Home Field Overhaul Raises Hope at North
It’s been a long summer for the North High baseball team. Tuesday’s doubleheader sweep at the hands of the Ottumwa Bulldogs was the latest case in point. But these are not the Bad News (Polar) Bears. There are signs that a turnaround is underway, even if they aren’t yet to be found on the scoreboard.
First-year head coach Justin Pithan is starting from scratch. He’s reaching out to the community for program support. A few sponsorship banners on the leftfield fence are evidence of that. He’s rebuilding the bridge to the Highland Park Little league on the Northside so it will be easier for ballplayers who start out there to end up playing at North. Coaching clinics are one of the tools he’s using to make those repairs and get more bodies feeding into the program pipeline. He’s preaching a mantra of “outwork, outhustle, and outclass,” that he promises his troops will inevitably lead to outscore.
There couldn’t be a more timely symbol of the overall overhaul that’s happening than ripping up the home field and starting over and that’s exactly what’s about to begin. North has been awarded a grant from Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association. The Baseball Tomorrow Fund (BTF) will provide funding for an irrigation system and the grading and re-sodding of the infield.
Tuesday’s twinbill marked the last scheduled home games of the season and signaled that it’s time to go to work and rebuild North baseball from the ground up. Visible beyond the centerfield wall was heavy earthmoving equipment across the street. Though it was there for an unrelated project it was also a reminder of what’s about to start.
“We are grateful and very excited to have been selected as one of the Baseball Tomorrow Fund’s grant recipients,” said Brian Tate, North’s Athletic Director .
“The Baseball Tomorrow Fund is thrilled to support the renovation project at North High School,” said Cathy Bradley, Executive Director of the BTF. “The renovation of this field will…support the expansion of a high school program and continue to grow the game of baseball in this community.”
And despite the struggles of late, it’s not as though baseball doesn’t have deep roots in the Northside community. You don’t have to look any further than North’s John R. Grubb Community Stadium where the football team plays for an indicator of just how deep. That plot of land was the site on May 2, 1930 of the very first professional baseball game ever played at night with permanent lighting.
The Des Moines Demons beat the Wichita Aviators that historic evening by a score of 13-6 in front of an overflow crowd of 12,000+ that included Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis, the Commissioner of Baseball at that time. The game was broadcast nationwide by NBC radio and later credited as a savior of minor league baseball which was dying during the Great Depression. By that summer’s end lights went up at bush league ballparks across the country, five years before they started playing under the lights in the big leagues. There’s a plaque at Grubb Stadium that includes newspaper accounts of “artificial daylight” at Holcomb (aka Western League) Park, a facility where both Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, among many other baseball luminaries, once played with barnstorming teams. “The Field That Saved Baseball,” the plaque reads. Like the new one that’s to be laid across the street, albeit on a smaller scale.
Coach Pithan is undaunted by this year’s string of defeats. He talks convincingly about “the new North,” and instilling “heart and swagger” in his team. “A lot of the breakdowns here happened over time because of poor communication,” he said. “I am determined to put a stop to that.”
Baseball can be a game of bad hops, even on the best of fields. But that doesn’t mean a school’s program can’t run smoothly. And thanks in part to MLB, the MLBPA and the Baseball Tomorrow Fund, North High is soon to be the home of the Good News Bears.
Click here to read more about North High School’s Baseball Tomorrow Fund grant.
