The sun did not always beat directly down on these concrete stands. There was a time when the breeze from El Yunque National Forest reached the covered bleachers of the Villas de Río Grande baseball park, cool and steady. Parents would settle into the shade beneath galvanized metal sheets that are no longer there. Baseball teams from all over the eastern region fought for field time at this recreational space, which was damaged by Hurricane María’s devastating passage in 2017 and has been awaiting obligated funds for its reconstruction since October 2023.

The park’s abandonment is not only because reconstruction funds have not arrived. The central government and the municipality have also failed to allocate enough resources for basic maintenance, the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo (CPI) found.

Financial data from the Transparency Portal of the Central Office for Recovery, Reconstruction and Resiliency (COR3) show $1,449,374,899 in obligated recovery funds for infrastructure related to “parks, recreational facilities and others,” a category that includes baseball parks. As of the end of September this year, only 27% of that amount had been disbursed ($391.8 million).

Almost all of this funding was requested by municipalities. It covers more than 2,200 projects, and fewer than a third (30.9%) have been completed. The data points to uneven progress and a slow pace of disbursements relative to the total funds available.

“We in the community do our best to keep the park in the best shape we can,” said Rubén García Flores, a community recreation leader in Villas de Río Grande who has been involved in baseball for more than four decades. “But time takes its toll. I have my own health issues, and even though I have my tractor to go over the field and cut the grass, the challenge keeps getting bigger.”

More than 40 years ago, here in Río Grande, a municipality on the island’s northeastern coast, a sporting tradition took root that, as in most towns in Puerto Rico, turned baseball into a school of life played out in neighborhood tournaments. García Flores helped plant those seeds in his community by organizing youth baseball teams, never charging a single cent for the coaching he offered.

The results are visible across generations in Río Grande. One example is Los Guerrilleros de Río Grande, a Class A Baseball team he manages, where the talent of players in their early 20s blends with that of veterans older than 35. Many of them first learned the game under García Flores’ guidance as children and developed their skills at the Villas park at different points in time.

“I gained experience and joy,” he says, soberly. “It wasn’t like it is now. I started young, teaching kids how to play. When I was 13, I already had my first little team of 7- and 8-year-olds. They were called the Tigers. We invited the kids on the radio. They came to this park, and since then I’ve always had my teams, even while I was playing in the Double-A league.”

Today, however, the midday sun washes over cracked concrete, broken, rusted fencing and a field overrun with weeds. On this community diamond, recovery has struck out.

COR3’s online registry shows that the full renovation of the recreational areas at the Villas de Río Grande park had an estimated cost of $828,151 and that $745,336 in funds were obligated for the project in October 2023. As of December 2025, two years after FEMA approved that allocation, not a single dollar had been disbursed to rescue the park.

Before the park was transferred to the municipality in December of last year, the Puerto Rico Department of Sports and Recreation (DRD, in Spanish) was the agency responsible for completing the work. But the DRD has not finished any of the baseball park projects in Río Grande, even though it has received obligated FEMA funds since 2020, according to an analysis of the COR3 transparency portal database.

For example, the park in the Palmer community, at the base of El Yunque, appears in COR3 documents as a construction project completed by the DRD. But its renovation was left unfinished and, at present, the field is abandoned and in no condition to host baseball games, the CPI confirmed. The park has a new lighting system that is not being used, just like the stands, even though three years ago local officials posed there for a staged photo op, which the administration of former Gov. Pedro Pierluisi used to loudly tout the park’s reconstruction and the laying of the first stone. Today in Palmer, the park is lost in a sea of tall grass.

The Puerto Rico Department of Housing also managed sports facilities in Río Grande before the hurricanes, but it did not request a single dollar from FEMA to repair them after María, according to the municipal administration. The small stadium in the Las Dolores community was among the facilities overseen by the Department of Housing, but the municipal government undertook its renovation along with that of the adjacent basketball court. The recovery of these facilities totaled $250,972, of which FEMA obligated $225,875 in October 2021. But as of December of this year, only $56,469 had been disbursed to the municipality, which had received the park transfer.

An Islandwide Challenge

The scenes of neglect in Villas de Río Grande and Palmer are repeated at other baseball parks across Puerto Rico.

COR3 data updated through the end of September identify at least 832 active projects (listed as “damages” in the COR3 system) that include baseball parks. Eight years after Hurricane María and five years after most of the funds were obligated, 42% of the projects remain stuck in the early stages of procurement, planning and design, with no specific completion date in sight.

In July of this year, Gov. Jenniffer González Colón presided over the reopening of the baseball park in the first section of the Río Grande Estates subdivision, alongside Sports and Recreation Secretary Héctor Vázquez Muñiz, House Speaker Carlos “Johnny” Méndez, Río Grande Mayor Ángel “Bori” González Damudt and a group of other political figures. But the reality is that the project, overseen by the Department of Sports and Recreation , remains incomplete and under construction, because it extends beyond the baseball park to include other nearby recreational areas.

Hoy, reinauguramos las instalaciones deportivas de Río Grande Estate. Este parque, renovado, vuelve a abrir sus puertas como símbolo de esperanza y compromiso comunitario.

