Sunday, August 12, 2012

Boom Times Coming for Utah

(This is a 'pilgrimage essay'.  It's another one from my Creative Writing class.  Those of you who know Drake will appreciate this one.)

Living with a baseball fanatic takes patience, fortitude, and the ability to absorb an unending stream of information. FANS follow their baseball teams, mildly interested during the long, long season, jacking their interest up during the play-offs and the World Series. FANATICS are altogether different. My husband, Drake, is a fanatic.

One of his first memories is going with his father to a Cincinnati Reds game. He doesn't remember the game or the field, but Ted Kluzewski, a Reds star with huge arm muscles are part of his toddler recollections. He started playing sandlot ball when he was about six years old. At the age of 10 he tried out for Little League. At this time, Little League was divided into the 'majors' and the 'minors'. It was composed of 10, 11 and 12 year olds. Even today, Drake's eyes glow when he recounts he was one of the few 10 year olds picked for the majors. He actually started at 2nd base for the “Schwabs” even though he was all glove and no bat.

As a kid, when he wasn't playing, he was listening. Baseball was a radio sport in the 1950's, and he listened faithfully to the Cleveland Indian games following his hero Rocky Calavito. I think this is when the seeds of fanaticism were planted. To be a Cleveland Indian fan in the 1950's meant your team always, always lost the only playoff position available in the 1950's to the Yankees year after year. In the 1950's there wasn't a play-off system in baseball, only the National League Champion and the American League Champion who met in the World Series.

Until early high school, Drake was still on the field playing baseball. A combination of a poor team manager and his failing eyesight drove him off the field. He never stopped watching baseball, and even had a period in early high school when he obsessively played a pencil and paper version of fantasy baseball with a couple of other high school buddies in binge sessions during one summer. He spent so many hours playing this game that his mother despaired over his social life.

Since 1971, figuring conservatively, Drake has watched 4000 baseball games. He knows so much about the game, that I'm still constantly learning new strategies and new slang from him. Baseball slang always tickles me. Some of my favorites are: 1'worm burner', 2'golden sombrero', 3'taters', 4'chin music', and 5hitting in a 'bandbox'. I've had plenty of opportunities to be educated in the finer points of the game.  We had season tickets to the Houston Astros, and followed that team for almost 20 years. When we moved to the Dallas/Fort Worth area, his allegiance returned to the American League, and he began to follow the Texas Rangers in 1991 – long before they were baseball's golden team. For the past three years, we have gone to 15 Spring Training games, followed by watching about 150 games out of 162 in the regular season, and ending each season by watching 20 play-off games and then rounding out the year watching the World Series. Post World Series, there is a period of mourning that sometimes lasts a month in our household.

With that resume you can understand how I can call Drake a fanatic. However, as the years passed, there was always one thing in baseball he hadn't experienced: The Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY. This place is the temple of baseball. Every true believer wants to breathe the air in the Hall of Plaques which is the altar inside the temple. This past November, Drake fulfilled his lifelong wish. He went to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Believe me, it's not exactly easy to get to this place. Cooperstown, New York (population 1800) is in the middle of nowhere, otherwise called the Mohawk Valley. It's smack dab in the middle of dairy farm country. We left northern New Hampshire and drove and drove and drove to get there. We finally reached the exit on the Interstate, and THEN we drove another 40 minutes. Cooperstown in a quaint little town filled with architecture that goes all the way back to the 18th century. It's actually named NOT for James Fenimore Cooper, but rather for his father.

During the Great Depression, Stephen C. Clark, a mover and shaker in Cooperstown, was looking for a way to improve the economic outlook of the hometown he loved. He pitched the Hall of Fame idea and baseball executives loved it. Thus, Clark snagged the prize for sleepy little out of the way Cooperstown. Today the name of the town is synonymous with baseball. In 1936 the inaugural Hall of Fame class of Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, Babe Ruth and Honus Wagner was elected, and in 1939 the original building opened.

The entire downtown area of Cooperstown is filled with souvenir shops, baseball card shops, equipment shops, buy a bat shops, a wax museum of baseball heroes, and little restaurants and cafes. It's surrounded with motels, hotel, inns, and bed/breakfast mansions. No wonder! At peak times of the year thousands of people visit. Inductee Weekend, where new players are added to the Hall of Fame, can see 80,000 visitors. Can you imagine a town of 1800 hosting 80,000 people? Some visitors wind up staying as far as 200 miles from the town during that weekend.

Fortunately for me, we visited at one of the most uncrowded times; only in January are there fewer visitors - can you say 'snow'? Instead of thousands of people thronging the museum, there were literally less than 10 people visiting the day we arrived. We got to see every exhibit, take 6photographs and look at everything completely unimpeded. I asked Drake for his impressions about the Hall of Fame, and the verb he used was "surprised". His expectation was that the building would be 'old' (it wasn't), and that it would be jam packed with smudged glass cases full of baseball stuff. Instead, we saw an open, airy space of three floors, and an exhibit policy that reflected the credo that 'less is more'.

First and foremost was the plaque gallery. This would be the heart of the museum. There are 289 individual bronze plaques each with a bas relief sculpture of the inductee's head (wearing the baseball team cap the inductee chose) together with a short recitation of their accomplishments. We spent a couple of hours just in this area roaming the plaques. Babe Ruth is here as is Joe Dimaggio, Mickey Mantle, Sandy Koufax and every other famous player you can name as well as some I'd never heard of. There are Major League players, Negro League inductees, executives and pioneers and even eight umpires represented on the plaques.

Drake really enjoyed being in a first class museum dedicated to his greatest interest. He seemed to float around the exhibits that day. Baseball is 'only a game', but baseball for Drake is tied up with his one and only athletic prowess, is the basis of the best part of his relationship with his father, and figures in many of our personal family memories. Our daughter was five when she saw her first major league park, and her face when she first glimpsed the green field, is one of our snapshot family memories. Standing in the Baseball Hall of Fame, Drake said, "This place makes baseball seem important because the museum is of such high quality." Not only was he not disappointed as can easily happens when something is anticipated for so long, but his obsession with this American pastime was somehow vindicated in Cooperstown.




1 An extremely hard hit ground ball in the in-field




2 One player striking out four times in a single game – a twist on the sports term “hat trick”


3 Homeruns – used in the 1950's and prior.


4 A pitcher throwing at the batter's head


5 A small major league park such as Fenway Park in Boston which has the “Pesky Pole”. The fence is 302 feet down the right field line named for Johnny Pesky, a weak hitting infielder, who hit his 17 home runs down this line. Aerial shots actually show the distance to this fence to be significantly shorter – perhaps 295 feet. An average right field fence in a non-bandbox park would be at least 25 feet longer.

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