At the Washington Nationals’ home opener in April, Duane Dargin, 9, stood in the center of the diamond beneath sunny skies waiting to throw out the game’s ceremonial first pitch.
Just one year earlier, Duane had never before held a regulation baseball in his hand, nor had he played baseball a day in his life. Duane’s neighborhood, predominantly African-American and near some of the poorest sections of Washington, is like many urban areas in America where even the children’s parents cannot recall the last time there was a Little League game down the street.
“No one even knows the rules of baseball,” Duane said.
It is one of the reasons that only 8.3 percent of players on Major League Baseball rosters last year identified themselves as African-American or black, a 50 percent drop from 20 years ago.
But on this day, before an announced 42,295 fans, Duane, who is African-American, toed the pitching rubber, cocked his arm in a full windup and released, hoping for a strike.
Duane got to this point, throwing a pitch in a professional ballpark, through the new Washington Nationals Youth Baseball Academy, a pristine, gleaming $17 million baseball complex that has risen incongruently on the tumbledown streets of southeast Washington.
The academy, one of several recently established or taking root in major league cities, is an important step for baseball as it confronts its most serious decline in youth participation in decades, particularly among African-Americans.
With Little League enrollment falling, an aging viewership of games and, in the case of many urban areas, ball fields in disarray or disappearing, the sport is confronting a sense that the game is boring, unfashionable and lacking the flash and flamboyance of basketball or football.
Increasingly, especially at the highest levels, it is a sport for the most affluent, whose families can afford the thousands of dollars to be on elite travel teams and attend specialized clinics.
With the academy, the Nationals believe they have hit on a formula that not only stokes interest in the game, but also bolsters the lives of children in neighborhoods that have some of the highest crime rates and poorest academic achievement.
The children pay nothing to attend. There is math tutoring, cooking classes and homework help. At times, practice sessions for baseball — and for some girls, softball — can feel secondary.
“We’re here to save lives,” said Chris Reed, the academy’s program manager, who grew up nearby in southeast Washington. “We’re not trying to build championship baseball teams.”
Still, the program symbolizes the hopes of bringing baseball back, in the face of large obstacles.
For 34 years beginning in 1971, Washington was without a major league team, leaving many children and families disconnected from the game. Participation waned and school teams disappeared with budget cuts. Something as common as a parent playing catch with a son or daughter became a rarity in Washington.
Sports took a back seat to more urgent matters.
Less than an hour after Duane left Nationals Park on April 6, the streets around the academy throbbed with the flash of police-car lights and a cacophony of emergency sirens. About 500 feet from the tidy pitching mound where Duane had practiced, Luke Holt, a 16-year-old Washington resident and a cousin of an academy student, was shot dead outside a public housing building.
“You come here during the day, and everything seems sunny and easy, almost tranquil,” Marla Lerner Tanenbaum, a principal owner of the Nationals who is also the vice chairwoman of the academy’s board of directors, said as she sat in one of the academy’s seven classrooms.
Tanenbaum gazed through floor-to-ceiling windows and pointed toward the housing project where Holt was killed.
“That neighborhood over there, 37th Street Terrace, is one of the toughest in Washington,” Tanenbaum said. “Baseball was not exactly what people around here were clamoring for. But their children come here every day — they vote with their feet. They’ve found a place where they instinctively feel safe.
“I hope we can show other pro teams that there’s more than one way to do community relations. We can’t solve everything, but we can try. It’s a working model that can, and should, be replicated around the country.”
Baseball’s new commissioner, Rob Manfred, made a visit to the academy one of his first acts after taking the job in January.
“Economics is why black kids don’t play baseball,” Manfred told reporters at the academy’s opening this spring. “To claim that they simply no longer like the sport is just another way of avoiding the truth. The good news is that the decline in participation in baseball by underserved kids is reversible.”
Many urban pockets have baseball development programs, including Harlem RBI in New York, which, for years, has helped restore the game in neighborhoods where baseball was once struggling.
But what makes the Nationals’ academy different is the collaboration — born out of the agreement a decade ago to bring the team to Washington from Montreal, where it was the Expos — involving the city government, Major League Baseball, the team and private donors.
What resulted is a four-hour program of after-school tutoring in science, technology, engineering and math, in addition to baseball and softball training, for about 220 children in grades 3 through 8 from two of Washington’s most challenged districts, Wards 7 and 8.
Each child receives dinner from a full kitchen, which also doubles as a food-education center. Children are picked up at neighborhood schools and driven to the academy three days a week from October to May. In the summer, the core programming operates daily, from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Nearly 1,000 other participants have also come through the doors this year to attend more than 400 baseball and softball events held at the complex. That includes high school and college teams, and youth tournaments. A local Little League, a first in the neighborhood in years, was founded at the academy and attracted 140 players this spring.
“If you look across the country, what doesn’t exist in any major city is a structure that allows children from low-income communities to get the same type of access to baseball and softball opportunities that their middle- and high-income peers have,” said Tal Alter, the academy’s executive director. “We have a concept for how to do that. We recruit coaches and mentors from the city and train them. We can put kids at or above grade levels in math and literacy efficiency and have them talking about graduating from high school and ultimately going to college.
“Baseball is the hook, but we can do all that.”
