Bringing Baseball Back to Manzanar

Newly constructed backstop and bleachers at Manzanar. (Courtesy of Dan Kwong)

 

I’ll never forget listening to National Public Radio while driving home from work, around the spring of 2024, when a story came on that broke me from the autopilot trance one finds oneself in when traversing the same route virtually every day. It was a story about an effort to bring baseball back to the Manzanar concentration camp in California where over 10,000 Japanese Americans were wrongly incarcerated during World War II.

That story so rapturously captured my attention that I wanted to learn more. In fact, it’s the reason I spearheaded a book proposal to the Society for American Baseball Research on this topic. I mean, what better way to educate oneself than to try to write a book on the subject, right? (Side note: On behalf of all the contributing writers, THANK YOU for reading this book!)

The story I heard that day spotlighted a gentleman by the name of Dan Kwong as being the proverbial mastermind behind the effort. Dan’s mother, Momo Nagano, was a Nisei, which means a child born in America to Japanese-born immigrant parents. She had been incarcerated as a teenager at Manzanar and, unlike many other Nisei who stayed silent about their time spent in incarceration, Momo was a storyteller who felt it important to share stories with her children about that chapter of her life. She reinforced to Dan that when she and the other Japanese Americans were placed by the US government into the Manzanar camp, no one, including government officials, had any idea how long they’d be there behind barbed wire. When faced with this situation, it was in the nature of the incarcerees to make community, which included playing baseball and softball. Dan, himself, is deeply in love with baseball, having played for over 54 years in the Japanese American baseball league in the Los Angeles area. It made all the sense in the world that he would make it his mission to spearhead the effort.

Volunteers help clear tumbleweed to make way for reconstruction of the Manzanar baseball field. (Courtesy of Dan Kwong)

 

For those of you unfamiliar with the theatrical world of performance art, it takes a massive team of people to pull off the final performance. You need a director, producer, set designers, tech crew, costume designers, and more. And this is where Dan wanted to set the record straight again. Although he had to stretch himself well beyond organizing a baseball game, he wasn’t a one-man operation as press reports may have led people to believe. Dan was backed by Great Leap, the community-based arts organization he works with, to handle overall production of the doubleheader.

There were struggles to overcome for Dan and the other volunteers. After all, Manzanar is run by a federal agency and dealing with any agency comes with having to navigate bureaucratic red tape, which was something Dan was unaccustomed to. Until the field was built, there could be no approval by Manzanar to hold the grand doubleheader baseball game that Dan was envisioning. In addition, Manzanar had a very small support staff, so while they could lend some assistance to the restoration effort, Dan still needed to do a lot of heavy lifting, figuratively and literally. His energy shifted from planning and raising money for baseball games to building a ballpark, which was not a skill set in his wheelhouse. Thankfully, prior to Dan’s involvement, the National Park Service applied for and received a grant from the Fund for the People in Parks that could be used for the ballpark reconstruction.

In November of 2023, Dan began organizing a group of 27 people to come spend a weekend using hand tools to clear all the tumbleweed that had grown over the original baseball field. If you haven’t cleared tumbleweed, know that it’s an arduous task made more arduous by the fact that if you don’t locate and hand pull the roots out, the tumbleweed will soon grow back again. As Dan stated to me, “It was miserable. Looking back, I think that was probably the worst part of the whole thing [clearing tumbleweed].” In the end, they miraculously cleared almost three and a half acres of the nasty thistle.

Dan next consulted with architects, structural engineers, and construction companies, learning that he’d need steel and lumber for the backstop and fencing. The scale of this project became overwhelming but didn’t deter Dan and the others. Dan put it this way: “I’m a performance artist. I put on live shows. I’ve produced, written and directed plays. I know how to do that. And I’m a good handy man, but I had never set a 24-foot steel post into the ground. The technical complexity and scale [of the project] was just light years beyond anything I’ve ever done.” There were so many moving parts that Dan had to hold in his brain. Discouragement followed at times as Dan would think, “This is going nowhere.” But, as he put it, “Anything that is hard to do, you have to face this stuff.” Dan stayed resilient by believing that the project was going to happen. He found confidence in the face of great uncertainty. And he found that confidence because he had support from others, including a dedicated group of volunteers working alongside employees at Manzanar National Historic Site, including Jeff Burton and arborist Dave Goto.

