This was the poster of Hank Aaron that hung on my bedroom wall almost 50 years ago — and considering how there wasn’t a lot of wall space to divvy up with two younger brothers sharing this less-than 200-square foot area, that’s a monument commitment we all agreed upon was worth allocating. (But since I was oldest, I think I had any tie-breaking vote).
I saw this every morning before riding my bike off to middle school. I saw it again every night after baseball practice and my paper route, then huddling with the transistor radio to listen to Vin Scully calling another Dodgers game.
Dodgers team historian Mark Langill confirms this was given away to fans at the May 17, 1974 “Hank Aaron Poster Day” at Dodger Stadium — a Friday night, the first trip the Atlanta Braves came to L.A. that season, about a month after Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s all-time career home run mark against the Dodgers’ Al Downing in Atlanta. Downing actually started this game and went the first eight innings in a 5-4 loss to the Braves in 11 innings (where Aaron went 0-for-3 against Downing). A scan of the poster is on display in the pavilion area along with the left field pavilion plaque from his last homer and a photo of Vin Scully interviewing Aaron in the dugout.
The beauty of this poster is that it was a chart so kids could document Aaron’s home runs in 1974 — and we dutifully logged in the information. We participated. We were invested in recording history.
When Terence Moore was 12, he says he also kept a treasured poster of Aaron. It was one Aaron would autograph years later: “Best wishes to Terry.” Simple and sweet.
Moore, who spent nearly 25 years as a sports writer at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution from late 1984 through the spring 2009, is also now in his 60s, a 1978 graduate of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where he continues to teach as well as contribute to Forbes, CNN and MSNBC.
When Aaron died in January of 2021, Terence Moore became an honorary pall bearer at the funeral. He also helped Aaron’s wife, Billye, write the obituary for the program.
They were that close, because through Moore’s journey as a sportswriter in the deep South, he experienced first hand some of the same racism and ignorance Aaron had gone though. Aaron admired what Moore endured, and vice versa.
Tribute publications that popped up for Aaron in the months after his death, as the 2021 pandemic-cloaked season was ramping up, included a special one from the Atlanta Journal Constitution, pulling together stories, columns and photos from its rich archive, a 128-page publication through Triumph Books. In stories spanned from 1974 to 2021, highlighting the works of writers such as Furman Bisher, Steve Hummer, Dave Kindred, Thomas Stinson, Jeff Nesmith, Wayne Mishew, Tim Tucker, Mark Bradley and sports editor Jesse Outlar.
But nothing from Moore.
If that was an oversight, Moore has more to offer with his own tribute, more than double the size, but also enlisting Triumph to house his collections of interviews, insights and interactions.
Topps 1975 No. 1 card
As Moore explains in the introduction, he had proposed a book idea with Aaron in late 2020, but Aaron’s lawyer had promised someone else exclusive conversations with Aaron that would lead to a publication in 2024, the 50th anniversary of his home-run record. Moore understood, but it also sparked him to take a new approach, starting his own excavation of their conversations about their mutual admiration for Jackie Robinson and the lessons they took with them over the years, about their mixed emotions watching another scorned Black man in his home-run record-breaking journey in 2006.
Topps 1974 No. 1 card
“I had enough material to make the real Hank Aaron shine more than whatever came before or whatever would come in the future,” Moore writes, noting their last on-the-record interview was in October, 2020 for a Baseball Hall of Fame publication story. “I had four decades of those Hank conversations — many of them recorded — and all of my other exclusive dealings with Henry Louis Aaron.”
Topps 1973 No. 1 card
Washington Post columnist David Von Drehle wrote in 2021 in a piece headlined “Henry Aaron did as much as anyone to redeem the South” that “I’m going to call him Henry in this column because that was the name he preferred, as opposed to ‘Hank,’ a nickname attached to him by a PR man who thought White fans might find it friendlier.”
Moore hammers home that distinction as well, separating the public Hank from the private Henry. Because of Moore’s access, he has examples of Aaron’s humor, wisdom and foreshadowing expertise on history. He can be miffed, angry, numb and reflective. He saved hate mail not so much as a motivational mechanism, but as something historians could use to judge just how much present day isn’t that much different from the past when it comes to how some choose to display personal fear and insecurities.
Moore can also speak more about how in 2014, Aaron’s slip-and-fall on an icy patch of driveway led to a hip replacement and a life-threatening moment many weren’t fully aware about — as the two were doing a CNN special on the 40th anniversary of the 715th homer, which Moore uses as a thread to tie together his 10 chapters, seeing him in a wheelchair, ailing, and wondering if this might be it.
