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For now, they have what Fuentes calls “their makeshift sandlot.”

He was playing sandlot games with boys four or five years older when he was 10, and at 14 joined his father’s steel mill team as a pitcher.

“So I started playing polo, but sandlot kind of polo, low level. But I learned. Anyway, I started getting better and better and better,” he said.

More than a half-dozen of the boys and girls on Wafula’s sandlot team are orphans, which is why the coach uses baseball as a tool to teach larger lessons.

Despite his Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis, Herbert never forgot the sandlot tales of his youth at Northwestern.