Weather’s not playing ball
Rainouts are disrupting seasons of many area Little Leaguers
Tony Salas raked the sandy, brown infield of a baseball diamond at Melrose Park in north Houston on Tuesday afternoon, getting ready for the evening’s little league games.
Then, as it has so many recent days, the sky darkened.
“They come from the southwest — same dark clouds,” said Salas, president of the Northside National Little League. “I just say ‘Oh man, here we go again, here we go again.’ ”
For the eighth time in the league’s two-month season, Salas canceled the day’s games after thunder rumbled and rain poured, further soaking the already soggy grass and turning dirt into mud. From Pearland to The Woodlands, the exceptionally wet spring has disrupted the schedules of thousands of kids and their parents, threatened the eligibility of players to take part in coming tournaments and sent Little Leagues across the area scrambling to salvage their seasons.
For some leagues, playoff series have been cut short. Others have spent hundreds of dollars on quick-dry compounds and extra dirt and elaborate machinery to drain and ready fields made uneven by water and cleats. Still others are cramming in make-up games on Sundays and holidays. “They want to play,” said Steven Compte, a coach of 22 years in the Northside league, “But there’s not really much we can do about it.”
For the last three months, southeast Texas has gotten more than its usual amount of rain — 8 to 16 inches on top of the typical 12 inches for the last three-month period. The waterlogged fields increase the risk of children slipping and injuring themselves.
The players on Compte’s Houston Prospects team — who last year helped the league win its district tournament before getting knocked out by powerhouse Pearland
— are no longer surprised by the text messages he sends telling them that a game is off. It’s happened about five times already this season, including on Monday.
Both Compte and the kids on his team are now beginning to worry that the missed games will affect tournaments down the road, including one in San Marcos planned for July.
“We’re having a hard time getting prepared for it,” he said.
The rain doesn’t discriminate. Some 30 miles to the south, Pearland’s Little League, one year removed from beating Northside and sending a team to the Little League World Series, is also battling the effects of the rain.
“I’ve been doing this for 21 years, and I’ve never had a season like I’m having this year,” said Danny Rhodes, the league’s senior maintenance director.
The league purchased a $900 Super Sopper, essentially a big roller with a large squeegee on it that absorbs water from the ground. It’s bought more bags of a quick-dry compound than ever before: five pallets of fifty 50-pound bags instead of the usual two.
The quick-dry material can be sprinkled on the infield to soak up moisture and it costs about $12 for each bag — not to be used too often, Rhodes said.
Then there are the vacuums, used by many of Houston’s teams to suck up water that doesn’t soak into the saturated ground. In Pearland, parents, coaches and even kids have used large squeegee mops to push water off of the field and into a trench they’ve dug. The water flows into a large hole, where it’s sucked out by vacuums — about 25 gallons at a time. Games rescheduled
More than 300 games have been rescheduled this year — many of those on Sundays, and the league even held seven games on Mother’s Day, said scheduling director Lee Gram-mier.
“We did as best as we could to get people off on Mother’s Day,” Grammier said, noting that the prior Sunday featured 21 games. The league wasn’t originally planning any games for Memorial Day weekend, but now Friday and Saturday are booked.
In Bellaire, 47 days of rain have led to 210 games getting canceled or postponed for its little league and the “abrupt” end of the season and playoffs for more than 100 children, said Brad Mills, president of Bellaire Little League.
The league features a double-elimination tournament at the end of its season where if a team loses, it gets placed into a separate bracket than the winners. The top teams in each bracket eventually play for the championship.
This season, Mills said, the league had to eliminate the entire lower bracket: nine teams across two age groups.
He said the league can only use a handful of fields for about 500 children and the priority was making sure every player played 12 games — the number of games for eligibility in summer tournaments that could eventually lead to the Little League World Series.
“That’s something we watch very closely,” Mills said. “As heartbreaking as it was to take away a season playoff, it would even be worse if we couldn’t get the minimum required number of games in.”
The difficulties have some teams adjusting. Rhodes said he’s looking into converting two softball fields into Little League fields by using portable pitching mounds.
Last season, the Neartown Little League started its season in March. This year, the league moved it up to February, anticipating rain delays and trying to end the season before the summer began, said Cris Bera, president of the league. Rained out
Next year, Bera said it wouldn’t be surprising if the league started in January. He said the exhibition game between the league’s “all-stars” scheduled this past Sunday to end the season got unexpectedly rained out.
“At 12:35, we were good,” Bera said. “Minutes later the rain starts coming down.”
On Wednesday, Salas was back at Melrose Park, pulling the weeds from the infield and checking to see how damp the grass was.
There’s no rain yet, but once again, the sky darkens ominously and thunder claps sound in the distance.
“Hope it blows by,” Salas said.