The splendor of the academy’s physical plant is certainly a major draw. In an area where vacant lots are strewn with garbage, the Nationals’ baseball youth complex is a beacon of perfectly drawn lines and luxurious, unspoiled fields. Not many colleges in America have facilities of equal quality. The academy has a full-size baseball diamond and two smaller fields for baseball or softball. State-of-the-art artificial surfaces keep the fields sparkling, and there are batting cages, warm-up areas and a 4,800-square-foot padded indoor training center.
A teaching garden with rows of raised beds for arugula, eggplant, tomatoes and collard greens sits between the fields, encircled by a fence made of old baseball bats that was built by Nationals pitcher Max Scherzer. It is called Field of Greens.
If the academy looks entirely out of place in Ward 7, that was part of the plan, too.
“People were surprised where we decided to put this place,” Tanenbaum said. “It’s kind of a forgotten part of Washington. But that’s part of the message. This is part of our city, and you’ve got to come here and be part of the revival and the solution.”
The local community was skeptical when construction began just off Minnesota Avenue, a busy, densely populated thoroughfare of fast-food restaurants, strip malls and cramped apartment buildings.
“Most people looked at how green and perfect it was and immediately assumed it was going to cost a lot of money to come inside,” Reed said.
It was not a misguided notion. An expensive pay-for-play model has swept over youth sports in America during the past decade. Elite travel teams charging annual fees in the thousands of dollars routinely attract not only the best players but the majority of players. The trend has had a particularly devastating effect on baseball in urban areas, where the more accessible, sometimes cheaper youth sports of basketball and football have become dominant, and far more popular.
As the finishing touches were being put on the Nationals’ baseball academy late in 2014, Reed and Alter began recruiting students, first from Kimball Elementary School, which is less than 200 yards from the facility.
“I begged my mom to let me sign up for the academy,” said Ziyonna Brown, a 10-year-old fifth-grader at Kimball. “I was the only one from my class to go; my friends said baseball was boring. I have never missed a day since.
“Now my friends wish they went. But now there’s a waiting list.”
Eventually, other local schools were contacted. At Beers Elementary School, Duane’s friends also told him baseball was boring, although none had played organized baseball. Duane’s mother, in fact, had to persuade him to try the academy.
“Now I don’t even want to play other sports,” Duane said.
It was a slow process to teach baseball and softball to children who did not know how to hold a bat or glove, but back at the schools, teachers and administrators saw other more telling breakthroughs, especially when it came to the students’ academics and behavior.
“They go there and meet engaging role models who teach them life lessons,” said Gwendolyn Payton, the principal at Beers, which sent 26 students to the academy. “You only have to go a few blocks from here, and there’s an external environment that is not always fostering good behaviors. Then you go into this beautiful academy, and there’s kids doing exactly what kids should be doing.
“They’re being guided by caring adults interested in their total well-being. The kids completely buy into that.”
Baseball’s renowned complexity and long learning curve — even the game’s best players do not get a hit 70 percent of the time — is viewed as a benefit, another teaching moment in a community where setbacks are far from uncommon.
Duane said he struck out often when he first visited the academy.
“I didn’t want to play anymore — I wanted to leave,” he said. “But I learned that everyone strikes out. You won’t get better at it unless you work at it.”
Ziyonna credited her academy visits with keeping her out of trouble.
“I used to get in fights and not do my schoolwork,” she said. “The academy taught me to focus on what mattered. It’s like when you’re playing a baseball game. You have to keep the game going.”
Danielle Sykes, another 10-year-old from Beers, said that she had been failing math but that the after-school and summer tutoring of the academy had raised her math average to an 84.
“My teachers are so surprised and pleased,” Danielle said.
The academy is trying to measure how the students, referred to as scholar-athletes, are growing socially, emotionally and academically.
“It’s pivotal that this project have impact that can be measured,” said Rodney Slater, a former secretary of transportation under President Bill Clinton who is the academy’s board chairman. “We are working hard to prove that impact, but I can see what we’re accomplishing in the faces of the parents and grandparents who pick up their children every day. You see the pride.”
There are early signs, too, that baseball is connecting.
Keith Barnes, the president of the new Ward 7 Little League, recalled that when he signed the first children up for his volunteer-run program, he would ask the parents to help coach.
“I had fathers quietly tell me that they didn’t know how to play baseball,” Barnes said. “I said: Don’t worry about that. I’ll teach you.
“Now, I’ll come up here on a Friday night and be pleasantly surprised to see a bunch of dads and moms playing catch with their sons and daughters. They just do it on their own. That never happened before.”
Gerard Hall, who has run baseball programs in Washington for decades, most notably the DC Knights, a youth team for teens as young as 13, said suburban opponents would often not come to the city for games.
“The academy has flipped all that,” Hall said, laughing as he sat in a second-floor room overlooking the academy’s picturesque fields. “You can’t find a place to play like this anywhere else around here. And that word is out. Now all those travel teams from the northern Virginia and Maryland suburbs are coming to us. We just wait for them.”
Andri’a Jones-Stover, Duane’s mother, is certain the Nationals academy has already made a significant impression on the community.
“So many families have talked to me about it,” she said. “They see how Duane has been lifted up, how he stays on his tasks, how if he’s slacking or falling backward, the people at the academy come together to get him back on course.
“Everyone asks me, ‘How can I get my child involved in that?’ ”
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