North Philly’s youth baseball fields are in sorry shape. They can’t wait long for MLB’s help.

If the past couple of years are any indication, by the time Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game is played in Philadelphia in 2026, the City of Brotherly Love should be awash, if not overwhelmed, by the largesse of MLB, the hometown hosting Phillies, national players’ organizations and their union, corporate sponsors, and civil servants.

Denver, Los Angeles, and Seattle — hosts of the last three Midsummer Classics — should serve as precursors for what will come Philly’s way. If that proves to be the case, the city’s most overlooked and underserved communities will form their fair share of partnerships as outreach programs are unveiled and newly renovated, pristine parks and playing equipment are shown off.

Since 1997, MLB and host All-Star clubs have donated more than $100 million through the All-Star Legacy initiative, which is a campaign under the MLB Together social responsibility platform.

However, don’t blame residents of the many neighborhoods that make up the vast swath of North Philadelphia if they declare they cannot wait until 2026. They live each day knowing what slips into the void when too many children have had no such luxuries in their entire lives.

Every day, the many places that could have been summer oases in North Philly instead remain overgrown, rubbish-strewn fields. How many kids face these daily settings in the neighborhoods surrounding Temple University is hard to calculate. So, too, are the number of days cobbled out of the innocence of childhood because of the lack of safe spaces.

The youngsters of North Philadelphia, like children everywhere, need and deserve safe spaces to laugh, play, and grow. Yet, as shown in a series of articles written for The Inquirer by the students from Temple’s Logan Center for Urban Investigative Reporting, the public swimming pools closed during the COVID-19 pandemic were slow to reopen in the neighborhoods that dearly needed them. The precious few lifeguards, many trained on the fly, are now being moved from site to site with a promise that every public pool in the city will, at some point, be open, kind of like a rolling blackout in the water.

As for playing fields, you can count them by the dozens. The question that screams out when touring North Philly is whether the fields are playable.

And if not, why?

In Part II of the Playing Fields, Not Killing Fields series, The Claire Smith Center for Sports Media will focus on playing fields and expanses of green spaces. Such safe zones seem commonplace for millions of American children, but, ironically, not all the little citizens north of Broad and Market Streets. With too few options, too many youngsters are homebound or out on the streets. It is not every day that North Philly violence helps write the daily crime reports, as the post-pandemic gun plague continues to result in mayhem and murders. Where is a child’s respite?

In the first installation of Part II of Playing Fields, Not Killing Fields, Temple student Nicholas Gangewere focused on the Lighthouse Field project, a diamond at East Erie Avenue and North Front Street in Juniata Park. It stands out for what might be, thanks to its inclusion in a joint project that made Lighthouse Field and the school teams that use it the beneficiaries of a $50,000 grant from Major League Baseball and the lawn care company Scotts.

That is but one complex in North Philly, a shining star in the land where baseball first mattered. Other inroads begun by Major League Baseball that already exist here include the Reviving Baseball in the Inner Cities program, which boasts approximately 6,000 boys and girls from the Philadelphia region in age-tiered competition each year. An umbrella of activism has emanated from MLB, the Major League Baseball Players Association and individual players, ever since George Floyd, a Black man, was murdered by police in Minneapolis in 2020. The game’s growing embrace of social justice movements not only led to projects like Lighthouse but also an awakening for Black players, their union, and their sport.

» READ MORE: Philly has a real need in finding its youth safer spots to play baseball

The idea of players uniting to help each other and underserved Black communities had percolated within the game since 2007. But with the dwindling number of Black players in the game, there was a hesitation to speak out.

Then came the rash of deaths of mostly young Black men and women at the hands of police in 2019-20. Seeing these events and ruminating during the downtime of COVID-19 lockdowns led players to check their own accountability. Then they united.

Present and former African American players formed the Players Alliance and informed their sport that silence about social justice was no longer an option. The outgrowth of that? MLB and the players union made a commitment to regrow the game where it had withered in poor and underserved communities.

In 2021, management and labor, in a rare show of unity, gave the Players Alliance $10 million to build fields, youth and education centers — safe spaces. MLB since has pledged a 10-year, $150 million grant to the alliance to expand its reach and mission.

“It was amazing to see how fast Black players came together to do more than just post something on social,” TPA cofounder Curtis Granderson said in a telephone interview this spring. “It started with social because that was the trend, but there was so much more we knew we needed to do, and we hit the ground running with our cross-country Pull Up The Neighborhood tour, which brought together not only Black players but also non-Black players to help hand out COVID-19 supplies, food, and baseball equipment to communities in need.”

“It’s about freaking time,” said 61-year-old former MLB star and eight-time All-Star Darryl Strawberry. “It’s been way overdue. Without opportunities to just play, what has happened are gun deaths, Black-on-Black crime, [and] children left without fathers.”

Locally, one ex-player’s initiatives have resonated. Former Phillies All-Star first baseman Ryan Howard, his wife, Krystle Campbell, the family’s foundation; the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation, Citizens Bank, and the Fairmount Park Conservancy, combined to contribute $700,000 to a makeover of a baseball field in Hunting Park in 2012. The National League’s 2006 MVP also helped establish the Urban Youth Academy at the Marian Anderson Recreation Center in South Philadelphia. The academy, which was named after Howard in 2016, is open year-round to approximately 6,000 children involved in RBI leagues in the Philadelphia area.

Still, what about North Philly, the portion of the city that the Philadelphia Athletics and Philadelphia Phillies first called home? The A’s won championships there. Hall of Famers like the Phils’ Richie Ashburn and Robin Roberts came of age there. The Negro Leagues hosted World Series there, too. The summer game footprint seemed indelible on Broad Street at the Baker Bowl, then at 21st and Lehigh Avenue at Connie Mack Stadium. Then they were all gone, the A’s skipping across the country like a stone across a lake while the Phillies followed the Broad Street subway south to the sports complex in 1971.

