A Man, a Van, a Plan for Scrappy Baseball November 2, 2006
The story of a baseball team from a Dominican immigrant enclave in Washington Heights and its beloved blue van.
IN Washington Heights, up in northern Manhattan, there are two JetBlues, each indispensable, in its way, to its passengers from the neighborhood’s Dominican immigrant enclave.
There is the airline, of course, which makes it possible to travel between New York and the Dominican Republic. And there is the other JetBlue, a beat-up, secondhand Chevy van with a powder-blue paint job. JetBlue the van belongs to Tony Trinidad, the community affairs officer for the neighborhood’s 34th Precinct, and his scrappy sandlot baseball team, the New York Bulldogz.
With his players from immigrant families struggling to cover the rent in Washington Heights and the Bronx, Officer Trinidad uses his own money to keep the team in uniforms, equipment and food. Except for the 2003 season, when Officer Trinidad hit the Lotto for $28,000 – as his assistant manager, Xavier Medina, tells it, “Trin wasted most of the money on the Bulldogz” – the team is generally strapped for cash. But that doesn’t stop their wanting to get out of the city, to travel to New Jersey, upstate New York and even to Florida, like other, more affluent sandlot teams.
Enter JetBlue. “The team,” said Mr. Medina, known as X by the Bulldogz and all his other friends in Washington Heights, “is nothing without the van.”
The players tend to get emotional when they talk about JetBlue. “We love that van,” said Deyvi Martinez, 19. “It’s like an airplane. We went to Florida, Canada, Pennsylvania, Connecticut in that van. Trin” – everyone calls Officer Trinidad Trin – “even lends it to us to go to the beach. It’s blessed, that van. It brings us everywhere.”
To be a young Dominican-American ballplayer in Washington Heights is to dream of making it to the major leagues, like Manny Ramirez, the Boston Red Sox star who hit his way out of George Washington High School. A major part of the fantasy involves a flashy vehicle, a Cadillac Escalade, say, Bentley or Range Rover, like the ones the rap stars drive in the videos.
In real life in Washington Heights, the Bulldogz, 30 players age 14 to 19, take the subway – and, for the last three years, JetBlue.
“JetBlue keeps the players grounded,” Mr. Medina said.
Staying grounded – that is pretty much the idea behind the Bulldogz. Officer Trinidad, who is 44 and was a champion wrestler back in high school, is not much of a baseball fan. But the game is the neighborhood passion. So in 2001, when Officer Trinidad was looking for a way to keep young men off the streets, he started a baseball team.
From the beginning, the players were desperate to travel. Officer Trinidad, who is married and the father of two teenage girls, knew how they felt. He grew up in a family of six children. His father was a building porter.
“I never left the city,” recalled Officer Trinidad, who is Puerto Rican. “My father was always working. We never had the money to go anywhere.”
Officer Trinidad packed the Bulldogz into his seven-passenger minivan and a borrowed second van, and began taking them to games in New Jersey. In the summer of 2002, thanks to a local sponsor, the Bulldogz made a weeklong trip to Orlando, Fla., to compete in a tournament. They went on JetBlue – the real JetBlue, the airline. The airline treated the players like V.I.P.’s, with the pilot welcoming the team over the loudspeaker.
Four years later, the players remember it as one of the best weeks of their lives. They had pillow fights at the Travelodge motel. They swam in the pool. They went to Disney World.
“We had a great time,” Officer Trinidad said. He laughed. “Maybe that’s why we lost all the games.”
The next season, naturally, everyone was dying to go back to Florida. But there was no sponsor. Meanwhile, someone’s uncle had just bought a 12-passenger van at an auction in Morris County, N.J. The van had been a county vehicle, which is why it said Morris County in big letters on the side. Officer Trinidad bought it for $2,000. He removed the name, but kept the powder-blue paint.
With Mr. Medina at the wheel, the team headed for Orlando – 24 hours on the road. The players sang, told jokes and argued about baseball, girls, the air-conditioning – “turn it down, it’s too cold;” “turn it up, it’s too hot” – and when they should stop again to eat. The miles flew by.
No official christening was necessary. The players had started calling the van JetBlue from the moment they climbed aboard. The ride home was somewhat bumpier – JetBlue broke down in New Jersey, about an hour outside of New York, when the transmission went, at 4 a.m. Everyone had to pile into the second van to get home, and JetBlue was towed back to Washington Heights.
Like the Bulldogz, who generally win at baseball – except in Florida – the JetBlue van has some impressive numbers: vintage, 1991; mileage, 113,000; baseball games, hundreds.
- Posted in : Uncategorized
- Author : arnold
Comments»
no comments yet - be the first?