may be a facade, but the competition is real.

“Instead of playing for a $106,000 World Series share and a fat ring, they’re playing for a T-shirt,” said Mark Cresse, a former Dodger coach. “They love the thrill. They’re spilling blood. It’s fun to watch them.”

On the Wrigley field, the Indian Ridge Country Club team battled Aleman Tile on a recent evening. It was easy to spot Indian Ridge’s sponsors. They filled an entire row, tanned legs crossed in the same direction as they cheer the action with polite golf claps.

Nine-year-old Chelsea Boschert was less restrained. She was in the stands dancing the Cabbage Patch. She screamed a chant familiar around here: “Go Daddy! Go Daddy!”

Lopez, the pitcher for Aleman, used to get choked up each time he played in one of the fantasy stadiums. He knew their trademark details well because when he first came to this country nearly two decades ago from war-ravaged, baseball-crazy Nicaragua he watched baseball on TV to ease his homesickness.

Playing the game now, he said, is somehow tied up with his feelings for the United States. “I crossed the border with only jeans and shoes. I worked three jobs, through the night, through the day. I came with nothing, but now I have my wife, I have my son, I have my house, I have three cars. I want more,” he said. “I believe in this country you can have anything you want if you keep trying. It’s just like baseball--a little bit at a time, and sometimes a really good play.”

Much, of course, has been made of baseball’s relationship to the American psyche and the bruises suffered by the love affair in recent decades because of strikes, the way players jump teams and family franchises giving way to corporate ownership.

But on this, the literal grass-roots level, the passion for baseball has never faltered. Promoters say this $6-million sports complex, which was partly funded by Cathedral City, shows there’s an appetite for playing ball that’s barely been tapped.

Big League Dreams opened amid doubts in 1998. At the time there were 36 community teams in the entire desert resorts area, and critics wondered how many more players an area with a year-round population of 270,000 people could support. Now 185 teams pay $300 each for a 10-week season.

Two more Big League Dreams complexes are under construction in Chino Hills and the Riverside County community of Jurupa, this time adding historic parks to the mix such as Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field, New York’s Polo Grounds and Detroit’s Tiger Stadium. More than 60 other cities have asked for presentations from the company.

“There’s an endless demand for a place where people can play their dreams. In fields like these, people are pretending they’re Mike Piazza. They’re living their moment,” said Rick Odekirk, who founded the Cathedral City sports complex with his brother, Jeff, and his father Joe, a developer who designed the fields by poring over photographs and blueprints of the real thing.

Jeff Odekirk recalled playing on a community ball team with three generations of Odekirks. His grandfather was the pitcher. Rick Odekirk remembered the condition of the fields where they played: “The sprinklers came on once in a while during a game and once in a while the lights went off. The umpires showed up late and gopher holes showed up everywhere.”

The Big League Dreams fields have about as much similarity to those fields as Major League ball has to T-ball. The dugouts here have mist cooling systems. Home plate faces a packed stadium, thanks to life-sized panoramic photos of baseball fans caught in vivid, on-their-feet, gesturing detail.

Roger McDowell--who pitched for the Mets during the 1986 World Series, but might be most recognized for spitting on Kramer in a “Seinfeld” episode--said the replica stadiums make amateur ball more fun.

“When I played Little League they didn’t have fences. If someone hit one out, you had to wait for someone to go get the ball,” said McDowell, co-host of a radio sports program broadcast from the complex. “Now someone in the Coachella Valley can make a play at third in Yankee Stadium.”

McDowell, however, says it isn’t exactly the same as playing in a big league park.

“You don’t get Yankee fans throwing things at you. You don’t get the smell of hot dogs and spilled beer and singing in the seventh inning. You don’t have someone like Nancy Hefley on the organ or Tommy Lasorda in the dugout. You don’t have bleacher bums,” he said. “It’s not the same spirit of life and death competition.”

But Cresse, a Dodger coach who was fired after 25 years of service and now gives clinics and private batting lessons at Big League Dreams, said maybe it’s games like the ones played here that really celebrate baseball.

Cresse missed the second game of this year’s World Series because he promised the children he’s been coaching that he would watch their game. When he finally left the park, adult softball teams were just taking the field at a Wrigley Stadium surrounded by palm trees, the Santa Rosa Mountains and a balmy, starry, desert night.

“These guys have to go to work the next day and they’re slapping on a glove at 10:30 on a Sunday night,” he said. “Now, that’s for the love of the game.”