DEPT. OF MASKED MEN: FOUL BALL

Since President Trump took office, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement have swarmed areas with immigrant populations, questioning people and making arrests. They’ve patrolled near schools and raided a homeless shelter. They arrested a four-year-old, two students of New York City public schools, and an Army veteran who happened to be Latino. Recently, masked and armed ICE agents descended on a baseball field in Riverside Park. They questioned a dozen or so eleven-to fourteen-year-olds who’d just finished batting practice, and left only after a confrontation with their coach, Youman Wilder, whom they threatened with arrest. He said, “I’m willing to die to make sure these kids can get home,” he recounted afterward.

- Zach Helfand

New York baseball people know Wilder. “I hold the city record in batting average to this very day,” he said recently. “My teammate at Thomas Jefferson High ended up playing eighteen years in the major leagues with the Cubs. Shawon Dunston. He was the first overall pick in the 1982 draft, over Dwight Gooden. The last two games, he got walked, like, six times in a row, and ended up hitting .790. And I went, like, six for six, so I ended up .800.”

Wilder has run a youth baseball program called the Harlem Baseball Hitting Academy for the past twenty-one years. There are about twenty-five kids, no tryouts (“We don’t take the best players. We take the guys that got cut”), and no minimum fee. “I’ll tell our kids, ‘Can your mom make us some rice and beans this week?’” Wilder said. He has produced four hundred college-scholarship baseball players, who have gone to Stanford, Princeton, and Columbia, and are now doctors and cops, or work on Wall Street. Four have made the major leagues.