The Rochester Hispanic Youth Baseball League’s home fields at Baden Park are diamonds in the rough.
The neighborhood surrounding the ballfields at Hudson Avenue and Upper Falls Boulevard is beset by violence and poverty. A shootout in a nearby parking lot a few days before the baseball season opened in June left a teenage girl dead. Before games, volunteers comb the outfield and bleachers for liquor bottles, lighters, and worse.
“Last year, we had a little girl that got stuck by a needle on our fields,” said Santos Cruz, the league president.
The league, which serves about 200 children on a shoestring budget, is precisely the sort of organization that New York state legislators had in mind when they carved out funding for underserved youth sports nonprofits in the state’s online sports betting law.
