The Roseland Little League folded in 1997, and soon its ball fields, at 125th Place and South Michigan, were thick with weeds. The wooden bleachers were already dilapidated, the fences broken.
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Two years later Anthony Beale, an Allstate Insurance systems analyst who would soon be elected alderman of the Ninth Ward, saw the potential in the run-down ball fields. In the 1970s he’d played for all-black Little League teams at Gately Park, at 103rd and Cottage Grove, where he regularly got cut by the glass on the field. He and his teammates eventually won a Park District tournament, but he still remembers feeling inferior whenever he played white teams in their nice ballparks. Now he wanted to give the Roseland kids a top-notch ball field–the advantage he hadn’t had. “That’s when you say the playing field has been leveled,” he says. “Our kids will play strictly on ability, and they won’t have a psychological disadvantage.”
Private donations also began coming in, and Beale, who estimates the entire project will cost $700,000, persuaded numerous big businesses to donate, including Commonwealth Edison ($140,000), Coca-Cola (about $10,000), Ford Motor Company ($5,000), and Waste Management ($5,000). Beale’s church, Salem Baptist, donated around $10,000, and the state promised another $390,000, part of which would go toward a third field for older kids.
On opening day, May 11, Sheriff Sheahan dropped by, and Beale, who coaches the Roseland Pirates, showed him a flower bed in which neatly trimmed bushes spell out RLL. Beale also pointed out the wrought-iron fence and the underground sprinklers. “What a difference,” said the sheriff. “Unbelievable.”
