From his sun-soaked upper deck seat at SBC Park Saturday
afternoon, nine-year-old Gilroy Junior Giant Antonio Perez surveyed
the stadium and offered his impressions of the park he was visiting
for the first time.
San Francisco – From his sun-soaked upper deck seat at SBC Park Saturday afternoon, nine-year-old Gilroy Junior Giant Antonio Perez surveyed the stadium and offered his impressions of the park he was visiting for the first time.
“I thought it would be smaller, like the whole stadium,” said Perez, who had a dripping orange Giants souvenir towel on his head under his black baseball cap, keeping him cool.
Perez, along with other players, coaches and parents of the Gilroy Junior Giants, watched the Giants and the Mets battle it out on the field below as Junior Giants Day guests.
Early that morning, the 58 Junior Giants players, plus their coaches and parents, took a bus from the Garlic City to San Francisco to take part in the annual event. Gilroy is one of 62 cities that participates in the Junior Giants program, which brings baseball leagues to low-income areas in towns from Oregon to Southern California.
This summer, the Gilroy Junior Giants league, run by Mexican American Community Services (MACSA), had 81 players split into six teams which practiced and played at least twice a week at Las Animas Park from the beginning of June to mid August.
“A lot of the kids don’t have the money to play for the city league,” said MACSA and league commissioner Juanita Calderon. She said most kids walked to practice at Las Animas, some for an hour to get to the park to play.
“This is a big deal for some of them,” she said.
Many of the Gilroy kids had never been to SBC Park before. As an added treat, they also got to parade around on the field before the game with 4,000 other Junior Giants participants.
The day before the game, 12-year-old Jesus Gonzalez found out he had been selected from the Gilroy group to be a junior announcer. In the bottom of the third inning, a nervous Gonzalez stood behind the home plate fence, microphone in hand, and faced the 42,180-strong sellout crowd. He announced Giants batters Randy Winn, Omar Vizquel and Lance Niekro, trying not to think about the thousands of people listening to him and watching him live on the outfield scoreboard.
“I was excited,” Gonzalez said. “I was just looking at the camera.”
After his announcing gig, Gonzalez joined the rest of the Gilroy group in the upper deck.
Michael Abeyta, 9, picked out his favorite player in the Giants lineup, Deivi Cruz, who was traded to the Washington Nationals Tuesday.
“I like No. 35,” Abeyta said. “He looks good. He catches good.”
Kimberly Mills, 7, and Maria Arvizu, 10, liked two of SBC’s most recognizable features, the Coca-Cola slide and giant baseball mitt – or, “the big mitten,” as Arvizu called it.
Volunteer coach Orlando Salcedo, who attended the game with the players, went above and beyond the call of duty during the season and afterward so that his whole team could come to the game. Only seven tickets could be provided free-of-cost to his 12-member team. So he took digital pictures of the kids, made them into laminated baseball cards and sold them to raise funds so the whole team could go Saturday.
Calderon said Salcedo also brought lunch to practice for his players.
“It was fun,” said Salcedo of his first attempt at coaching. “I’d have no energy when I came home from work. I’d be kind of drained. But being out with the kids would bring back my energy again.”
Another coach, Fausto Padilla, enjoyed seeing his team improve over the course of the season.
“(It made me realize) I do have a little something to give to them,” he said. “I never had the chance to play organized baseball growing up. I always wanted to play.”
Desire Villescaz, 11, joined the Junior Giants as a part of her goal to play as many sports as possible.
“I’m in a lot of sports in elementary school,” she said. “I used to play football with the guys. And soccer.”
Villescaz got to watch her favorite player, Jason Schmidt, face off against the Mets’ Tom Glavine. But she wanted to accomplish one more thing before she left the park.
“Probably later on I’ll get his autograph,” she said.
