In small-town Kansas, man with a vision is bridging cultures through baseball

Harvey Peña has to tell his wife not to pinch him. If this is a dream, he doesn’t want to wake up.

In this town, where the northernmost reaches of the Flint Hills lead to the Kansas-Nebraska border, an island boy from Puerto Rico has found his joy.

Most FM radio signals have long faded into static here, and the closest shopping mall is an hour’s drive away. The population barely eclipses 2,500.

But off 6th Street, half a mile from the heart of town, sits a glimmering artificial-turf infield and bluegrass outfield. It has been almost 10 years since this baseball gem was developed on top of a city dump and a field of alfalfa grass. Today, bleachers and a few hundred sun-washed blue seats stand ready for fans, overlooking the shallow valley in which the field is planted.

Somerset Park, with dimensions stretching 317 feet down the right-field line, 381 to center and 319 down the left-field line, is where the creator and manager of the Sabetha Lobos discovered his euphoria.

“If you saw the field I grew up on, you would think a cow would not want to be there,” Peña said. “This is like making it to the big leagues.”

Most days, Peña, 37, will stand above the field and think back to how he came to live in this community, in a tiny Kansas town that supports his vision of opening doors for Latin American baseball players.

A friendly smile, a welcoming personality — both have helped Peña along the way. On game nights, sounds from the park drift through Main Street past town hall and Downtown Coffee Company and Scooter’s, one of two bars in town. Sometimes it’s a Taylor Swift song. Sometimes it’s a number from Marc Anthony, the Puerto Rican tropical salsa singer, and Peña’s personal preference.

The voice of the PA announcer still fumbles over a few of the Spanish names. On the field, though, Español is shouted from one corner to the other, only occasionally punctuated by English and usually for the benefit of one of Peña’s few non-Hispanic players. Cheers from the fans are mostly in English, save for an intermittent “Vamos Lobos!”

To Peña, this field, this town, these people, these players — everything he’s put together ... it’s all still a little surreal.

The story of the Lobos sprawls from Puerto Rico to Owasso, Okla., to the country of Colombia and Western Michigan. Separate walks of life brought these people to one small town in northern Kansas.

To tell this story, it’s best to start with a 19-year-old Peña. He left his family, his house on the beach, his language, the only culture he knew in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, to play shortstop at Iowa Central in 1998. Seventeen years later, he speaks impeccable English.

After leaving Iowa Central, Peña remained around summer college baseball in Tulsa and nearby Owasso, where he still lives during the offseason with his wife, Sarah, and 10-year-old daughter, Taliyah. He works with youth teams and gives private baseball lessons to make a living.

In 2013, Peña founded a Puerto Rican national team that earned a berth in the National Baseball Congress World Series in Wichita in 2014 and 2015. But the team struggled to find opponents for games during the four- to five-week span in which it came together each summer. Peña’s charges had plenty of raw talent and desire but no dedicated training facilities, no home field and no real fan base in Wichita.

He was giving opportunities to Latin American players, and that had always been his goal. But Peña knew “there was something missing.”

“The mix of cultures was missing on there,” he said.

Enter Sabetha and the Mid-Plains Collegiate League, with whom Peña had been in contact since the day his Puerto Rican squad was eliminated from the 2015 NBC World Series. With an impeccable field that was being used primarily by high school-level American Legion teams, Sabetha appeared to present a perfect home base for Peña’s club.

Folks there were ready to support baseball in just about any form. They included Paul Herl, president of the Sabetha Baseball Association and an administrator of the field, as well as a cast of volunteers who serve in various capacities at Somerset Park.

Some would become host families to Peña’s players, most of whom are chasing their own dreams in a foreign land.

“A lot of these host families, I’m surprised they know the difference between a baseball and a baseball bat,” Herl said. “It really has nothing to do with baseball. … We told them what Harvey was trying to do, and they saw a chance to help out some people, and they did.”

In 2010, according to the most recent U.S. government figures, Sabetha was 96.6 percent white. There were just 26 Latinos in town.

At the beginning of his first summer in Sabetha, Peña had to find host families for 21 Latinos, plus a handful of American players.

They came from Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Guatemala, Colombia, the Dominican Republic and the Bronx. Before Peña found them and brought them to Sabetha and the Mid-Plains Collegiate League, most played for college teams. Five had played on Peña’s Puerto Rican national team.

