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How a bunch of Hollywood Jews saved youth baseball in South Los Angeles

“Oh! Oh! That’s my baby! Right there! He’s catching it!” Bridgette Harper called out as her son, Dillen, 11, stood at shortstop, glove in the air, his eyes on the baseball plummeting toward him.
[additional-authors]
June 25, 2015

“Oh! Oh! That’s my baby! Right there! He’s catching it!” Bridgette Harper called out as her son, Dillen, 11, stood at shortstop, glove in the air, his eyes on the baseball plummeting toward him. Notwithstanding his mom’s confidence, it was evident Dillen had misjudged the pop fly as he stumbled backward, trying to adjust at the last second. The ball missed his glove, fell behind him and rolled into shallow center field.

But suddenly, in a typical — and typically entertaining — youth baseball misjudgment, the runner didn’t stop at first base. He tried to extend his fortune, heading to second. Dillen quickly recovered from the misplay, scooped up the ball and threw it to the second baseman, who caught the toss, turned, and applied the tag just in time. Out!

“He got him!” Harper yelled. “All right, Dillen!”

Dillen and his team, the Mariners, were playing on a beautiful, sunny, 75-degree afternoon in mid-June on the immaculately groomed fields at Jesse Owens Park. It was a perfect day for youth baseball in South Los Angeles. 

Four teams in the Hollywood Indies Little League (HILL), which comprises kids ranging in age from 5 to 16, were playing on two of the park’s fields in games slated for a 5 p.m. first pitch. Four more teams were slated to play in the early evening, and HILL would return to Jesse Owens Park on Saturday, as they do every week from March through July.

In some ways, the baseball environment HILL has created at Jesse Owens Park can be found at thousands of American parks, and at baseball fields throughout Los Angeles.

But in South L.A., the summer baseball scene at Jesse Owens Park is an exception — a strong athletic and community institution set in a low-income, often gang-infested neighborhood. It’s a part of Los Angeles that was once a breeding ground for baseball stardom, but because of a confluence of economic and cultural factors in the 1980s and early ’90s, South L.A. lost its baseball culture. Then, 21 years ago, thanks to a group of Hollywood benefactors, as well as a group of committed coaches and community leaders in South L.A., organized baseball has made a comeback for this neighborhood's kids. And along with it, they're learning far more than just the game.

South Central — home to MLB greats

For a baseball fan, a drive through South Los Angeles can take you through a chapter in baseball history. In the 1960s and ’70s, parks in the section of Los Angeles south of the I-10, formerly known as South Central, were filled with the cracks and thuds of baseballs making contact with bats and leather mitts on fields where future greats such as Eddie Murray, Ozzie Smith, Darryl Strawberry and Eric Davis got their start. 

In South Central, as in other low- and middle-class, predominantly Black neighborhoods throughout the United States, baseball was once a staple, a go-to team activity for kids and teens.

But that was decades ago.

Murray, Smith, Strawberry and Davis, whose Major League Baseball (MLB) careers spanned from 1977 to 2001, all grew up in L.A. at a time when baseball was as much a part of inner-city youth life as it still is today in middle- and upper-class neighborhoods in places like Santa Monica, Brentwood and Bel Air. Those players were all in the majors in 1986, when African-Americans accounted for 19 percent of all MLB players.

Today, though, only 7.8 percent of MLB players are African-American, a consequence of many factors nationwide — including an increased emphasis on college scholarships for football and basketball, local governments cutting budgets for public parks and sports programs, the rising cost of equipment and league registration fees, and an unemployment rate for African-Americans above 10 percent nationally. The 7.8 percent figure doesn't include, for example, players from the Dominican Republic.

In the early 1990s, Los Angeles County’s Department of Parks and Recreation was forced to make cuts after the Board of Supervisors approved an $8.2 million budget for the agency — $2.7 million less than what it had requested. The shortfall didn’t close parks in South L.A., but Parks and Rec cut staffing and began charging families more to sign up their kids for county-run sports leagues, which in turn made it more difficult, if not financially impossible, for kids in low-income families to join a baseball team. Organized youth baseball in South L.A., for all intents and purposes, disappeared.


“The main thing is to keep my kids, keep anybody, just in the rank with everything — keep them off the streets.” — Eric Garmendez, a father of four

In 1993, when Stan Brooks, a successful independent filmmaker, read a Los Angeles Times article that described how impending cuts would affect the county’s South L.A. baseball programs, particularly at Helen Keller Park, but not at parks in L.A.’s wealthier neighborhoods, he was beside himself.

