“The Best Little Baseball Town in the World:
The Crowley Millers and Minor League Baseball
in the 1950s”
The author:
Gaylon H. White
The publishing info:
Rowman & Littlefield
278 pages
$38
Released on April 21, 2021
The links:
At the publisher’s website
At the author’s website
At Indiebound.org
At Bookshop.org
At Powells.com
At Vromans.com
At The Last Book Store in L.A.
At PagesABookstore.com
At Amazon.com
At BarnesAndNoble.com
The review in 90 feet or less
There’s always a decent chance one might judge the decision to further investigate a book by the blurb on its back cover. Try this one on for size:
“(It) tells the fun, quirky story of Crowley, Louisiana, in the fifties, a story that reads more like fiction than nonfiction. To start, the Crowley Millers’ biggest star was Conklyn Meriwether, a slugger who became infamous after he retired when he killed his in-laws with an axe. Their former manager turned out to be a con man, dying in jail while awaiting trial on embezzlement chargers. The 1951 team was torn to pieces after their young center fielder was struck and killed by lightning – during a game. But aside from the tragedy and turmoil, the Crowley Millers played some great baseball.”
It’s all accurate, for sure. A story that must be told, actually, and a reminder that sometimes truth is more compelling than things that could be made up. But in a way, while that is a lot of what’s going on here and setting the tone for the adventure, it doesn’t fully capture the essence of what Los Angeles-born Gaylon White has actually done here with his latest deep dive into the history of minor-league baseball.
We won’t suggest the reader jumps to the final chapter — after White lays out all the details about the team and this effort to get pro baseball into the community only to have it disappear after a few short years.
But if only for this exercise, consider how White comes to cover the rebirth of historic Miller Stadium, and the pride of the community. This is a ballpark, White notes, located near the railroad tracks used by the rice mills. It earned the nickname of “Rice Capital of American” in this southern Louisiana city just east of Lafayette. It’s a place, they say, where “Life Is Rice and Easy.”
Back in the day, White continues, fans parked along the track, but in the middle of the games the public address announcer would call out the license numbers of cars that had to be moved for a train to pass through.
The town had a population of about 12,500, and they’d sometimes get 7,000 attending games there.
About 20-plus years ago, the ballpark was restored and upgraded as it fell apart from neglect.
Richard Pizzolato, known around town as Coach Pizz, said he was at the field one day in 1998, when a man in a heavy Brooklyn accent asked: “Is this Miller Stadium?”
Coach Pizz confirmed it was. In his own Southern drawl, he added: “It’s great to have you back Mr. Scivoletti.”
Mike Scivoletti, a shortstop for the Millers in their glory years of 1952-to-’53, was the visitor, and he was shocked to be recognized.
“How do you know who I am?” asked Sciovletti.
“You were my hero when you played here,” Coach Pizz said.
Pause for one of those “Field of Dreams” crying moments.
At a confounding time when Major League Baseball has decided to compromise its future by streamlining its minor-league organization and eliminating more cities and small towns from the pride of having a pro team, White has fortuitously seized a moment to recall a franchise that once existed, then vanished, and merits just two generic paragraphs on a Wikipedia entry.
Here’s the Millers, and their trenchant story during the 1950s when the city decided to build a ballpark and then hope a team would come. They did, and then came the post-WWII Class C version of the Evangeline League.
The league’s name itself is a thing of literary beauty. It’s the epic poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow called “Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie,” which focuses on Acadian farmers, descendants of a group of French-speaking settlers who migrated from coastal France in the late sixteenth century to establish a French colony called Acadia in Canada and parts of what is now the state of Maine. Forced out by the British, many resettled in southern Louisiana. They are now more popularly known as Cajuns.
Continue reading “Day 18 of 2021 baseball book reviews: A minor-league story told in a major-league way, ‘rice and easy’”
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