Sixteen-year-old Angels fan Brett Pevey never needed to draw the blueprint to his field of dreams. He knew it by photographic heart, having seen Angel Stadium hundreds of times since his parents began taking him to see the hometown team as a toddler.

So, on June 4, the day after the last day of his Glendora High freshman year, the aspiring architect immediately began construction on his largest, most labor-intensive and sophisticated project. He had ambitious designs for a 25-pound, 4x-4×2-foot model of Angel Stadium of Anaheim from scratch, from donated cardboard, craft-store foam board, plywood, four rolls of duct tape, hot glue, cake-decorating palm trees, two soft-serve ice cream helmets, backyard rocks, household scissors and paper.

No hard hat was necessary. Just hard work for the past two months, including some manic, marathon 11-hour-a-day overtime shifts, between his golf team practices, Angels games and dozens of trips to hardware, art and electronic stores to acquire more supplies.

Check out the photos to see detailed views of this elaborate model.



“He was so dedicated to this that I had to remind him to eat and take vitamins so he wouldn’t lose any more weight,” said Brett’s mother, Lorelei, of the big-league project that bordered on obsession. “This is what Brett did with his summer vacation.”

Twice this past week, Brett stationed himself in front of The Big A’s Homeplate Gate to show off his little Big A. Fans stopped, stared and studied everything from left center field’s rock pile to the right field’s iPod-animated video board looming amid the familiar DeWalt tools, Chevy and OneWest Bank.

Then he clipped wires to a battery and powered up the rectangular strips of LED lights mounted on the model’s rooftop and scoreboard. Game on. This was Brett’s home run.

“It’s almost done,” said Brett. “I’m just waiting to get one more Angels ice cream hat to use as the second giant helmet at the entrance. Then, finally, I’ll be finished.”

MAP OF THE HEART

Brett loves baseball but can’t play. A congenital heart condition and two open-heart surgeries prohibit him from playing contact sports. So he has built their churches.

“Whenever we took him anywhere in the stroller, he’d reach for the maps, open them up and look at all the rooms and spaces,” recalled Lorelei. “Then he’d go home are start making the buildings he saw.”

His first project came at age 5: the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. Brett used Legos, the plastic bricks that a decade later filled 15 boxes in his closet and three bins beneath his bed.

In his early teens, Brett replaced Legos with cardboard on his birthday and Christmas wish lists. Soon friends and neighbors were dropping their leftover corrugated cardboard boxes at the doorstep of the family’s Glendora home.

Brett began paying cardboard, scissors, tape and rubber cement tribute to his favorite sports teams by making replicas of the Coliseum, Staples Center, Dodger Stadium and Angel Stadium twice — once depicting the original Anaheim Stadium that opened in 1966 and the other showcasing the ballpark as the venue for the 2010 All-Star Game.

Those rough-hewn models with crude, scissor-cut edges and ballpoint pen-drawn details were just the beginning, basic maquettes for his all-out Angel Stadium. A visit last summer to the Fullerton offices of Crane Architectural Group, which built Big League Dreams athletic facilities in Redding and Chino Hills, introduced him to their model-making materials and techniques and inspired him to swing for his architectural fences.

“My grandpa (Vern Andrews) went to the first game at Angel Stadium,” said Brett, proud to be a third generation Angels fan. “I dedicated my new Angel Stadium to him. It’s the biggest, best looking model I’ve ever done.”

BUILDING THE BALLPARK

About three months before he broke ground — well, plywood — on his Angel Stadium, Brett began studying the real home of the Angels. He and his father, Ray, a chiropractor, arrived early at games and took hundreds of pictures of the ballpark from all angles, from the parking lot and from their family’s season seats in Section 112, Row T, behind the Angels’ dugout.

“Brett even took video in the car as we drove to the stadium on the 57 Freeway,” said Lorelei, still mystified by Brett’s dedication. “He was driven. He probably would have done more if he didn’t have to pay for this out of his allowance!”

