It wasn’t a costume party at Riverfront Park, nor a hallucination from the near-80 degree heat Saturday, April 2.
There really were over 525 boys and girls, ages 4 to 14 years old, from more than 40 teams all wearing Arizona Diamondbacks jerseys for the Verde Valley Little League opening day.
As part of a $30,000 cost-saving measure for May upgrades to the park’s primary four-stadium complex, all 44 teams in the VVLL’s eight divisions sport D-Backs uniforms during games, with teams distinguished by individual color combinations and head coaches.
“It’s going into storage, it’s going into bullpens, it’s adding tiered seating to keep people off the walkways,” said Jeremy Peters, new VVLL president. “We’ve got big plans to improve our facilities.”
Those plans did not seem to faze defending league champion coach Jeff Lynch, whose team, led by pitcher Ryan Lindsay, blasted Carlos Godina and his white-and-red-colored major league Diamondbacks, 17-0, in four innings.
“We have the youngest team in the league,” Godina said after his 9-year-old son, Isaiah, moved to the mound from shortstop to hold Lynch’s Diamondbacks scoreless the final two innings. “We just needed a different pitcher, is all.”
Starting in the third inning, Isaiah Godina was moved to the mound from shortstop, proceeding to throw strikeout after strikeout behind changeups and a “wicked” knuckleball, his father said.
“I’m not biased: They were like Casey at the Bat,” Carlos Godina recalled. “He impressed a lot of people. They didn’t score any runs after the third.”
While the six other VVLL divisions cap teams at five runs per inning, first-game jitters got to Godina’s and head coach Nick Garcia’s major league teams, as they both allowed a total of 37 runners to cross home plate safely.
“It was 6-4 before the fifth inning,” Godina recalled Garcia’s other major league opener. “But then they had a lot of walks.”
Garcia’s team wound up losing, 20-9, to head coach Adam Gabaldon and his heavier hitters, on a clear day in which Shawn Zingali, VVLL board member in charge of promotions, could see a new Riverfront Park stadium complex in June.
“Instead of having dirt, we’re going to have concrete seating come down to the bullpen area,” he said of upgrades to the main complex, which he anticipates being finished in six weeks — definitely by the end of the VVLL schedule the first weekend of June. “We’re going to raise a fence and extend a block wall up six feet, and then we’re going to have seating right on top of that.
“Also, we’re going to have storage facilities at the end — that way each field has their own supply area. We re-did some cabinets in the snack bar. We also have, above the snack bar, an umpire’s changing room. We’re going to be putting baseball player silhouette shading on the windows.”
In addition to those upgrades, VVLL is looking for additional corporate sponsorship to help defray the cost of eventually covering the entire four-diamond main complex at Riverfront.
“We have a goal to cover the facility all the way into the shed to make sure that the stands and snack bar are protected completely,” Zingali added. “We are saving money from the jerseys, but we’re going to need somebody large to help us out. There’s plenty of people out there who want to be part of little league; they just don’t know how.”
For more photos, please see the Wednesday, April 6, issues of the Camp Verde Journal and Cottonwood Journal Extra.
