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So much more than baseball by Rachel Kossman
MySouthEnd.com ContributorThursday Aug 14, 2008 Sam Steeves sits grinning in his wheelchair as his friends use all their energy to push him up the zigzagging wheelchair ramps of Fenway Park. Here, amidst the chaos of the crowds at the Futures of Fenway Red Sox league games on Aug. 9, Sam’s wheelchair seems more like a throne than a handicap.
Three months ago, Sam, 15, was crossing Seaver Street in Roxbury when, after being waved on by a truck in the first lane, he walked further into the intersection. He didn’t see the other car barreling towards him at 35 miles per hour. Sam was thrown into the air; the car was totaled. Both of his legs were broken, along with his shoulder, and he had cuts and bruises over his body. Since then, Sam’s gone through three surgeries to knit his body back together.
"At first I didn’t feel anything, I thought I was fine and I tried to get up. My knee came up but the rest of me stayed on the ground. I could see the bone in this leg out through my pants and this leg was twisted completely around," he said, pointing at his calves, to the scars where the pins held the rods onto his legs.
"Did the pants get ruined?" Sam’s friend and teammate Harrison asks, and the whole room - a luxury box seat at Fenway Park, in fact - laughs.
At this point, however, the details of Sam’s accident almost seem unimportant. What stands out most is that Sam, at 15, has one of the best support communities a young teen could ask for. That community is South End Baseball.
"These teams rallied around him incredibly. That was nice, to see kids at that age really understand," said David Steeves, Sam’s father.
Sam is starting shortstop for South End Baseball’s Astro team and plays baseball for Boston Latin Academy. He’s been playing for South End Baseball since he was 11, and ever since then, South End Baseball has given him a community he can truly rely on.
"It just all didn’t look good," Jack Kay, 16, a junior at Roxbury Latin High School who also plays in the league, said of Sam’s accident. "But I think it could’ve been that much worse if he hadn’t had that much support."
That support doesn’t just come in extreme situations, and there’s no doubt that it originates on the field.
"I remember last year, my brother’s team won one of the Bay State tournaments and they beat Lexington in the finals," recalls Kay. "One of the kids from Lexington was crying at the end and my brother’s whole team, Sam’s team, they all went over and gave the kid a hug. So it’s a really friendly community, South End Baseball in general."
The network of strength and friendship that South End Baseball weaves extends beyond just support. It goes without saying that the South End can be a rough place for some local kids to grow up. And there is no doubt in many people’s minds, especially former South End Baseball players who are now in college, that the league keeps kids off the street and out of trouble.
"I would say it kept me off the streets and away from the bad crowds," said Patrick Valdes, 22, a former South End Baseball player who is transferring to UMass Amherst from Roxbury Community College next year. "The South End is just crazy, so getting involved in playing baseball just kept me away from all that and made me a wiser, stronger person."
David Brade, 19, a sophomore at Denison University, couldn’t agree more.
"Compared to some people we probably had a leg up. I mean, people have different lives, people grow up differently. I think that [South End Baseball] gave us a chance to grow up in a more positive atmosphere," he said.
Valdes, Brade and their friend Jason Burrell, 19, have been close since they all entered the league almost a decade ago. Even now that they’re all at different colleges, they make an effort to keep in touch; South End Baseball gave them the start to their long friendship.
Paul Rinkulis, executive director of the league, says he sees baseball as a metaphor for life - and he hopes that the kids come to see it that way as well.
"In baseball, if you’re batting .300, which is three out of 10 ten times, you can get a career for the rest of your life," explained Rinkulis. "Life is the same thing. You’re probably going to miss as many times as you swing, as we all know, and not everybody has the same opportunities. But for a lot of young people, if they work hard they can get the same result."
For more than 20 years, Rinkulis and the others who helped start the league and keep it going have been able to bring that message to more and more young people. When South End Baseball started in the late 1980s, it only had about 40 participants. Today, it has grown to more than 1000 kids, including a girls’ softball league.
"We threw gasoline on a fire and a beautiful thing came out of it," said Rinkulis. "But the most important thing is to know that there’s are a lot of South End Baseball kids in college, I don’t know how you put that in words. And succeeding at the best colleges, at the best levels, and not necessarily from the best circumstances, and I don’t mean that in a bad way."
It’s not just insiders that feel so passionately about the program. Larry Lucchino, president and CEO of the Boston Red Sox has been a fixture at South End Baseball’s opening day for the past seven years. It’s because of that relationship that the kids from South End Baseball are enjoying the Futures of Fenway from a luxury box seat, with leather couches, big screen TVs, and ballpark food, and not out in the stands.
"It’s one of the best organized and best run little league programs that I’ve ever seen," he said. "I mean, I love the idea. I come to the Futures of Fenway and I see several former South Enders, little leaguers who are now reciting the various colleges they go to."
Between the incredible opportunities that the league affords underprivileged youth, the community it creates and the life long friendships it gives root to, South End Baseball has become an irreplaceable program for youth in the neighborhood.
"I’d never trade it," said Brade, without hesitation. "We played the best baseball. We weren’t always that serious all the time, but we had a lot of fun... I wouldn’t trade it for the world."
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