As Tampa development booms, this historic Black Little League lost out

TAMPA — The coach approached the chain-link fence, a cane in one hand and a key in the other. He hadn’t returned since the move.

Pausing in the afternoon heat, his mind drifted to how things used to be: The bleachers, packed with parents and grandparents. The volunteers, doling out snacks and support. The clubhouse, declaring it was the home of the Yellow Jackets Little League.

Children played here, just west of the Hillsborough River, for decades.

“This was more than just baseball,” said James Wright, 89, scanning the grass he once tidied seven times a week, now dotted with trash. “This was a community.”

The bleachers had been dismantled. The clubhouse, demolished. The ballfields, once alive in a technicolor of team jerseys, sprouted only weeds.

In the distance stretched a sparkling skyline evolving at warp-speed, the g-forces of change felt particularly in this historically Black part of West Tampa, now host to one of the city’s largest redevelopments.

Rome Yards — a project that includes the Tampa Housing Authority and a Miami developer — will have about 1,000 mixed-income homes, parks, an amphitheater and more. To make way, city officials in 2018 uprooted the Yellow Jackets.

Their ballfields were included in the 18 acres officials pitched as a “blank canvas” waterfront property ripe for Tampa’s next metamorphosis.

Wright, who’s served as the Yellow Jackets president since 1975, stood by the fence and wondered why the league hadn’t been part of the grand plans. City leaders moved the league to another neighborhood, to a park beside a graveyard. Meanwhile, more than five years later, the construction at the ballfields that forced the Yellow Jackets to move has yet to begin.

Wright shuffled closer to the chain link. Did his key still work?

Click.

A turn of his wrist threw open the lock. But the gate led nowhere, really. Not anymore.

Modest beginnings

Earlier this summer, Wright sat beneath the water-stained ceiling of the league’s new home, two miles north in Tampa Heights. Not far, sure. But not West Tampa.

The Yellow Jackets no longer have a clubhouse like every other Little League chapter in the Tampa-area district, just a trailer with a leaky roof. The city still hasn’t added a ramp, so each day Wright mounts the steps with his cane. The bathrooms lack plumbing. Coaches say they have to shepherd kids past drunk loiterers to the public restrooms across the park.

Beside Wright were plastic tubs stuffed with relics of a league that has survived on a shoestring: trophies, hats, graduation pictures, obituaries. Newspaper stories detail the city’s rich Black history, many of its landmarks lost to time, disinvestment and promises of urban renewal.

The Yellow Jackets were founded in 1967, the same year a white Tampa police officer killed a Black teenager. Segregation had long locked Black residents out of opportunity. The killing was a boiling point. Days of unrest left Central Avenue, the Black economic hub, in ruins.

“We rose from the ashes,” Wright says.

James “Big Jim” Williams started the league with little more than a desire to give young people purpose. Wright became involved a few years later, when he was 40 with two daughters.

“Really, he’s a father to hundreds,” said Robert McIntyre, 43, a former Yellow Jackets player who went on to play in the minors before joining the Tampa fire department. In moments of doubt, all these years later, he ponders: “What would Coach Wright do?”

Wright has devoted more than half his life to the league. Inside the trailer, stashed in a cupboard near a bucket collecting dripping water, is an award from the city for his service.

The decades show in the stoop of his shoulders. Earlier this year, he landed in a hospital bed.

“Exhaustion,” he shrugs, a medical bracelet still on his wrist.

The number of Black Major League Baseball players is at its lowest in decades, often attributed to how lower-income kids in the U.S. are locked out of youth sports because of hefty fees and scant places to play. The Yellow Jackets have never charged for registration.

Wright and a handful of volunteers are dogged by the day’s anxieties: How to make ends meet? How to help more kids? How to get better facilities like they had in West Tampa and fought so hard for?

“I probably would have left here years ago,” he says. “But the city did us wrong.”

‘Part of something’

Before there was much of anything in Tampa, there was baseball. The city’s pipeline to the big leagues includes the likes of Al Lopez, Wade Boggs and Fred McGriff.

The Yellow Jackets coaches, though, were more concerned with creating a haven than hall of famers. Before the move, the ballfields on Oregon Avenue were an oasis in a hard-scrabble neighborhood. Kids poured in from nearby public housing.

“You could forget about the hard times if you knew there was a game on Saturday,” said Dedrick “Dee” Jackson, 50. When his family moved, he found a way back to the fields to play ball, even though a whooping awaited him at home for straying too far. Sometimes he counted on the league to provide dinner.

“Baseball was our heartbeat,” he said. “It was everything.”

An agreement with the school district secured the Yellow Jackets more space, bathrooms and a yellow clubhouse in the 1990s. Team photos lined its walls.

Difficulties still intruded. The speaker system was stolen. So were benches. When a storm blew out the lights, they knew not to expect speedy city repairs. Out of chalk, coaches would mark baselines with flour.

“When a game was on, you could get ahold of anyone at the fields,” said Wayne Moore, a former security officer at nearby Just Elementary where Wright often stopped to check on players.

Moore remembers students buzzing for an upcoming game. “Officer, you coming to see me play?” they’d grin.

“It wasn’t about the sport,” Moore said. “It was about pride, about being part of something.”

