Culture & Community | Puerto Ricans United, Inc.
Angel Ramos (at far left) with coaches and members of CABA. Lucy Gellman Photos.
Across Clinton Avenue Park, dusk was falling, and a summertime symphony of mosquitoes, passing traffic and grassy footfalls had started to unfold. In one corner of the field, sixth grader Carter Jones stepped up to the plate, a bat steady in his hands. Across the grass, a group of middle-school students walked forward in a series of low lunges, stopping every so often to slow down and take stock. Near a single set of bleachers, Jerold Roberts beamed as he watched his son step up to the plate.
In the center of it all, Coach Angel Ramos took it all in, his eyes somehow everywhere at once. In every low lunge, every clean thwack of the bat, every student who had improved their swing and their posture, he could see his vision for youth enrichment coming to life.
Welcome to City Angels Baseball Academy, (CABA) a youth baseball league and year-long outreach program that Ramos and his wife, Milagros Ramos, founded in 2019. Part sports, part academic enforcement, and part social and emotional learning, the organization seeks to empower New Haven's youth through baseball and team building, from weekly training and practices to games.
It currently serves kids between ages nine and 18, meaning fourth or fifth grade all the way through senior year of high school. Ninety percent of young people on its dozens-strong roster are from New Haven. This Thursday, it will be honored as the recipient of Puerto Ricans United, Inc.'s nonprofit award at the organization's annual gala.
"Coaching is my passion," Ramos said on a recent Thursday, surrounded by students playing baseball in every direction. "I see these kids—they've got so many challenges in front of them. They need guidance."
While City Angels may be relatively new, Ramos' vision for the organization has existed for decades, criss-crossing states, at least one ocean, and language barriers in the process. Born and raised in Cańovanas, Puerto Rico, Ramos picked up a bat well before he was 10, and was playing for a league in Carolina, Puerto Rico by the time he was 15. In his late teens, it was baseball that brought him to small-town Texas, where he studied physical education during his time at Ranger College.
When he was exhausted or felt far away from home—particularly from his younger siblings—it was baseball that kept him going. If friends expressed skepticism, "I told them, I gotta do this for my family," he said. Decades later, he still tells the story of his evolution with a baby face and dimples, a sign that the sport has kept him young.
In the late 1990s, he met his wife Milagros through a coworker who had mentioned that Ramos would like his sister-in-law. His colleague was right: the couple hit it off, and later moved to New Haven to start a family in 1998. They began raising three daughters, all of whom are now dedicated to helping professions and in their 20s.
From playing baseball, teaching it became his passion. His friends, some of whom had played in the major league, noticed how much he lit up when he was around kids—and how much they lit up around him, too. A few commented on how rare it was to have a dedicated player who was willing to take a step back to become an equally dedicated coach.
"I always liked to teach," he said, remembering years spent coaching in Woodbridge and Hamden before he began his current job at Wilbur Cross High School. He loved his job, he said; he still does. But at the end of a high school season (and sometimes during it), he was aware of a level of need in the city that Wilbur Cross alone could never meet. City Angels, which now works with over 70 young people, was his answer.
The baseball academy, which opened a brick-and-mortar location at 31 Fulton St. in 2021, started with two teams, both of which traveled to Puerto Rico for games in early 2020. When the group returned, it was nearly March: Ramos watched as the world shut down around him. He transitioned to Zoom, temporarily leading classes online that didn't feel at all similar (athletes are now asked to do a self-check for fever and symptoms before they arrive at practice). Meanwhile, he and Milagros also rolled up their sleeves, volunteering in the community.
He was thrilled, he said, when the team was able to return to the field with new Covid-cautious measures in summer 2020, as kids donned masks with their purple-and-white City Angels uniforms and helmets and prepared to play ball. They eased into a rhythm of practicing twice a week, with younger team members practicing at Clinton Avenue Park, and 13 to 16 year olds in Rice Field, close to Wilbur Cross.
As sports came slowly back, the team also traveled, taking the game to locations like Westport, Hartford, Norwalk, East Lyme and Long Island. That part of the CABA was and remains important to Ramos, he said: some of the students haven't been exposed to other towns and cities before. They don't have a sense of what exists beyond New Haven.
As word traveled, interest in the program grew. In 2021, City Angels opened its brick-and-mortar space on Fulton Street, a former warehouse with room to practice and four batting cages. It made Ramos' dream of a year-long, all-weather hub for the nonprofit possible. As a coach, he added, he is not single-mindedly focused on baseball: he monitors players' academic progress, and asks that they take a break from the academy if they are struggling in school.
"A lot of the parents, when the kids are struggling in school, they call me. I tell them, 'If you don't have the grades, you can't play baseball,'" he said. That's usually all he has to say to get them doing their work: He's found that kids improve their grades when they want to keep playing.
It also means long, rewarding days, he said. Ramos' morning usually starts at 4 a.m., where he works a job driving tractor trailers. By 3 p.m., he's at Cross, getting the team ready for practice, with a game season that runs March through May. Several days a week, he then heads right to City Angels. He usually gets home close to 9 p.m.
At City Angels, the season begins for young members in April, and then for older kids in June. The fall season runs through October, and the winter months are mostly spent training on Fulton Street (view a schedule here).
In just five years—including a global pandemic—the organization has become a beloved part of the city's social fabric. Marlon Soto, a sixth grader at John S. Martinez Sea & Sky STEM Magnet School, has been playing with CABA for two years, said he joined to play baseball with his friends.
Along the way, he found that playing sports helped him keep his mental health in check. When he's at practice, "it takes my mind off things," he said.
That's also true for Carter Jones, a sixth grader at St. Rita School in Hamden who joined City Angels for the first time roughly a year ago. He's thrilled to have found the organization, he said.
"I wanted to get better and I heard this team [CABA] was really good," he said. "The positivity and the vibe is just amazing. They always bring you up and never bring you down." 
From a fence that separated the field from a small group of parents, Jerold Roberts watched his nine-year-old son step up to the plate for batting practice. Born and raised in New Haven, Roberts first read about CABA through a Facebook post last year, and thought that it could be a good activity for his son.
A year later, he thinks of Ramos as "like a father figure" to all the kids he coaches. "He just has a way of getting the message across.”
As practice showed no sign of stopping Thursday, that approach was clear. Back by a baseball diamond, Ramos and fellow coaches were talking a group of players through their swing. Every time a player's bat collided with the ball, a smile teased at the edges of his mouth. Several yards away, Coach Ramon Ramos ran a group of middle schoolers through their final drills of the afternoon.
"It's not a race!" he cried out to them every so often, as they began to rush past each other while mid-lunge. When they had finished, he ushered them into a circle.
Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Ramon Ramos moved to Connecticut two decades ago, "to try to get a better life." In that time, he and Angel Ramos have both coached teams that play against each other, and worked together for several years. At this point, "we are family," he said.
"We're trying to get these kids off the street so that they get a better education," he said.
It's that kind of guidance that also put CABA, and particularly Angel and Milagros Ramos, on PRU's radar years ago. When Ramos heard that CABA had won the nonprofit award, he was thrilled. He's still surprised every time he thinks about where City Angels started five years ago.
"I was not expecting it," he said. "I always do everything from the bottom of my heart. It's made me very proud of what I'm doing to give more to the community."