En este corte de cinta me acompañaron líderes que han sido parte fundamental de este esfuerzo:

El alcalde… pic.twitter.com/3ExWwTuxVu

— Jenniffer González (@Jenniffer) July 18, 2025

By December, 53% of the $1,319,315 funds obligated for that development since 2020 had been disbursed. The field is currently in a state of total abandonment due to disuse and lack of maintenance.

There is another similar project in this subdivision under the Department of Sports and Recreation, still in the planning phase. Funds for that project have been obligated since 2020.

The mayor told the CPI that in December of 2024, the Municipality of Río Grande received the transfer of two parks from the Department of Sports and Recreation: one in the Jardines community and another in Villas, where García Flores still brings his baseball teams together. Both parks entered the design phase in 2025.

“Many of these properties do not belong to the municipality and, if we do not hold the title, we can practically do nothing,” González Damudt explained. He said that after Hurricane María his administration filed claims with FEMA for all the facilities, regardless of whether they belonged to the municipal government or the central government. “The Department of Sports and Recreation itself admitted it did not have a clear picture of what was theirs and what was not,” the mayor said.

The municipal chief added that it was the municipality that took on the task of determining which agency each facility belonged to.

“There were duplicate claims to FEMA. In the Río Grande Estates subdivision, most of the facilities belong to the Department of Sports and Recreation. The agency filed claims for some of those facilities, but not all of them. And for the ones they did claim, they asked for much, much less money than the municipality requested for each facility. The same thing happened with other parks, like Alturas and Villas de Río Grande. The Department of Sports and Recreation even took money that had been allocated to those projects and moved it to other municipalities because, according to them, the law allowed it. That is why we pushed so hard for the transfer, because the department started projects here and left them half-finished,” the mayor said.

Along those lines, Guaynabo Mayor Edward O’Neill Rosa, whose municipality lies just south of San Juan, argued that FEMA and COR3 are not the problem, because “the money is there.” According to him, “the problem is that neglect is a bigger issue than the availability of funds.”

“Responsibly, I move projects forward little by little, as revenue increases, without having to take out loans,” he said, referring to projects that require matching funds, since in many cases the cost of the work exceeds the amount of funds obligated by FEMA.

“Projects have to be done in full,” the Guaynabo mayor said. “I am not going to start something [a reconstruction project] that later will not be finished. And we have managed it that way, being consistent about having all the money in place without leaning on FEMA or COR3,” he added.

DRD Strikes Out Without Taking a Swing

This confusion over who owns which facilities is not an isolated problem. According to data provided to the CPI, the Puerto Rico Department of Sports and Recreation lacks an up-to-date inventory of the sports infrastructure under its control since the previous four-year term, even though it launched projects and requested funds that were not necessarily based on a comprehensive assessment of all the damage.

In a written response to the CPI, the agency said it never received the budget needed to carry out a full property inventory, so “the Department of Sports and Recreation manages the inventory with the internal resources available, facing time and capacity constraints.” The agency said it does have a baseline document that estimates there are 75 baseball parks under its direct administration, a figure that, as of October 2025, was still “being refined.”

The Department of Sports and Recreation did not specify which municipalities these parks are located in. The list it provided is organized by regional offices and broken down as follows: Northwest Region (3), West Region (2), North Region (14), South Region (11), Southeast Region (11), East Region (8), Northeast Region (10), Metro Region (13) and Central Region (3).

The Secretary Lays Down a Sacrifice Bunt

The Department of Sports and Recreation lacks a full picture of the recreational infrastructure under its control, which helps explain the near-collapse in the execution of sports reconstruction projects on the island.

“The main surprise we found when we arrived, and something I mentioned during my confirmation and budget hearings, is how little is known about the inventory of facilities,” the Sports and Recreation Secretary said. “We saw that when Hurricane María hit, both the DRD secretary at the time [Adriana Sánchez Parés] and the mayors filed FEMA claims for the same facilities. There were duplicate requests [and not necessarily for the same amounts per project]. That happened in practically every municipality, and that is why it is a situation we are still working on today,” he noted.

By the end of September, the COR3 Transparency Portal listed 267 structures or groups of structures for which the Department of Sports and Recreation requested funds for rehabilitation. Fifty-eight percent remain stuck in the first phase, planning, even though funding for most of them was initially obligated in 2020.

To rehabilitate these structures, FEMA approved $89.4 million. So far, only 31% of that amount has been converted into payments.

According to Vázquez Muñiz, his focus as secretary is to complete the inventory of facility ownership. But he stressed that this is a challenge that must be handled “without generalizing [the work plan].” He said, “You have to go facility by facility and town by town,” and that is not, he acknowledged, a quick process.

The secretary said the bidding process takes a long time and that “it would be much nicer” if it did not. He also acknowledged mayors’ calls to receive, through transfers, facilities currently under DRD administration so they can take charge of them. “We are more than willing to transfer facilities. We have already done so. What happens is, and this is something we constantly talk about with the mayors, when a facility is handed over after the work is completed, you have to wait for FEMA’s closeout, which can take a year.”

Each step adds months — if not years — of waiting.

While bureaucracy slows the execution of projects, hundreds of parks continue to deteriorate, many of them with fields swallowed up by weeds, leaving Puerto Rico’s children and teenagers with nowhere to play.

In this inning, recovery funds for Puerto Rico’s baseball parks still are not scoring any runs. The post–Hurricane María rebuilding effort remains stuck at the plate, burning through at-bats.

This translation was generated with the assistance of AI and reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy and clarity.