ARCADIA, Calif. — Only one of Brian Gardner’s baseball bats survived the Eaton Fire. But that was all he needed.
Gardner, 48, grabbed the bat and got ready for his turn to hit. Someone told him to expect a “heater.”
“I call it a fastball, not a ‘heater,’” he joked. “‘Heater’ is one of my new trigger words.”
It was a Sunday afternoon, with blue skies, and he and eight other guys had gathered to bat around at a park in Arcadia. For a couple of hours, they were doing what had been a weekly ritual before the Eaton Fire tore through their neighborhood in Altadena three weeks earlier, displacing them all from their close-knit community in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains.
Gardner’s house was reduced to ashes, including a home bar with more than 1,000 bottles of whiskey. He also lost a Cadillac Eldorado with cattle horns on the front grill that he used to drive his kids to school on Fridays as a special treat. He’s now living in a rental house with his wife, two children and 13-year-old terrier.
Once he had finished his turn, Gardner leaned his bat against the fence and exhaled, saying to no one in particular, “That felt good; that felt really good.”
The men are part of a group chat, dubbed “Altadena Sandlot,” started by a dad in 2023 to connect with other men in the area. It had mostly been a place for more than two dozen guys to rib one another and plan their weekly meetups to shag balls in the field. But since the Los Angeles-area fires, it had become something else: a way to seek practical advice, share fear and anxiety and reconnect to the community they profoundly missed.
“It wasn’t designed to be a support group for dads, but that’s what it evolved into because of this,” Gardner said.
Sunday’s meetup took place two days after authorities announced the Eaton Fire was 100% contained, but that brought little relief to the guys whose houses were still standing. For many, their gas and power were still turned off, and neither the cleaning nor the rebuilding had begun.
Nine of them showed up at a field 8 miles southeast of Farnsworth Park, where they used to meet. One was a new addition to the group, but as a dad from Altadena who lost his home to the fire, he fit right in.
They talked about where they found deals on gloves, bats and balls that they scored recently from local sports shops or off eBay. One dad bought a new screen for the guys to pitch from, along with a bucket of baseballs. They realized the field didn’t have a home plate, so they used the bucket lid as one.
“It’s fitting that we don’t have a home plate,” Gardner said.
The group chat and gatherings served a special purpose even before the fires as a small-scale antidote to the male loneliness epidemic. A widely cited survey in 2021 found that men have fewer close friends than they did a generation earlier, a decline more pronounced among men than women. Men also die by suicide at a higher rate than women and are more likely to experience depression but less likely to seek mental health treatment.
Psychologists and therapists say men tend to bond better side by side, whereas women are often more adept at building connections face to face, which is to say guys are more likely to become friends by doing an activity together than by simply talking.
Andrew Holmquist, 44, created the group chat when he invited a few dads and dudes to meet up on a Monday night for batting practice. He said he felt like men of his generation weren’t making time for friends on the weekends. And especially during the pandemic, he said, they’d spent a lot of time with their children, whom they love but needed time away from, too. They couldn’t cuss around them, for instance, or vent to them about their jobs.
“The crass way to put it was I need to go spit and scratch with the guys,” Holmquist said.
One by one, the guys invited other men in the community to join. Most of them were fathers of children playing on the same Little League teams or going to school together, though some were single.
“They’d be like, ‘Ah, I’m not very good; I haven’t hit a baseball since eighth grade,’ and then you’d see them get ahold of one, you’d see joy on their face, and I was like, ‘That’s why we’re here,’” Holmquist said. “You’re just doing something. You’re not frustrated with work; you’re not thinking about anything at home. You’re just here to have a good time, and people started to talk and make connections from that.”
Eric Gibson, who joined the group a year ago and spent most of his time in the outfield Sunday, said it’s stereotypical for guys not to reach out for help unless someone is very close to them. So it helped that this group was in place before the fires. “Everybody knew each other pretty well and no one gave a s--- about saying whatever they want,” he said.
Once they finished playing Sunday, the men gathered around in a circle. They talked about what they were all going through — the insurance adjusters, property assessors, regulations around rebuilding and accidental drives toward their old homes out of habit, as well as how their families were doing.
Tim Gehling, 43, hasn’t been able to return yet to survey the damage to the Altadena house where he lived with his wife and two children.
Gehling said in an interview that he feels like it’s his job as a father to keep it together and that the group has helped him do that. Throughout the afternoon, he worked up a sweat, diving a couple of times trying to catch the ball in the outfield.
“It’s all men in the same age group who are going through the same s---,” he said. “It gives me strength.”
Grant Babbitt is living with his wife and four children at a friend’s house with their kids in Arcadia. “It’s like the longest sleepover ever,” he quipped to the guys. He described recently finding his oldest son in a closet. His son insisted he was fine — he just needed a quiet moment alone.
“Him and I are the two that seem to be kind of like carrying everything right now,” Babbitt said as he took his glove off and put it under his arm. “Except I’m talking to you guys, but he’s not really talking. It’s a challenge.”
The sun was setting. They needed to get back to their wives and children. They realized there was another way this was different from their past meetups — many of the guys usually walked home from Farnsworth Park.
“And it’s a place where I played Little League myself,” said John Tyberg, 44. “So it’s odd to be in Arcadia. It just doesn’t feel right.”
But they agreed to meet up again next Sunday. As they walked off toward their cars, they shouted their goodbyes, then drove off in different directions toward homes that weren’t their own.