At first, it was a hard sell. Peña was pitching a team in its infancy to mostly Latino college-aged kids, trying to coax them to a little town on the Kansas plains that lacked much of a Latino-based community.

“They all Googled ‘Sabetha’ immediately,” Peña said. “They could see the population in Sabetha.”

Then Peña sent them pictures of Somerset Park. They saw photos of the indoor facilities built by Stan Keim, owner of Keim TS Flatbed Trucking, including two batting cages, a pitching machine and a full-sized basketball court. That drew the eyes of a lot of players, just as it did Peña’s when he chose Sabetha as the Lobos’ home.

Home for the players, when Peña started, was supposed to be a local hotel. But the planned partnership fell through, leaving Peña a little lost and lacking housing for his 27 players.

Bill Glace, the Keims and a woman who didn’t want to be named in this story eased Peña worries, reaching out through the community to find homes for the players. Together, they hosted more than 20 players to start the year, and more and more families eventually took in Lobos of their own.

As he went about his recruiting, Peña maintained his simple mission: to give players, especially Latin Americans, an opportunity they might not have had before, the same opportunity that he’d had to play in America.

Soon enough, the players began to arrive. And nearly as quickly, they started finding a place in the community beyond the diamond at Somerset Park. They formed bonds with host families over dinner or church or late-night conversations after games.

One night, Glace, who was hosting 13 kids at the beginning of the season, had players from six different countries sitting around the table.

They played catch and formed brother-like relationships with teens in town. Peña and the Lobos hosted a camp on July 6 with both younger and older kids, and almost 50 showed up.

Before every road trip, the Lobos meet at Casey’s, a fuel stop and convenience store near Sabetha’s light-blue water tower. Soon, the Casey’s employees learned the players’ names. A gas station became a point of community outreach.

“Kids around look at you like you are a major leaguer for the Royals,” said Cesar Marrero, a third baseman from Puerto Rico. “People in town recognize you, know how you did, know your name. … The city has received us like their own.”

Host families say it has been an easy relationship. At most of their homes, it’s always yes ma’am, no sir. Bud Keim, Stan’s son, said the two players he hosts are tidier than he is.

To Peña, this is perfect. It’s everything he had hoped for, everything he wanted, for his players. He has tried to stay out of the community’s interactions with the players so they could form this bond themselves, so the community could see who the players really are — not just who they are when their coach is around.

Peña believes this respect for community, for family, springs from the players’ roots in Latin America. He says he has always seen similarities between the Latin American and Midwestern ways of life.

“We are very family-oriented, we like to have kids, we like to have get-togethers, have cookouts,” Peña said. “So the only difference that I see between people from Sabetha and people from Puerto Rico might be the fact that they’re white and we’re brown, we speak Spanish and they speak English, they have a lake and we have a beach. But that’s it.”

After his daughter was diagnosed with Shone’s Complex, a heart disease that caused her mitral valve to function abnormally, Midwestern kindness enveloped him. The same people that have helped him live in this dream world have been there for his family as Taliyah’s endured five open-heart surgeries.

Peña says he is trying to convince his wife, Sarah, to move the family to Sabetha so he can be on the Somerset Park field every day. She has reservations — so does Taliyah, who has some say in the decision — but both understand the attraction of this town. They might come around.

“He could probably convince me to do anything,” Sarah said. “Why would I stop him? … I’ve never seen him so happy. This is exactly the thing he’s been working for.”

Peña would be OK with dying on that baseball field in Sabetha. If not there, then a beach in Puerto Rico. But he still has goals to achieve. He wants to build academies for Latin American players in Sabetha and Puerto Rico. He’d like to spend half of every year in each locale.

In the meantime, he continues to invest his dream in some 20 young players, many of them from his own island-nation homeland. In their future hangs the balance of so many more who are a lot like them, looking for something bigger, a better opportunity.

Just like Peña when he came to America 17 years ago.

“I basically told them, ‘Don’t mess up my dream,’” Peña said. “Because my dream is not to be able to coach baseball, or just be in baseball. It’s to be able to provide kids with the opportunities that I might not have had, and I know a lot of my island friends, and Dominican and Venezuelan friends, didn’t have.

“I told them, ‘Don’t close doors. Open doors.’ That’s what we’re all about.”

This story was originally published July 15, 2016 at 6:07 PM with the headline "In small-town Kansas, man with a vision is bridging cultures through baseball."