‘BASEBALL SKY’ ABOUT THE GAME OF LIFE
PLAYWRIGHT FINDS INSPIRATION IN LOGAN HEIGHTS FOR OLD GLOBE’S NEW PLAY
The team that has brought José Cruz González’s “Under a Baseball Sky” to fruition at the Old Globe Theatre includes not only the playwright himself and director James Vásquez, but two longtime members of San Diego’s Mexican American community.
One of them is Maria Garcia, who lives in Logan Heights and who showed González around the neighborhood that inspired his play about “two wounded souls who find something in common in throwing a ball and playing catch.” Her “amazing record of history of the community,” González said, reflected the important role the quintessentially American game of baseball has played in its growth and its culture.
The other contributor is director Vásquez’s father, Pedro Ortiz Vásquez, a poet and activist who’s been a high school baseball coach for 40 years. The senior Vásquez has been serving as the baseball fundamentals coach for the production, which begins previews Saturday in the Globe’s Sheryl and Harvey White Theatre.
“I didn’t get to understand baseball until my children started playing,” said González. “Mr. Vasquez was fantastic about it. He broke things down for me — all this knowledge of baseball, but also a metaphor for life, the sort of things like ‘Keep your eye on the ball.’ ”
James Vásquez said that as a boy growing up, he heard his father speak that phrase — “Keep your eye on the ball” — many, many times.
“I grew up in Chicano Park,” James Vásquez said. “I remember watching the murals being painted. From an early age I had a connection to the energy of the community. Baseball is the all-American sport. There’s something really beautiful about these immigrant communities that find their place in America through this sport. There’s something
about them being able to play this that gives them a sense that ‘I do belong here.’ ”
“Under a Baseball Sky,” an Old Globe commission, was first heard in a Zoom reading as part of the Powers New Voices Festival, held virtually in 2021. It was rehearsed live last year at the Colorado New Play Festival in Steamboat Springs.
A few months ago, González and Vásquez did
a reading of “Under a Baseball Sky” at the Logan Heights Library and were heartened by the audience response.
“They were telling us their baseball stories about their parents or their grandparents,” said González, who also wrote “American Mariachi,” a musical that premiered at the Old Globe in 2018 and was also directed by Vásquez. “It really struck a chord with them. They were just so moved and excited.”
“Under a Baseball Sky” is about a friendship that forms between young Teo and elderly neighbor Eli O’Reilly that’s interwoven with the generational presence of baseball in their Mexican American community, one not unlike San Diego’s Logan Heights.
“At the very heart,” said González, “it’s just two people playing ball.”
Whether it’s novels like Bernard Malamud’s “The Natural,” W.P. Kinsella’s “Shoeless Joe” (which became the film “Field of Dreams”) or works of theater like “Under a Baseball Sky,” the national pastime has repeatedly served as a vehicle for telling deeper stories.
“There’s Americana in it,” González said of baseball. “You’re playing against this other team, but it becomes bigger than yourself. There’s something heroic about it to me.”
Vásquez recounted that some members of the “Under a Baseball Sky” cast have said they never realized how much baseball was like theater.
“It has an ensemble,” he said, comparing the two. “There are stakes. There are obstacles to overcome. There’s a beginning, middle and end. There are act breaks.
“Baseball is its own form of theater,” Vásquez said.