Dan was fortunate to have a cadre of allies. Alisa Broch, who had retired from being a park ranger at Manzanar, was a beloved person in the Japanese American community who was close with Dan’s mom. When she heard about the project, she immediately offered to help, which included finding Dan a welder. The welder, Chris Siddens, had been a neighbor of someone who was placed in an incarceration camp, and was more than happy to help the baseball field reconstruction effort. According to Dan, it quickly became clear that Chris’s skill set went way beyond welding. Pretty soon Chris was guiding the entire construction as a volunteer. “I couldn’t have done this project without Chris,” said Dan. For example, Chris would give Dan the list of materials required for the two men to build the 34 rebar cages that were needed in the construction.

Early on, Dan was connected to a local structural engineering company, Nous Engineering. After he wrote to the company to inquire how to set posts into the ground, Nous replied with technical drawings and became a regular (free) consultant to the project. It was an amazing outpouring of generosity.

When LPA Design Studios heard about the project, they gifted $10,000 to the effort. TELACU, a community and economic development organization located in the shadow of Angel Stadium, gave $9,000. Dan made sure to point out to me that these companies are not Japanese-owned or even Asian-owned, but they saw and appreciated the meaning of the project.

 

 

Independence is a town of maybe 600 people outside Manzanar. The fire chief, who was a friend of Chris’s, came out to see the restoration effort and asked how he could help. Dan let him know that the project team was required to have a standby ambulance and EMT on site in order to be awarded a permit for the doubleheader. The fire chief lent their ambulance for no charge, saving thousands of dollars. Four days before the game, the fire chief told Dan that his department was going to do a hose training exercise on the newly restored Manzanar baseball field. They came out at night and sprayed 4,000 gallons of water all over the field to help keep the dust down for the game itself.

As Dan put it to me, “You go down this long windy path, and you don’t know where the end is. You just keep going, thinking, ‘What’s next?’ But if you knew the length of the path at the very beginning, you’d go, I don’t know about this.’ We made a lot of it up as we went. You just take one step after another. When we were building the bleachers, I was just thinking, ‘When is this going to be over? I’m so sick of screwing down floor planks.’”

Gradually this intense labor of love became a realized baseball field that unfolded in front of them. But there was one more disaster to overcome. A week before the doubleheader was scheduled to be played, the evening right after construction had finished, a windstorm blew down a portion of the ballpark fencing, which led to the possibility that Manzanar would have to cancel the doubleheader.

With tens of thousands of dollars spent and people having made their reservations to attend, Dan raced into action with a passionate, well-reasoned plea to Manzanar’s superintendent not to cancel the game. Thankfully that message resonated with the superintendent and now that Dan, Chris, and the others had built the field, it was time for the players and fans to willingly come. The performance piece was at hand. There was a doubleheader to be played.

RUSS SPEILLER has been a SABR member since 2023 and could not be more grateful to the writers, editors, and consultants who contributed to this book. Having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in Chemical Engineering, Russ lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, with his incredible family. He has contributed to numerous SABR books, the BioProject, and Turnstyle magazine. This is his first time leading the construction of a SABR book and he is appreciative of the SABR publications board for choosing to greenlight this effort. He really hopes you all enjoy and learn from How We Played the Game. To read more of Russ’ work, please visit russspeiller.substack.com.

 

SOURCES

The primary source for this article was an interview between the author and Dan Kwong on January 3, 2025. The author would like to thank Mr. Kwong for his time and candor.