It's play ball time at transformed Daniel J. Flynn Memorial Park

Smithtown officials on Friday unveiled a transformed Daniel J. Flynn Memorial Park in Commack, with four state-of-the-art ballfields, shaded dugouts and viewing areas for fans, lights for night play and a central building whose second-floor scorekeeper's room offers a panoptic view of the facility.

The two-year, $7.8 million rebuild is the first since the park’s dedication in 1979 and one of the town’s biggest parks investments in decades. It will serve thousands of players in Smithtown’s recreation leagues for children and adults along with teams from across the Northeast competing in weekend tournaments officials hope will bring fees to the town and sales to area businesses like delicatessens and restaurants. Those tournaments, which started earlier this month, bring as many as 500 players and fans a day.

"This is one of the best fields built on Long Island," said Joe Arico, town park maintenance director. "I’m not knocking any other fields, but this one is like my child."

Brian Heinrichs, assistant parks director, said even "after the hardest rainstorm, we can play 15 minutes after it stops raining -- there are no rainouts."

Starting in 2019, workers removed 175,000 cubic yards of soil from the site, regrading fields that had been so steeply sloped that outfielders couldn’t see batters and installing a base layer of sand and rock for drainage. They dug nine 2,100-cubic feet drainage pools per field and unrolled acres of artificial turf more than two inches deep for a luxurious cushion and a truer bounce than the original grass and dirt. Later they turned to finer detail like screens at the fence behind each home plate so pitchers could throw without distraction.

Top town officials, armed forces veterans and members of Flynn’s extended family attended the opening. Flynn, a star catcher for Kings Park High School who went on to play college ball before joining the Army, was killed 19 days after deploying to Vietnam in 1968. He was 20.

A younger brother, Dennis Flynn, 71, of Holbrook, said the facility might not now exist but for the intervention of veterans. Town officials in 1997 floated a plan to excavate the park, sell the underlying sand for $3.8 million and use the site for a yard waste transfer station. They abandoned that plan after community opposition including a what he called a Patrick Henry-level speech at a town meeting by Vietnam veteran Richard Kitson, who also attended Friday’s ceremony.

Town Supervisor Edward Wehrheim, who grew up with the Flynns, played ball with Daniel Flynn and deployed to Vietnam shortly after his friend was killed, said in his remarks that "I think Danny’s up there looking down on this … Hopefully we made him happy and proud."