Late January is a sacred time to the Long Beach youth baseball community. Leagues all over the city have begun practice and are looking forward to Opening Day ceremonies and the start of games in just a few weeks. Sadly, Long Beach’s most historic league has been struck by copper thieves on the eve of their season beginning.
Long Beach Little League, which operates out of Stearns Champions Park, had the copper wiring stripped out of nearly all of their lights over the weekend. Long Beach Little League is the most well-known of the youth baseball leagues in Long Beach, having famously won the Little League World Series in 1991 and 1992.
Now, with games scheduled to begin in just three weeks, the league will have to completely rework its schedule unless the city can work quickly to repair the lights–night-time games and practices would be impossible without them.
“Everyone’s schedule will be shrunk down, we’re going to have to trim back games,” said Doug Wittman, Long Beach Little League president. “We’re already losing practice times this week and we’re overloaded with about 600 kids this year. The loss of the lights will really hurt.”
Wittman said that the power boxes are in the ground at the base of the light poles. He noticed that the power boxes had been cut open and found a Sawzall blade on the ground near one of them, suggesting it was cut with a power saw.
“They also cut off our cage chain locks and stole an expensive pitching machine,” he said. “It’s sad.”
The copper thefts are part of a larger nationwide trend as copper shortages have led to skyrocketing prices. Increased demand for copper globally has led to higher copper prices, which has in turn led to increased thefts of wiring from public infrastructure, with thieves then selling the wiring, typically to recycling centers.
The city of Los Angeles has seen whole neighborhoods lose streetlights due to the thefts, with nearly triple the reported outages in 2024 than had occurred in 2018, according to the Los Angeles Times.
State lawmakers have attempted to curb the issue by regulating scram-metal recyclers, with Assembly Bill 476 (passed and signed in October) requiring recyclers to collect records that verify a seller’s identity and proof of ownership. Still, the demand and price for copper is getting so high that the thefts remain commonplace.
At a recent meeting of the Long Beach Parks and Recreation Commission’s Governance Committee, city leadership discussed the issue at length. They described a cat and mouse game where some light poles around the city had been concrete-layered at their base to prevent thievery, which then led to thieves cutting into the ground further away from the pole to take the wiring out down the line.
