By Lornet Turnbull
Special To The Medium
For Jeron “Bookie” Gates, growing up in the Central Area during the 1980s and early 1990s, it was easy to fall in love with baseball.
On Saturdays during the spring and summer, groups of neighborhood residents – both adults and kids – would gather at Garfield playfield to catch a game. Gates’ own father coached Little League, high school baseball and semi-pro and even his grandmother played the sport. “If you lived in the CD,” he said, “baseball was the thing to do.”
At home, though, Gates could never convince his older brothers to let him play.
“I have photos of me wearing umpire gear, calling balls and strikes — or what I knew to be a balls and strikes,” recalled Gats. “From there I never stopped. That drive was in my DNA. Baseball was in my blood.”
It’s only natural then that Bookie, as everyone calls him, who would go on to become a multi-sport athlete at Garfield High School, play for the Washington State University Cougars and later in the majors, would look for ways to inspire that same love of baseball in the next generation.
Baseball Beyond Borders (BBB), a club Gates built over the last decade, seeks to expose urban kids of color to America’s national pastime, developing their skills through mentorship, tournaments, camps and clinics and by supporting baseball programs at their local high schools.
Baseball Beyond Borders also develops and nurtures coaching and leadership skills within the community, giving its student athletes role models while helping prepare them for college and beyond. Gates and his supporters have also started a volleyball program for girls.
“The thing that makes baseball sexy, isn’t the uniform,” he said. “It’s the intellectual stimulus it provides. When you are able to elevate your critical thinking on how you approach the game, you begin looking at baseball through a critical lens that you then transfer to life.”
But Gates also knows what he’s up against – the powerful allure that basketball and football hold for America’s urban youth. And 70 years after Jackie Robinson shattered the race barrier to become the first Black professional player in major league baseball, African Americans are a pretty rare sight on the baseball field. Only about 8 percent of MLB players are Black and actor Chris Rock once famously referred to Black baseball fans as an endangered species.
“Baseball in general is not a sport that African Americans are participating in,” said Vance Adams, who also grew up playing baseball on the playfield at Garfield and whose 18-year-old son is enrolled in Baseball Beyond Borders.
“It’s not as sexy a game as basketball and football,” he said. “You can sit in the left field the entire game and not get any action.”
Gates calls it the glamorization of those games, both of which he played with distinction at Garfield. He was a quarterback there, played forward and guard on the basketball team and was a shortstop on the baseball team. In 1998, he earned Garfield High School’s most outstanding athlete award as well as the US Amateur Baseball Federation World Series co-MVP.
Gates said in his youth he “played baseball with guys who were far more talented than he but who chose to move in a different direction.”
In the African-American community, “there was not the ongoing support and advocacy or opportunity to play the game,” he said.
It meant kids like him who wanted to continue playing baseball after graduating from Little League or who wanted to play club baseball had to travel out of the neighborhood.
He played with the East Side Shockers and later the Chaffey baseball club and believes the exposure helped him earn a scholarship to Washington State.
“I didn’t know anything about Pullman but it offered me an opportunity to pursue an education and play the game,” says Gates.
Gates was drafted by the Minnesota Twins in his junior year, but said he made a pact with his family that he would finish his education.
After college, Gates played for a year and a half with the Arizona Diamondbacks and later with the Colorado Rockies before he was let go.
Back in Seattle he struggled with the loss of his great-grandmother, a family matriarch whose steady counsel he’d come to rely on. He also began casting about for ways to reclaim his passion for baseball at a time when the sport had lost its appeal particularly with African American kids.
In 2007, the late Herb Chaffey, founder of the Chaffey Baseball Club where Bookie had played while in high school, offered to be the fiscal sponsor for kids of color for fall/winter baseball training. But when that training ended, Gates said both he and Chaffey realized there was a real unmet need among these young men and developed the first teams within the Chaffey Inner-City. By 2011, the club was down to a single team which that year won the United States Specialty Sports Association(USSSA) Fathers Day championship. Three years ago, Gates spun off the program to form Baseball Beyond Borders. The community picked the name Kings for the team, partly in reference to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
BBB has served hundreds of student athletes through league play, tournaments, camps and clinics, including 274 in 2016.
One of those was Adams’ son, Leland, who like his father, grew up with a love for baseball. Adams initially enrolled his son in other local baseball clubs.
“It was expensive and we worked hard to support him financially,” Adams said. “We did that for four years. During that time, he was the only African-American player on every single team.”
A very good player, Leland soon began to lose his passion for the game, his father said. Four years ago, Adams enrolled him in BBB and immediately, “I began to see that zeal again.
“Bookie is a big personality and my son identified with the coaches and the other kids in the program. He found family there and knew if he had issues he could go to them and they’d identify with what he was going through,” said Adams.
He said his son is involved in a range of other activities outside baseball, something the BBB coaches are aware of and fully support. What’s more Adams said Leland is playing in the same tournaments as the kids from those other premiere clubs.
“I’d gotten to know these guys over the years and with Leland being a teenager now, I know in them I have allies,” Adams continued. “It brings meaning to that saying ‘it takes a village.’ I trust they will speak life into him, and not just about baseball….”
In January, his son received the Gert Hauser Moving Beyond 12 scholarship award for his outstanding academic record and commitment to community transformation.
“I wish I could have done this from the beginning,” Adams said. “He’s thriving.”
Gates said the group faces the ongoing challenge of keeping young athletes engaged.
“There’s a disconnect,” he said. As it was in families like his and Adams,’ he said, “A kids’ experience with the game is based on the experience his parents and grandparents would have had. My peers and coaches have the same experience.”
BBB works with high school coaches and athletic directors to help defray some of the basic, unmet needs for their student athletes. It has been working with Rainier Beach, Franklin, Garfield and Cleveland high schools, recently adopted Renton High school and is in conversations with Highline in Burien, Gates said. Students from other schools are also part of the club. “There have been times when Cleveland didn’t have enough kids to fill a team.” It meant that one of his mentees in his senior year was unable to play.
Supporting the schools is part of the organization’s four keys to success, which Gates said include program evaluation, financial viability, community readiness, and effective governance.
“We want to serve all kids of color; African American kids are a priority,” Gates said. “We want a club that represents the ethnic diversity that makes up our city.”
The program builds its roster during late summer/early fall. In the fall and winter, members, about 60 this year, are involved in strength and agility training.
“A lot of our kids come to us in the summer. But if we can capture them during the Spring, (and offer support) so they aren’t coming out of their pockets…we can build on their self-confidence” and get them to stay in the game.
BBB hosts an annual breakfast fundraiser to help support those students who can’t afford what it might typically cost to play the sport, between $5,000 and $10,000 per student annually. The next fundraiser is scheduled for Jan. 25, 2018 at Safeco field. Bookie said the Seattle Mariners is a major sponsor and an ongoing supporter of the program; many members of the team volunteer with BBB.
“There’s only so much we can do and only so many kids we can serve annually,” he said. “We want to make sure it is economically feasible for any kid who wants to play.”
