On a chilly and cloudy Friday afternoon, the high school baseball home of Jackie Robinson is a cratered, weed-choked monument to a memory forgotten.
When Pasadena John Muir High steps carefully onto its field against rival Pasadena High, the main concern of its coach is simply that his small and overmatched squad doesn't get hurt.
"This is such a beautiful thing, being attached to all this history, the school of the greatest baseball player ever," Robert Galvan said. "But it's become a very humbling experience."
There are clumps of dying grass in the infield, chunks of dirt in a rutted right field, a sloping hill toward a muddy basin in left field, and an eroded bump for a pitchers mound that contains only a cracked piece of rubber.