An L.A. native and die-hard Los Angeles Dodgers fan, Brooks phoned Parks and Rec, looking for an explanation. 

As he recalled during a recent interview in his small office in Santa Monica, the official on the other end of the line told him the staffing cuts and hike in user fees were simply a result of funding shortfalls. “That’s insane,” Brooks remembers telling the official. “What would it take to bring it back?” 

The answer was “money” — from someplace other than the government.

“So you’re only cutting it in South Central, where you have kids who are at risk, and this is the sport that plays during the summer when the kids don’t have a place to go,” Brooks said, asking rhetorically whether baseball was also disappearing in West L.A. (It wasn’t.) 

“How does somebody not fight this?” Brooks said. “Well, the [South Central] parents don’t have the clout and they don’t have the money.”

Brooks, who at the time was often absent from L.A. because many of his productions were filmed in Canada, felt the least he could do to reinvest in the community was to put some Hollywood money into Hollywood’s backyard. So he wrote letters to a handful of other producers and managers — people he’d pitched to or whom he had worked with on projects over the years. He asked each one to chip in a few hundred dollars to support an inner-city youth baseball league that would be free for all participants, with the hope that some children who may otherwise spend their summers on the streets could instead learn how to pitch and catch.

Brooks received eight checks back in the mail totaling nearly $6,400. With that seed money, he created the Hollywood Indies Little League in 1995. Now in its 21st season, HILL has raised and paid out nearly $500,000, funding nearly 5,000 young players, most of whom would likely have never played organized baseball if not for HILL’s free-for-the-user policy. 

Bats, balls, uniforms and other expenses are paid for by HILL’s sponsors and, more recently, by the Los Angeles Dodgers, which recently became a partner and donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to renovate the baseball fields at Jesse Owens Park. Donors have the opportunity to sponsor an entire team for $975, and Brooks himself, aside from creating and organizing the league, has put thousands of dollars of his own money into HILL (including extending loans when there’s a budget deficit), and has given thousands of hours of his own time. 

More important than baseball, though, HILL offers respite in a neighborhood where youths with too much free time can be easy targets for gang recruitment. The fields at Jesse Owens Park, on the corner of Western Avenue and Century Boulevard, a few miles east of Los Angeles International Airport, are filled throughout the spring and summer with HILL’s young boys and girls, who are kept busy by the league’s two game days and two practice days every week, and who are given the opportunity to be part of something bigger — to be part of a team.

And although it’s certainly a secondary, or tertiary goal of HILL, maybe one day the league will even produce another Ozzie Smith.

Baseball vs. the streets of South L.A.

On a recent Wednesday afternoon at Jesse Owens Park, Brooks stood next to a chain-link fence adjacent to a dugout as he watched a game between 8-, 9- and 10-year-old boys and girls on the Rockies and Orioles teams. 

Despite his busy work schedule, every month or two, whenever he’s in town, Brooks makes it down to a HILL game.

This particular game was vintage youth baseball — some kids would stop on first base when they should have either made a turn toward second or overrun the base. Some would huff and puff after a strikeout or an errant throw; routine grounders would turn from outs into singles into doubles after successive bad throws; fielders would forget to tag the runner on a steal and instead just stand on the base, not yet understanding the difference between a force-out and a tag-out; and, of course, accurate pitches would be few and far between. It’s all par for the course for baseball novices, and also a heartwarming source of entertainment for parents in the bleachers.

“All we could do is put the pieces together and hope that baseball could be played here,” Brooks said, looking on as the Rockies led, 2-1, in the bottom of the second inning. “Everything after that was the community, and they really embraced it.”

As Brooks and league commissioner Michael Flowers — a volunteer who runs HILL’s day-to-day operations — discussed potential new sponsors, players in the dugout ribbed the pitcher (“Rally, rally, the pitcher’s name is Sally!”), and the coaches on the field (all of them volunteers) made sure their players stayed in line. 

“It’s only a game, OK? None of that,” one coach called out after one of his players had an angry outburst after a base-running mistake.

Standing next to the bleachers, Eric Garmendez, a father of four, watched as his 8-year-old daughter, Amanda, stepped into the batter’s box. 