» READ MORE: In dual efforts to keep city kids safe, the contrasts between these two recreation centers are stark

Fifty-two years later, it’s hard to find any locals of any age playing where the A’s, Phillies, and the Negro League Stars once stood. If the highly publicized baseball initiatives are all about growing the game and creating safe places, good for them. But where are the children’s leagues north of Market Street? Where is the excitement of, say, Little League ball and the late-summer festival in Williamsport, Pa., that enraptures people around the world?

North Philadelphia is already encompassed in a chartered Little League district that is headed by the expansive Philadelphia Dragons Sports Association. The association, previously known as Taney, includes Center City, Old City, Northern Liberties, and the territories up and through North Philadelphia to Cheltenham Avenue. Approximately 700 boys and girls participate with the Dragons annually in the league competition each spring. Approximately 240 children also are set to play in what will be the Dragons’ second season of a fall league.

“It’s been way overdue. Without opportunities to just play, what has happened are gun deaths, Black-on-Black crime, [and] children left without fathers.”

The thing is, the fields on which the Dragons’ leagues play are almost exclusively south of City Hall. North Philadelphia kids can join the teams and leagues found elsewhere in the district, but there would be commuting involved.

So, why not establish Little League affiliates within the association north of Market Street? John Maher, president of the Dragons’ leagues, has been involved in one way or another with the association for several years. He has yet to see the North Philly neighborhoods seek to have Little League teams.

“A couple of years ago, someone reached out, and she and I talked several times about perhaps starting a team in the 20th and Hunting Park area, but it did not happen,” Maher said. “We’d be more than happy if someone wanted to start a league up there. We’d offer start-up instructions, equipment, and advice on how to run a league. Believe me, I am a big believer in getting kids to play.

“But the people who want the league have to get a charter from Little League International. They have to go to Little League. Little League doesn’t wait for people to come to them.”

In short, it does take that village, larger than an individual MLB/Scotts project. It takes parents, community leaders, partners in universities, and beyond. To do less is unacceptable because the human toll is unforgivable.

You’ve seen the headlines regarding the violence and crime that roil North Philly communities. The reports of a rising flow of illegal weapons that often expose children to gunfire may make you want to change the channel or click on a more soothing link. It is easier to watch the kids who play Little League on television than think of those who can’t.

Just for a moment, though, imagine that daily reality of North Philly is your life. Perhaps, instead of numbers, just think of the human toll that might result without fruitful activities for kids.

Over the course of 40 years of covering sports, the conversations, the interviews, the sheer number of exchanges with players, coaches, and managers have pretty much faded away. Yet the one such conversation is seared in my memory. Strawberry, once the No. 1 player picked in the major league draft, told me that he would never have been able to play the sport as a boy, let alone as a major leaguer, if he had come along 10 years after his birth in Los Angeles in 1962.

“I believe that to this day,” said Strawberry, the top draft pick in 1980 who went on to play 17 years in the majors.

“I stand by that because I saw the street becoming so much more violent, so much more deadly,” he said of growing up in the Crenshaw area of South Central L.A. “It was a very heartbreaking thing I saw growing up, and it was more so 10 years later because it was getting worse, I couldn’t have played.”

His career was pockmarked by drug addiction, a lifestyle he counsels against when meeting with youth and organizations in this chapter of his life. He battled through cancer while still a player. He also played on three championship teams. It certainly would be an eerie Back to the Future twist to see whether the turbulent Mets would have won in 1986 if there was never a Darryl Strawberry to draft in 1980. Or would the Yankees have won it all in 1996 and ‘99 if a veteran contributor named Strawberry never learned to play ball as a child?

Strawberry did play, though. Early on, he gave back to Crenshaw High. He returned in the offseasons to South Central where he and other fellow big-league Angelenos would work out together in the parks.

“Harbor Park, that used to be the place to go,” Strawberry said. “Me, Eric Davis, a lot of players from South Central, we used to practice there all the time. Of course you had to be extra careful, because of the violence, the red against the blue,” he said, referencing the two major warring gangs of the time, with members identifiable by the colors they wore (Crips, blue; Bloods, red).

“Guys were running through the park with guns,” Strawberry said. “They didn’t really mess with us because of the respect they had for us.”

Would he have recommended that the children of his neighborhood use Harbor Park, too? Strawberry, his voice wistful, said, “of course not. You wouldn’t send your children out there.” As gun violence and drive-bys increased, Strawberry recalled, many parents in South Central would not even allow their children to raise their heads above the level of windowsills.

Now, to be clear, Strawberry and I did not talk about growing major-league ballplayers. We talked about growing children who just may want to stand taller than a windowsill, to play baseball or softball, in peace, in the neighborhood they call home. And if they benefit in ways they don’t even realize, well …

“Baseball helps children with leadership, discipline, dealing with failure, being patient, and so much more,” Granderson said. “Having exposure and the option to play it is important because if you want to play, you should be able to. The challenge comes when a kid wants to play and that option isn’t there.”

All the more reason why the children of North Philadelphia should not wait till 2026 to matter to the village. For some children, that just won’t be soon enough.

Playing Fields, Not Killing Fields is an Inquirer collaboration with Temple’s Claire Smith Center for Sports Media and the Center for Urban Investigative Reporting, to produce a series examining the current state of Philadelphia’s youth recreation infrastructure and programs. The project will explore the challenges and solutions to sports serving as a viable response to gun violence and an engine to revitalize city neighborhoods.