Pushed out

More than a decade ago, city officials set sights on transforming 120 acres that run along Interstate 275 and the west riverbank. As a once-sleepy downtown boomed, the nearby waterfront land became prime real estate.

Out-of-town developers marveled at the area’s untapped potential over beers at nearby Rick’s on the River. They held community meetings, residents pouring in to discuss impending change. The Yellow Jackets were included in preliminary design proposals for the neighborhood.

The area contained one of Tampa’s oldest public housing complexes.

“The plan had always been to demolish the dilapidated, drug-infested, gang-riddled, violent North Boulevard Homes,” former Mayor Bob Buckhorn, who spearheaded the area’s metamorphosis, recently told the Tampa Bay Times. “It was long overdue.”

Two thousand residents relocated ahead of its 2018 demolition.

Buckhorn saw two options for the league, he said: “Leave for a better place, or shut down.”

His administration requested the City Council remove the old ballfields from Tampa’s list of designated parks, opening it for development. Frank Reddick, a former Yellow Jackets player, was the City Council chairperson at the time. He worried about the erasure of Black history.

“We’re losing it,” he said in 2018. “Losing it every day with all this new development.”

Still, he joined the unanimous vote to remove the park from the city’s designated list.

The league moved to Calvin Taylor Park in Tampa Heights, which it uses for free. The Rays Baseball Foundation chipped in more than $40,000 for baseball and softball equipment.

“This is a good day for the Yellow Jackets and it’s a great day for Tampa,” Buckhorn said at the 2019 ribbon cutting, thanking Wright for “recognizing that our city is changing.”

Wright doesn’t care for public speaking, or attention of any kind. Once he won a volunteer award; the next day he replaced the name badge and gave it to someone else. But he didn’t want to jeopardize the chance for future investment.

“The city had all the power,” he said later.

So he stood at the podium, quoted from Corinthians and said the situation turned out “very well.”

He wanted it to.

‘All about the kids’

There was no Little League for Black kids in Tampa when Wright was a boy. He played in the street with a ball and a broken broom handle. His dad earned 50 cents an hour packing chicken feed. His mom, a hotel cook, made clothes for him and nine siblings from spare grain sacks.

He never forgot how a group of men, eager to give kids like him a safe place to play, banded together to establish a small park by the river. It wasn’t much but it was theirs. The lesson lingered.

Years later, Wright, a sales rep for a fabric wholesaler, heard the Yellow Jackets needed a hand. Before long, he was a fixture. First to arrive, the last to linger. He coached and umpired. He handled the books and he grilled the burgers.

“I want to teach not necessarily baseball, but respect,” he said.

He remembers players’ names, their throws and swings, where they work decades later. Principals, coaches, firefighters. Sometimes he’s the first person they visit when they get out of jail.

“For him, it’s all about the kids,” said Anthony Lester, who took some of his first steps on the Oregon Avenue baseball diamond. Lester has coached for the league for 18 years, juggling his family and landscaping business while making the 60-mile round trip from his Ruskin home to Tampa three times a week during baseball season.

“I want to give back,” said Lester, 42. “The Yellow Jackets have been underdogs for a long time. I want to keep them alive.”

Casualties of changing city

The city says it’s done right by the league.

“We have gone out of our way to help the Yellow Jackets with field improvements and things that other leagues might take care of in-house,” said Tony Mulkey, head of Tampa’s Parks and Recreation Department.

“Not true,” said first-term City Council member Gwen Henderson whose district includes the old ballfields. She often answers calls from residents confused about why the Yellow Jackets had to move while their former home has remained vacant for years.

“Not only was this special place taken away, the league was moved to somewhere worse,” said Henderson, the council’s lone Black member. “Meanwhile, their old fields are just sitting there. That’s disrespectful.”

The city still owns the Oregon Avenue ballfields. The site is part of the land it has agreed to lease to the Related Group, among the region’s most prolific developers, for 99 years. Construction on the ballfields, specifically, isn’t set to begin until June 2027, almost a decade after the Yellow Jackets left.

There’s no plan for the Yellow Jackets to return. In June, all six of Henderson’s colleagues joined her in requesting that Mayor Jane Castor’s administration review their community benefits agreement with Related and consider amendments that would require the developer to improve amenities at league’s new location.

“Across the city, the spaces that belonged to Black people are gone,” Henderson said. “I don’t want our presence to only exist in the form of historical markers.”

Beyond the vacant ballfields, the area is abuzz with construction. A riverside walkway is coming. Soon, the area long considered a food desert will get its official stamp of rebirth: a Publix.

A coach continues

Next year marks Wright’s 50th as president. He’ll be 90 in January. He visits the Yellow Jackets trailer most days, baseball season or not.

Asked again why he’s so devoted, a moment passes. He thinks back to when he collapsed at home earlier this year. Who happened to answer the 911 call?

McIntyre, the former minor league ballplayer who used to cling to Wright’s legs at the baseball diamond on Oregon Avenue as an 8-year-old. Now he’s a lieutenant with Tampa Fire Rescue.

“Coach Wright,” McIntyre said as he walked into the room to find the man who had a hand in raising him crumpled on the floor.

The coach smiled, recognizing his former player, as he always does.