“The main thing is to keep my kids, keep anybody, just in the rank with everything — keep them off the streets,” Garmendez said.

Garmendez is in his first year as an assistant coach on his twin boys’ HILL coach-pitch team, and is a construction worker in South L.A., where he was born and raised. Notwithstanding the brand-new Oakland Athletics tattoo he was sporting on his muscular neck, he pointed to the Dodgers tattoo on his arm when asked who he roots for.

“Growing up in South Central, you hear the hype, and a lot of it is true,” Garmendez said. “It would’ve helped out a little bit more if there was something like this as I was growing up.”

The Mariners sit in the dugout during a June 17 game. Photo by Aaron Pellish

One of HILL’s biggest goals is to get parents involved and keep them involved in the league as much as possible, something Garmendez said he himself was hesitant to do until he was asked to help coach his sons’ team.

“I’m cutting straight out of work just to make it to practice, because once you’re in, it’s a commitment,” he said. “But you know what? It’s a sacrifice — whatever it takes for my kids.”

Two weeks later, at an adjacent field, as Harper, one of several baseball moms in the stands, kept an eye on her youngest child, Brenden, who was throwing a tennis ball against a nearby wall, she explained why it’s so important to make sure her kids are always doing something, whether it’s baseball, swimming, basketball or spending time at the California Science Center.

“If they get bored, they can do mischievous things,” she said. “Just being bored — wrong place at the wrong time. Just being bored, one little bad choice can get them in trouble. My boys don’t have time for that. I keep them busy. By the time they get home, they’re tired, sleepy and hungry.”

Harper said Dillen joined the league in early June, but, unfortunately, too many kids had signed up in the youngest age group, which meant Brenden didn’t get a spot.

“It’s free, and that’s a blessing to me because I’m a single mom,” Harper said. Asked if she’d otherwise be able to afford the $100 or so per player that HILL covers, Harper said she’d find a way. But, of course, it would come at a cost.

“If I gotta collect cans, bottles, whatever I have to do for my babies, I’ll do it,” Harper said. “It would be tough, but I’m very resourceful. I would’ve figured it out.”

She would’ve done so because she knows idle time in South L.A. can be a dangerous thing.

Jesse Owens Park is in the Gramercy Park section of South L.A., which is bordered by the neighborhoods of Westmont, Manchester Square and Vermont Knolls. Those four areas, which make up only about five square miles, have seen in the last six months 706 violent crimes and 1,162 property crimes (including robbery and grand theft auto), according to LAPD crime statistics. Most households earn less than $20,000 per year, and graduating from high school, let alone college, is not a given.

Kenneth Broussard Jr. is 17. His father is a longtime HILL coach who grew up playing ball in the ’70s just three miles away at Helen Keller Park. On a recent game day, Broussard sat in HILL’s huge equipment trailer as he talked about how baseball helped keep him out of “gangbanging and stuff like that” during high school.

“I started seeing the separate ways all my friends was going,” Broussard said. “Some of them was going down the wrong path and stuff.

“Over here, it’s not the best of neighborhoods. Even if you’re not doing anything wrong, you could be standing outside, and somebody can rob you; the police might harass you,” he said. “There are just a lot of things that are naturally avoided when you’re at practice or at the game.”

Broussard wore gray sweatpants and a muscle-tight camo shirt, and he was at the park to help Flowers (Mr. Flowers as the players, parents and coaches call him) with run-of-the-mill administrative and organizational tasks, for which he’s been paid about $50 per week since he was 12.

Broussard is currently studying electrical construction and maintenance at Los Angeles Trade Technical College, but he still helps Flowers with league paperwork, equipment organization, watering the fields and other routine tasks. “When I was young, my dad wanted me to start working,” Broussard said, recalling his father’s words: “If you get that $50 a week, maybe Mom can afford to get you new shoes, or maybe you want to get something for Mom and make Mom feel better.”

A few minutes before Broussard had arrived, Mariners head coach Kenneth McCoy Jr. was sitting in the same trailer, smiling and talking about the young HILL player everyone calls J.J. He’s 12 and one of HILL’s star players. He’s also on the team McCoy’s squad was about to face — one coached by McCoy’s father. 

J.J. plays shortstop and pitcher. He can already throw the ball 65 miles per hour — accurately — a promising sign of what’s to come. “He reminds me a little bit of me,” McCoy said, smiling. “But we’re not gonna get into all that.”

