He Has A Rice Field Of Dreams

Pablo Melendez was the troubled child of suddenly divorced parents back seeking a father figure when a Wilbur Cross High School coach put his arm over his shoulder and said, ​“You’re on the team.”

A generation later, the firefighter is on a mission to upgrade Cross’s playing field and change the culture of the sport that changed his life.

That was a life-changing moment, the beginning of salvation through baseball.

Roll the clock ahead 24 years. Today Melendez, a retired New Haven fire department lieutenant, has his own son, named Cal — yes, as in Hall of Fame shortstop Cal Ripken — on the Cross nine. He is leading a campaign to upgrade the chronically run-down Rice Field, where Cross plays, so that lots of other kids can have similar experiences to his.

And he wants to change the culture of baseball, and softball for the girls, throughout New Haven’s high schools.

That begins with addressing rindown facilities beginning with Rice Field. Melendez cites Rice as the chief incriminating evidence that the national pastime remains a poor cousin to football and varsity hoops in the Elm City.

Melendez, accompanied by Cross baseball coach Angel Ramos, made that pitch (pun intended) at the monthly meeting of the East Rock Community Management Team (ERCMT) gathering at the mActivity Fitness Center on Nicoll Street.

“I’m here to see if we can fence in Rice Field. It will deter dog walkers and other people from cutting across,” Melendez said.

“You can put up signs” advertising local restaurants, for example, to bring in income, he added.

ERCMT Vice Chair Kevin McCarthy urged Melendez to make his appeal to Rebecca Bombero, who helms the city’s parks and rec department

Melendez said he is already on the agenda for an upcoming meeting of the parks commissioners. In addition, he was also pitching to see if the East Rock community — including sign-buying restaurants — might want to get on board as well.

“It’s a beautiful park,” Melendez said.

Back when he was playing — as part of a state championship-aspiring team under coach Frank Morgillo in the mid-1980s — the maintenance of the diamond did not have to compete with the needs of so many soccer fields that now criss-cross the outfield and eat it up, he said.

“I’m all for other sports,” Melendez said. ​“But soccer is encroaching. You’re destroying the baseball field.”

“The kids could get hurt,” said Coach Ramos, referring to the debris that he and the kids routinely clean up before each practice. They pick up booze nips bottles, the occasional needle, and other litter, especially in right and center field, which runs into woods where homeless encampments chronically spring up.

As a visit to the field with Melendez later in the week revealed, there are also divots all over the outfield, holes dug out, and loosely covered with dirt, in which fielders many times have turned an ankle. So far, the kids said, no one has had a fracture yet or been significantly hurt.

Yet it could happen, which is what Ramos meant when he added at the meeting, ​“The kids could get hurt, and sue the city.”

A questioner at the meeting asked Melendez and Ramos about the other uses of the field that fences would impede. Melendez said he is asking to fence in just the varsity diamond, leaving room for at least two soccer fields to the west of the baseball area.

When Is A Home Run A Home Run?

During practice at the field on a bright Wednesday afternoon, set beneath the Angel of Peace high on East Rock, members the Cross baseball team echoed what Melendez had testified.

Andrew Marrero, who with his 92 mile-per-hour fast ball is going to the University of Connecticut on a baseball scholarship, said that playing on a diamond without a true fence has been a problem.

“Balls just roll into the woods,” he said. ​“It’s not right.”

At his home field, he has never seen what a home run looks like, he said.

“You hit the ball far, and you only get to second base,” said shortstop Angel Galindez, who is going to Ranger College in Texas on a baseball scholarship. A speedy outfield can retrieve a ball rolled into the woods and get it back in time to limit the batter to a double. In a formally fenced park, a ball of similar distance would be a home run.

Gallindez also pointed out potholes, even though the parks department had rolled the outfield just a day or two before.

“You can turn an ankle,” Gallindez said before returning to shagging fly balls in preparation for the team’s opener of its 20-game season with Woodland Regional High School on Monday.

The kids pitch in on maintenance. They help rake the infield and fill dirt in areas dug out around bases.

“I try to teach kids to care for the field,” said Ramos, who recently took the job after having coached the sport for five years at Hamden Hall, a prviate high school up Whitney Avenue.

That groundskeeping also takes 20 or 25 minutes each day from practice time, added Melendez’s son Cal.

Pride In Appearance

Melendez said that with volunteer time on his hands since retirement, he is on a campaign to change not just a field but a culture about baseball, which has meant so much to him.

He said that when suburban teams come to play at Rice Field, ​“from outside of town they see we don’t take it seriously” based on the condition of the field.

That applies, he added, to the other high schools with baseball programs, Hillhouse and Career .

For the past two years Melendez has served on an athletic commission of the Board of Education. He has been hearing that at Hillhouse a baseball field is being readied where all three schools would be able to play their home games.

“It’s a great idea” to have a turf for all three schools, and one where the girls can play softball as well, Melendez said.

But that’s all he’s heard, words, not deeds.

Even with space available for a proper diamond near Hillhouse’s athletic center, still the Hillhouse team takes a bus to its home games played on a field at West Rock. Likewise the kids from Career. Taking buses to home games is not what you do if you are serious about baseball, Melendez said.

Parks and rec chief Rebecca Bombero told the Independent that she has not yet heard of Melendez’s project and therefore could not respond either as to feasibility or cost.

However, she offered in an email message the following comments on maintenance and the city’s baseball fields in general:

There are numerous challenges with field maintenance in use by unpermitted groups, unpermitted attempts at maintenance by individuals who do not understand proper care and maintenance and practices, AVs and Dirt Bikes and our crazy New England weather.

In addition, there are times our athletic teams attempt to use the fields before they are ready for the season — it usually takes 2 – 3 weeks past the last bits of snow melt to be ready for play as they need to be dry enough for us to put equipment on them (the last snow melted only a week and a half ago). We work with the BOE athletic director and issue permits only when the fields are ready for play.

With regards to the multi-purpose nature of the fields, Bombero continued:

There is overlap between the outfield of baseball and the soccer fields at Rice. We would have to look at grade, slope, and availble space to determine if there was enough room to site a soccer field differently including the necessary safety areas around the field.

As this is the first time I am hearing of this project, there is no estimated cost for what such a project (the fencing) would cost or budget to do so.

Hillhouse High School, long a city powerhouse in football and basketball, is also a baseball team to watch this season, Melendez said.

With regard to facilities there, Bombero said preliminary planning has begun for improvements to Bowen baseball field, ​“which lost its irrigation during construction of the football field and has not been available for play since.” It will become a seeded, grass field.

Melendez’s first action on the BOE’s athletic commission was to put in a request for batting cage hardware to be added at the gyms of the three schools, so the kids could practice their hitting there on rainy days.

“We have the nets,” he said, but he’s been waiting two years — peppered with many reminder phone calls — for the work order to come through and to be acted upon.

The result: During the off-season and on rainy days, through volunteer efforts, the kids are transported to commercial facilities in North Haven, where they practice hitting and other skills. Again, money spent that needn’t be, and hours spent in traveling that should be for practice.

Melendez said he has explored temporary fencing for the Rice Field facility through a pal who owns New Haven Total Fencing, with whom Melendez played during his high school years.

“I’m not going away. It’s a labor of love,” Melendez added, ​“for the kids.”