“Hank was so much more than 715, his final home run total of 755, or anything else involving what he liked to call ‘the game of baseball’,” Moore writes. “Even so, his grade under pressure while catching and passing The Great Bambino showed the essence of Henry Louis Aaron to everyone as much as anything else.”
In August of 2017, my good pal Chuck and I prayed to our Heavenly Mother and hit the Mother Road. Potholes be damned.
He shipped his convertible to a cousin’s house in a Chicago suburb and we flew in shortly thereafter. We could have floated the next 2,000-plus miles back home. Instead, we found the most beat-up versions of Route 66 to retrace. Much of it is replaced by superhighways now. The original heart and soul started in the 1930s is buried in asphalt and gravel somewhere in there.
Progress.
We had a rough idea how it could be tamed, but the key was flexibility, creativity, patience, an ability to live off gas-station food, no advanced hotel planning, a AAA map, a phone app, sun screen, and an appetite for adventure.
We know in general if Route 66 could be framed as a baseball road trip, it begins at Wrigley Field, ends at Dodger Stadium, blows past Busch Stadium, can happen upon minor league teams in Oklahoma City, Albuquerque, San Bernadino … Y’know, Phoenix isn’t that far south from Flagstaff if you want to catch a Dodgers-Dbacks game during a pennant race …
The drive, as well as the game, is meant to breathe as a living organism, more calming and cathartic as a car ride as long as you’re not speeding toward an end point.
If you stay alert, there can be magic moments. Like winding out of Missouri, chipping off that corner of Kansas, and pointing toward Oklahoma. The mileage marker mentions an approach into a place called Commerce.
Ah, so this is where “The Commerce Comet” came from?
Short detour time.
The barn next to the boyhood home of Mickey Mantle in Commerce, Okla.
A sign on the Mantle home needs some restoration. (And please, no apostrophe between “1950” and the “s”)
Mickey Mantle’s birthplace in the Cherokee Nation-adjacent Spavinaw, Olka., and his home in Commerce aren’t usually a point of reference in Route 66 guidebooks. Just just gotta sorta know and show up with appropriate attire.
The Will Rogers Turnpike (Route 44) that overlays much of the original 66 requires finding E. 50 Road merging into 560 Road South, past the L&M Convenience Store, and the statue of Mantle outside Commerce High School. Finding his simple white childhood home is a side trip up some narrow roads to 319 South Quincy Street. A recent New York Times story about the city explains that while the town has pride in the Mantle name, even painting the base of the water tower with Yankee pinstripes and a No. 7, there is a depressed area that needs some attention and economic support. Ironic, sure, for a town still called Commerce.
We became very in tune with the baseball part of this trip very quickly, and the hundreds of photographs with our iPhone had a good percentage related to things about the game.
There was a must-stop at the original Ted Drewes Frozen Custard in St. Louis — our “Terramizzou” came in a red Cardinals’ helmet, which helped as it quickly melted upon an attempt to eat it in the hot sun — and a trip over to see the newest Busch Stadium.
In between, the Dodgers’ Triple A affiliate in Oklahoma City comfortably rests at Chicksaw Bricktown Park, where there is a statue of local hero Johnny Bench, born in OKC but prepped in a tiny offshoot 60 miles west called Binger, Okla. Conveniently, the Dodgers’ Double-A team in Tulsa, Okla., known as the Drillers and playing in the art deco designed park known as Oneok Field, are just 100 miles East of OKC, also on the route.
So, too, the Albuquerque Isotopes, part of the Colorado Rockies’ family now after it was a former Dodgers’ breeding ground (note the Joc Pederson reference in this pix). It’s a must-visit for fans of “The Simpsons,” right next to the University of New Mexico sports facilities even on a non-game day.
Eventually, you land at the feet of the Inland Empire 66ers’ home diamond near the Wigwam Motel in San Berdo.
They’re called the 66ers for a reason, right? Not far from the original McDonald’s site, the stadium entrance has an arched sign featuring a character of car mechanic swinging a giant wrench like a baseball bat. The team logo is like a Route 66 highway sign. They’ve only been the 66ers since 2003, a team previously known as the Stampede and Spirit until the current ownership team decided to pay homage to the famous strip that often isn’t even marked on road maps any longer.