McCoy, 24, is studying kinesiology at Los Angeles Southwest College, which is a mile south of the park. He wants to coach baseball and football as a career.  McCoy played in HILL from the age of 4, when the league was in its second year, until he aged out at 16. Sadly, but not surprisingly, he had a quick answer to why the league is so important for the neighborhood.

“I had a friend who wanted to come out and play [in HILL] but he couldn’t get the chance, because he got killed, because he was out on the streets,” McCoy said. The friend, gunned down at 14, was in a gang, McCoy said, and was mistakenly identified as a target by an armed member of another gang. “[He was] hanging around with the wrong people at the wrong time.”

In his early years at HILL, McCoy said, he was a “hot-head” who would get angry when he lost video games and baseball games.

“Out here, coaches told me, ‘It’s nothing; it’s just a game. You’ve gotta build yourself back up so you can look forward to your next game,’ ” McCoy said. “If you stay angry, then all you’re thinking of is the negative instead of the positive. I instill that upon my kids now.

“The type of coach I am, I will teach you everything there is to know,” he said, proudly. “I will teach you how to win; I will teach you how to lose.”

During the interview, McCoy responded to questions with a level of respect that was the norm in numerous conversations with kids and parents associated with HILL, responding with a “Yes, sir” or “No, sir,” and not acting rushed, even though the interview was clearly taking time away from pre-game preparations.

A little later in the afternoon, while McCoy was on the field coaching, another HILL coach, who identified himself only as Sherman (but said people call him “Lee”), stood next to the bleachers and talked about baseball as a “thinking game,” more so than other sports. 

“What if the ball comes to me? What am I going to do? At any moment, any time, the ball may come to you,” Sherman said. “What are you going to do? What am I going to do when it’s time for me to stand out? You’ve got to have a plan.”

Standing behind Sherman was HILL alumnus Matthew Salazar, 18, who was at the park just hanging out — smiling and listening to his former coaches Sherman and Kenneth Broussard chat about their days playing at Helen Keller Park. Salazar said he wants to coach, too, and said Broussard was “the best coach I ever had.” Broussard, like Sherman, talked about youth baseball as more training for life than training for baseball later in life. 

“I never talk baseball so you can grow up and be a pro. I’m just talking baseball so we can learn to compete, because that’s what life is gonna be,” Broussard said, interrupting himself at one point to whistle at one of his players walking by. 

“Johnny! Tuck your shirt in! Tuck your shirt in! Get your head right! Remember what I told you.”

How Stan Brooks makes a pitch

Stan Brooks used to be clueless about the art of pitching. 

Not the baseball type of pitching — he’s known all about that since he began playing baseball as a child.

The movie and television type. 

Before he launched his first production company, Once Upon a Time Films, in 1989, but after he had broken into the industry thanks to a mailroom job at Filmways Pictures, Brooks was in a meeting in 1980 with the chairman of Orion Pictures, Mike Medavoy, who asked him what he was trying to pitch.

Despite having recently graduated from the American Film Institute, Brooks had never learned the art of pitching and thus could conjure up only an image of pitcher Sandy Koufax when Orion’s chairman put him on the spot.

Pitching is no longer a problem for Brooks. Now the owner of Stan & Deliver Films, Brooks has produced more than 65 movies for film and television over the course of his more than 30 years in Hollywood, winning a Primetime Emmy Award in 2007 for outstanding miniseries for “Broken Trail,” which aired on AMC and collected three more Emmy awards, 12 Emmy nominations, and three Golden Globe nominations.

In 1987 and 1988, as president of the Guber-Peters Television Co., Brooks was the guy on the receiving end of Barry Morrow’s pitch for “Rain Man,” which won Oscars for picture and screenplay in 1988. 

In Brooks’ modest three-room Santa Monica office, a big “Rain Man” movie poster sits behind his desk inscribed by Morrow with the words, “The Man Who Heard It First.”

Producer and director Stan Brooks created Hollywood Indies in 1995 after country budget cuts nearly shuttered youth baseball in South L.A. Photo courtesy of HILL

More recently, Brooks is the executive producer of “Hollywood Scandals,” which is going into its third season on Reelz, and he’s the executive producer for Lifetime’s “The Lizzie Borden Chronicles,” a miniseries with Christina Ricci that follows the title character after she’s acquitted of the 1892 murders of her father and stepmother. It’s a production that has taken Brooks to Canada for weeks at a time.

