Still No Field After 90 Years

Without a home ballpark, the Rams have had to fit in wherever they can, whether that be a field miles away from campus or their opponent’s home grounds.

For players and coaches alike, this presents problems that run deeper than just on-field play.

“It was embarrassing to say that you get ready, you're wearing your home jerseys, and you're showing up to the other team's field,” said Kaleo Velez, sophomore infielder. “It’s not as satisfying as having the team show up to your house and be there an hour early and have it be your facilities and your baseballs… You feel like you're still away.”

Mario Mendoza has been around City Baseball for over 20 years, first as a player starting in 2004, then as an assistant coach in 2011, and later taking over the head coaching job in 2018. He feels like not much has changed.

 “The hardest part about our school is that it really hasn’t evolved, since I was playing here. Whether we’re on the road, or practicing at random fields, or we don’t have a batting cage,” said Mendoza. “We still don’t have a lot of facilities [we need] to get better, to be successful.”

It doesn’t seem like much will change in the immediate future. Men’s Athletic Director Adam Lucarelli said that funding is the main obstacle to constructing a field. “City College has been financially strapped, and it’s not going to get better. We had to lay off a lot of faculty members, we had to drop sports. We used to have thriving track and field and cross country programs, and we had to drop that sport, which is tragic.”

In the 91 year history of City College, the baseball team has never had its own field. After playing at a number of different SF Rec and Parks fields around the city, they settled on Balboa Park’s main field in 1954, playing there until 2010. 

The next year, they began to call Fairmont Field “home,” a diamond some 7 miles south of Ocean Campus in Pacifica. While the playing surface was significantly better than Balboa Park’s, the distance from the college posed an issue that the team struggled to work around.

On top of that, St. Ignatius Prep owns the field and uses it for its baseball, softball, and field hockey teams, which has caused numerous scheduling problems for City College over the years.

Unsurprisingly, the program's shortcomings in this area affect the recruitment of new players. Mendoza said, “If you’re a parent, why would you want your son to play at City? A lot of these kids are used to nice things. So when I recruit, and I say, ‘we only get the field for two hours, and you have to leave school, come to the field, then come back to campus after’, they look at me like I’m crazy.”

So will City Baseball ever have a field of its own? While the future is murky, Lucarelli said that over the years, there’s been “chatter” about a collaboration between SF Rec and Parks and the college to renovate Balboa Park, turning it into a field suitable for this level. The construction of a field on the Balboa Reservoir site was also considered before the site was finalized for what is now the Harry Britt Building.

For now, at least, there's a stopgap in place. The cavernous Maloney Field, former home of the SF State Gators, will play host to the Rams for the next two years, and the players are glad to have some stability. “It’s exciting to have our own place to call home for a set amount of games,” Velez said.