LOS ANGELES _ The Dodgers were still in Brooklyn and Dwight D. Eisenhower was still in the White House the last time Southern California went this deep into the summer without a Major League Baseball game.
For Conrad Munatones, then a 20-year-old catcher from East Los Angeles, the big leagues were an East Coast thing, like Broadway plays or Philly cheesesteaks.
"When someone said the Brooklyn Dodgers, I thought that meant Brooklyn Avenue," he remembered.
Two minor league teams played in Los Angeles, but to Munatones, baseball meant Sunday doubleheaders at Belvedere and Evergreen parks, where neighborhood legends made their names playing for teams like Eastside Beer, Ornelas Food Market and the Carmelita Chorizeros. The games drew hundreds of people to the parks after church to sit on uncomfortable wooden bleachers or on blankets in the grass as mariachis played and carne asada sizzled.
"For Mexican Americans in the postwar era, next to the Catholic Church, barrio baseball was both the centerpiece and the heartbeat of their community," said Samuel O. Regalado, a Cal State Stanislaus history professor who has written extensively on the subject. "For the players, both U.S.-born and migrants, the games were a transnational platform by which they could achieve a level of respect and local notoriety that, outside of the barrios, was rarely afforded to them."
For players like Munatones, who signed with the Dodgers two months after the team moved from New York in 1958, baseball was never better than on those warm summer afternoons in East L.A.
"The interest was total in that community because that's all we had," said Munatones, now 83 and living in San Dimas. "We were given the opportunity to perform in front of good-sized crowds that loved baseball and didn't have the money to buy tickets for the (minor league) Angels or the Hollywood Stars.
"It was quite a thing. Most of these people were laborers. They were given a Sunday to enjoy so they would do it as a family."
Evergreen Park, now Evergreen Recreation Center, is temporarily closed, a victim of the COVID-19 pandemic that also delayed the start of the Major League Baseball season until Thursday. But the memory of how baseball once thrived there hasn't been forgotten, not by those who played or cheered them on.