His office is packed to the brim with Dodgers merchandise and paraphernalia, dummies and bobble heads, as well as movie awards and posters, pictures of his wife, three children, and various entertainment stars with whom Brooks has worked closely. 

In another of his office’s three rooms, just to the right of the entrance, is where Brooks displays Hollywood Indies trophies and photos. His team, the Red Sox, hasn’t won a championship since the late ’90s, and they finished 6-6 last year.  His Red Sox’s championship drought is not quite as bad as the 86-year slog suffered by the MLB team, but Brooks has heard the comparison many times. Like Brooks, many of HILL’s donors support their own individual teams. Fitness guru Jake Steinfeld’s Rockies had a miserable 2014, going 0-12, while producer Howard Braunstein’s Astros went a respectable 6-4.

Brooks is a huge Groucho Marx and W.C. Fields fan, and loves to talk about how those two actors spurred his love for film and TV when, as a young kid, he’d go to matinees at a movie theater — now gone — on the corner of Pico and Fairfax. He described his work as a producer, and his sale of Once Upon a Time Films five years ago to Braunstein, as well as his recent transition to becoming a director with the productions of “Perfect Sisters” and the TV movie “The Grim Sleeper,” which was nominated for a 2015 PRISM Award for its accurate depiction of substance abuse.

When Brooks talked about Marx or the Dodgers or about his favorite baseball film, “Field of Dreams” (which, he said with a smile, made him sob to the point that his wife, Lifetime executive Tanya Lopez, had to hold him), Brooks’ voice sounded like a young kid’s — a little higher-pitched and a little louder than an inside voice.

“What I love about baseball is that it teaches lessons that the other sports don’t teach,” Brooks said. “For one, it asks you to sacrifice. It’s actually a word that’s in the game. You lay down a sacrifice bunt or you hit a sacrifice fly.” 

Brooks said when he calls up his Hollywood buddies and pitches them on supporting HILL, he’s in “full-on producer mode.” Those pitches, Brooks said, go something like this:

“I tell them what it’s like to be down there. I tell them about the mom who came up to me and said, ‘I don’t know where my son would be if it wasn’t for you.’ It’s not just baseball; it’s reviving a community. It’s not just pitching and catching; it’s parents getting to go someplace on Saturday to see their kid; it’s the kid that gets up at 4 a.m. and folds and unfolds his uniform and looks at it on his bed because it’s the first uniform he’s ever put on, and how special that is to him, how important that is to him because he’s part of a team — the first thing he’s ever been a part of in his whole life; the only time he’s been asked to be part of something instead of a gang.”

That pitch, evidently, works wonders. HILL costs about $25,000 a year to run, and its many supporters have included 3 Arts Entertainment’s Michael Rotenberg, who’s the executive producer of HBO’s “Silicon Valley” and FX’s “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”; manager Connie Tavel, whose clients include actors Jon Hamm and Craig T. Nelson; the massive Creative Artists Agency; Braunstein; and actors Hank Azaria and Chris Bauer, who has appeared in “The Wire” and “True Blood.”

Not just a photo op

In 1995, after Brooks had raised his first few thousand dollars for HILL, he met with residents and community organizers in South L.A. to pitch his dream of free baseball. Initially, his idea was met with some skepticism. One woman who helped run Helen Keller Park told Brooks that people in South L.A. were tired of “Hollywood types coming down for the photo-op charity, the kind of charity where you write a check, you come down, have your picture taken with some African-Americans, and then we never see you again.” 

Hill's Mustang division players (ages 8-10) wear their game faces in the dugout during a June 3 game. Photo by Jared Sichel

Brooks said he was told to not expect much love from the neighborhood early on.

“You’ve got to prove to us that this thing’s for real,” Brooks recalls hearing. “Then you’ll see it.”

John Wicker, chief deputy director for L.A. Parks and Rec, was running the department’s operations in South L.A. in 1995 when he first met Brooks, whom he now calls a “hero” for the department.

“He reached out to us and said he really wanted to do something to keep baseball alive in the inner city,” Wicker said. Parks and Rec was charging anywhere from $75 to $145 for its baseball leagues, more than many of the families near Helen Keller Park and Jesse Owens Park could afford. “If it’s a choice between dinner and playing baseball, they’re going to have dinner,” Wicker said. “Stan said, ‘No, I don’t want anybody paying.’ I think it’s the only [league] that I can think of where it’s free.” 