There are many sports-related sites to acknowledge on the 66 trip, from Chicagoland Speedway in Joliet, Ill., to Santa Anita Race Track in Arcadia. But pump the breaks.
But there is also something called “The Field of Dreams” baseball park, near a tiny three-square mile town called Baxter Springs, Kansas, which locals insist is the “First Cow Town in Kansas” (there’s a specific Cow Town Mural on the corner of 11th and Military Ave., to mark the proper ID). It does sit in the middle of a cornfield, but on the Kansas state tourism board website, there is a simple post about it: “This baseball/softball complex on ‘Old Route 66’ was the dream of a local high school teacher and coach. Community support allowed the dream to become reality.”
— Grassroots Baseball (@GrassrootsBB) May 20, 2022
Now picture this: Boys and girls playing the game in cities and places these days that almost look forgotten in Rand McNally’s atlas. On fields full of weeds, near junk yards and abandoned gas stations. Places where those who once traveled Route 66 as a major highway really were needed, but now can be forgotten.
Photographer Jean Fruth, former Baseball Hall of Fame president Jeff Idelson and a host of others attached to the 501c3 known as Grassroots Baseball won’t let the game, or this path, be lost to history.
Extending on a project that first came to light in 2019 with “Grassroots Baseball: Where Legends Begin” — where San Francisco bay-area based Fruth published more than 250 photographs of her journey from the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Cuba, Japan and several U.S. events (and we gave a shout-out in the L.A. Times at the time) – the focus this time is on the left side of America, the Mother Road that built in the 1920s allowed easier, measured and accommodating migrating travel from Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas out to New Mexico, Arizona and California.
Back in ’19, the Grassroots Baseball pilled in an RV, loaded up with baseballs, gloves and Big League Chew, and made stop after stop, putting on clinics in under-served areas, sometimes bringing the game to kids for the first time.
It’s called mothering in some cultures. Nurturing in others.
The cover sets the scene: A 1968 Chevy pickup in El Reno, Okla., with three players from the Binger High Bobcats riding in the back.
Remember, Johnny Bench … Binger, Okla., headquarters of Caddo Nation with has a population of 672 by the last census, down from its peak of 849 in 1930. There is a Route 66 Diner on the main street.
Opposite the title page, there’s four kids playing a pickup game amidst rusted farm equipment in Claude, Tex., just east of Amarillo (population: 1,196).
Baseball in Claude, Tex., captured by Jean Fruth.
The photos of baseball interchange with whatever Fruth finds of historical context on Route 66 – Wigwam Hotels, statues on the corner of Winslow, Ariz., and wild burros in Oatman, Ariz., are as prevalent in the narrative as an AIA state playoff game in Flagstaff, Ariz., or U-16 game in River Valley High.
By the time we make it to California, places such as Edward Vincent Junior Park in Inglewood, Los Amigos Park in Santa Monica and Santa Monica beach at dusk just north of the pier are featured landmarks where kids are doing their bat and ball stuff.
Former SI writer Steve Wulf helps shape the MLB-related essays delivered on a state-by-state basis, starting with Jim Thome in Illinois, through George Brett in California, and including Bench in Oklahoma.
Hall of Famer @GeorgeHBrett grew up alongside his three brothers near Route 66 in El Segundo, California and contributed a first-person essay about his experiences in our book, Grassroots Baseball: Route 66 available for preorder now: https://t.co/ma2z8YeFpppic.twitter.com/IUYurKoiEN
Brett’s essay on page 223 includes the line: “Just like Hollywood actors, baseball players get discovered. My showscase game was the 1971 state high school championship game at the Big A in Anaheim – our El Segundo Eagles beat the Lompoc Braves and their ace, Roy Thomas, 5-2. Thomas was taken in the first round of the draft by the Phillies, and I was taken in the second round by the Royals. Two years later, I was in the majors and three years after that I made my first of 13-straight All-Star teams.”
He went 20-13, 3.82 ERA, 419 IP and 289 Ks. That’s over an eight-year career, not one season. Once untouchable in the Phillies’ farm system, he was traded to the Chicago White Sox (in a deal that included Jim Kaat coming to Philadelphia), taken by the Mariners in the 1976 expansion draft, traded to Houston, converted to a reliever, taken off waivers by the Cardinals (a Route 66 team), went back to a starting role, hit Ellis Valentine in the face with a pitch to shatter his cheekbone, was picked by the A’s in a Rule 5 draft, traded back to the Mariners, had a sore elbow and was released, came back as a non-roster invitee, had a run of seven straight wins for the ’85 M’s, hit with more tendinitis, down to the minors, one more trip to the bigs with the M’s in ’87 and won one more game, then pitched for the St. Lucie Legends and Sun City Rays of the Senior Professional Baseball Association from ’89-’90 until the league folded. He went on to be a middle-school math teacher in the state of Washington, the moved to Las Vegas.