Brett set up a construction site in his family room, placing the $25 unfinished piece of Home Depot-cut plywood on a round game table. Then, with pencil and a ruler, he drew a ball field at the base’s center.

A $300 trip to their local Home Depot, Ace Hardware and Jo-Ann Fabrics & Crafts – “It was the first of like a hundred stops and to all different locations,” Lorelei added – got Brett’s stadium started.

He hot-glued red-orange sandpaper to the base to serve as the warning track, infield dirt and the pitcher’s mound. He overlaid it with green felt for the grass and cut out white foam board squares for the bases and a pentagon for the plate.

With a white marker, he sketched in chalk baselines. A piece of window screen formed the backstop netting. Yellow spray-painted bamboo skewers made perfect foul poles. One-inch tall strips of cardboard, which he covered in green duct tape, formed the outfield walls.

Rising two feet from the base, the model took shape when Brett used foam board, cardboard and hot glue to erect three tiers of cantilevered stadium seating. Beginning with the right field pavilion that overlooks his favorite player, nine-time Gold Glove-winner Torii Hunter, Brett patiently worked counterclockwise around the park, carefully Xacto-slicing support beams and using a ruler to keep everything properly perpendicular.

A zig-zag cut in a cardboard rectangle did the trick for the building the exterior ramps that fans climb to reach upper level seats. Without instructions, Brett had engineered every step.

“My mom just started letting me use the Xacto for the foam board, so I was really careful,” Brett said. “But I did burn myself once with the glue gun.”

Glue dots adhered the piles of the pebbles from his backyard that now form the left center field waterfall. Glue holds down the model’s exterior landscaping of more than 50 plastic palm trees bought from a cake decorating store and other shrubbery found at Michael’s.

Miniature wood bats a hobby shop radiate upward from the Homeplate Gate. Color printouts of Angels players Torii Hunter and Jered Weaver and manager Mike Scioscia fill the murals on the model’s facade in front of the checkered plaza to mimic brickwork. The last available Angels mini-helmet used for soft-serve ice cream at the Glendora Baskin Robbins stands on cardboard stilts near Gate 2.

Brett constructed sheds with red duct tape awnings and drew on windows for ticket booths. He used foam core and red duct tape to make the towering, iconic A-frame scoreboard and laid down rows of black duct tape to symbolize the surrounding parking lots.

Then it was time for the final touches: silver marker to draw in parking lot spaces, Angels 50th anniversary logos and giveaway gnomes around the outfield; and stadium graphics. He spent several hours of searching Google Images and sizing, printing and draining color ink cartridges to copy the corporate signage that plasters the ballpark, the Coors Lights and Ruby’s Diner billboards over center field, Budweiser in right, Pepsi and Pechanga Resort Casino bordering the video board beneath the haloed “A” in left, and Toyota and jetblue.com on the outfield walls.

“I wanted it to look as close to the real thing as possible,” said Brett, who also printed up crowd shots of Angels fans and used rectangular bunches to fill sections of the stadium. “What really makes it work are the electronics.”

Those ideas came from the two guys in the model positioned where his family’s real-life seats would be. “Here they are right here behind the dugout,” Brett said, pointing to his uncle and grandfather in the stands.

His uncle, Dean Andrews, urged him to add music and video to the model. So Brett hollowed out a space in the right field video board to house his iPod, which plays the 50th anniversary anthem “Calling All Angels” by Train and streams footage from the 2010 Home Run Derby at Angel Stadium.

His grandfather, Vern, an electrical engineer, took Brett to Orvac Electronics in Fullerton and bought six LED panels of lights that they mounted atop the stadium model’s roof and wired to batteries.

Lights on, Brett used a Sharpie to scrawl “June 4 – August 13, 2011” on the plywood spine near his model’s entrance to mark his construction dates.

With his Angel Stadium nearly complete, he happily took the field of his dreams to where they really play ball. He wanted to share his model with Angels fans.

He built it. And they did come.

— Reporting from Anaheim



Contact the writer: masmith@ocregister.com

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