Free participation has helped turn HILL into one of L.A. County’s largest youth baseball leagues, with about 250 kids signed up every season. And one that, as Brooks pointed out, does not limit membership according to geographic boundaries, as many youth baseball leagues do. Kids who live many miles away, but still inside the sprawl of South L.A., can enter HILL’s sign-up lottery, which, because of high demand, cannot give a spot to every kid who wants to play.

In addition to Hollywood, Brooks’ biggest and most recent donor catch has been the Los Angeles Dodgers Foundation, which two years ago, as part of its participation in the MLB’s Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities (RBI) program, partnered with HILL and gave $300,000 toward creating two state-of-the-art “Dodger Dream Fields” at Jesse Owens Park, foundation Executive Director Nichol Whiteman said. The Dodgers’ support of HILL was spurred by Brooks’ relationship to one of the Dodgers’ minority owners and Brooks’ former boss, Peter Guber, who also co-owns the Golden State Warriors and is CEO of Mandalay Entertainment.

The Dream Field upgrades, which were unveiled at the start of HILL’s 2014 season, include huge scoreboards, new grass and dirt, and improved irrigation. The Dodgers Foundation also pays for the league’s equipment and its hundreds of uniforms, all of which, somewhat comically, are Dodgers uniforms, which makes every HILL game look like a confusing faceoff between the Dodgers and their bitter crosstown rival, the Dodgers. 

‘We are the village’

As Michael and Rosalyn Flowers sat together in the equipment trailer, which rests just outside one of the Dream Field’s outfield fences, every few minutes a coach or a player would pop in to run a question by the couple, who have run HILL since 1996, its second season.

Michael and Rosalyn, both in their 50s, met in their hometown of Memphis and moved to L.A. in 1981. They raised two kids, Ebony and Marcus — both now adults — in Gardena, a few miles south of Jesse Owens Park. Michael recently retired from Boeing, where he was an engineer. Rosalyn is an analyst for Southern California Edison. She’s quiet and reserved but has a tough-love side. As she firmly said, “When the kids come, they belong to me.” 

The league, Michael said, is there to help parents raise their kids, but the parents have to let go when their kids are on the field.

“We tell the parents, ‘Hey, when your kid is on the field, they belong to us. We will take care of them; we will cherish them; we will love them; we will protect them as if they are our own.’”

Flowers said sometimes when he and Rosalyn are out shopping, they will be approached by former HILL players, now adults, who remember the couple and thank them for their guidance. One man even approached them at a hardware store and credited Michael and Rosalyn for helping him get to a point in life where he has a good job and a wife and kids. Flowers said he and Rosalyn didn’t even recognize the man but were deeply moved.

“We fill in a lot of the gaps they may have at home,” Flowers said, his voice trembling lightly with emotion. “Some of them are single-parent homes, and sometimes they have trouble makings ends meet. A lot of kids come, they may not eat unless we have them eat.” Although HILL doesn’t budget for meals, throughout the season its volunteers look after at-risk children. Flowers and Brooks said coaches and parent volunteers ensure that kids who are hungry will get food. And when one of HILL’s players was tragically killed in the early 2000s, the league’s leadership helped the family cover the boy’s funeral expenses.

Flowers’ eyes filled with tears as he talked about the teenage boys and girls he hires and pays, such as Broussard, to help organize equipment and manage the scoreboard. Training them to become self-reliant, and giving them a few extra bucks, “means a lot to the families,” Flowers said, pausing to gather his composure.

“I’m sorry,” he said, wiping his eyes. “We have coaches that have been here for 19 years! You don’t see that kind of dedication from coaches that are volunteers anywhere else. When their kids stop playing, the coaches disappear. Our coaches stay because they know they are part of something bigger than just baseball. We have coaches that were ex-gang members. They know that if somebody didn’t pull them in … where they would be today. They’re trying to pull these kids to keep them in here so they don’t go through what they had to go through.”

Flowers plans to transition in the next couple of years from commissioner to spectator and fan, and will entrust the leadership of Hollywood Indies to someone else.

“Stan and his friends and associates provide a vehicle, through his fundraising, to allow us to do what we do,” Flowers said. 

“They talk about needing a village to raise a child — we are the village.”

To learn more about Hollywood Indies, go to

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