Some players end up on the well-paved road to Cooperstown. Others get stuck in the muck of the Cadillac Ranch, take the road more traveled, and hopefully enjoy the scenery. From Lake Michigan to the Santa Monica pier, you can do it, too. Bring a bat and ball. The sand is nice.
How it goes in the scorebook
Get your kicks with this picture-perfect portfolio that captures more than the essence of the game and its long and winding journey. Bring your best baseball friend. And don’t forget Winona.
Reflecting back on our recent review of “Remarkable Ballparks,” this is an example of a photo spread that executes and excites, having a narrative fleshed out by the photographer who experiences the trip and conveys it with visual artistry. It makes it personal, professional and prolific.
== A beauty of a Q&A with Fruth for BrianSmith.com, photography blogger includes: Q: Most readers are probably jealous of your access to major league baseball – yet any of them could easily cover a little league game in their hometown, do grassroots games give you allow you to shoot from vantage points you could never get access to at a major league game? A: I am spending more time teaching sports photography these days and I can’t stress enough that it’s the “what” not the “who” that makes great pictures. When you let go of “the who” and just focus on your angles, light and creativity, you can make something great. In professional sports, so much of the time we are making the same picture. I prepare just as much for a little league game as I do for a professional game. I shoot my subjects as if they are professional players, but with so much more ability to be creative.
== If you’re so moved, click the donate button and make a tax-deductible donation to support the mission to promote and celebrate the amateur game around the globe. A $100 donation gets you this book, signed, and the extra $30 goes toward the cause.
== Thanks to Baseball-Reference.com, there is an incredible data-sifting interactive map of Route 66 that allows users to pinpoint any of the 1,065 players it has determined were born within 50 miles of this stretch of road and whose last year was 1926 — the year Route 66 was commissioned and then fully paved by the late 1930s. The list is lead (by those with a career WAR of 100 or better) by Barry Bonds (Riverside), Rickey Henderson (Chicago) and Mickey Mantle (Spavinaw, Okla.)
The pull-down menu of cities are an easier way to make connections. Take, for example, Fullerton. The 10 names that show up (in order of career WAR) are led by Jim Edmonds, Phil Nevin, C.J. Cron and Austin Barns. So, what about Walter “Big Train” Johnson?
The Fullerton High graduate who pitched 21 seasons for the Washington Senators starting in 1907 as a 19 year old (417-279, 2.17 ERA, 110 shutouts) was actually born in Humbolt, Kansas in 1887. From our mapping, that’s about 93 miles from the closets point on Route 66 in that area – Galena, Kansas, which is about the only major outpost in the state that Route 66 cuts through between Missouri and Oklahoma. Johnson’s family moved from Kansas to Orange County when he was 14 in 1902. He was discovered by the Senators while living and pitching in the Idaho State League.
The same confusion might come from tracking George Brett. The only player on the Baseball-Reference menu pull down from El Segundo, Calif., is Lars Nootbaar, the current outfielder for the St. Louis Cardinals. Brett was born in far-off Glen Dale, West Virginia, and his family moved to El Segundo when he was starting elementary school, graduating from El Segundo High in ’71 behind his three older brothers (who were born in Brooklyn). Robin Yount, who played at Taft High in Woodland Hills, was another who was born elsewhere – Danville, Ill., about 130 miles south of Chicago – before moving in the Route 66 “50 mile radius” when he was infant.
From Los Angeles, there are 150 position players and 75 pitchers listed, including Hall of Famers Tony Gwynn, Eddie Murray, Duke Snider, Joe Gordon and Bobby Doerr, plus Darryl Strawberry, Bob Watson, Brett Butler, Eric Davis, Ken Landreau, Hubie Brooks, Bob Ojeda, Bill Singer and Dock Ellis.
On what would have been his 62nd Birthday, we recognize LA native and HOFer, Tony “Mr. Padre” Gwynn. He leads all players born along Route 66 with a career .338 batting average, and his WAR over his 20-year career with the @Padres is a whopping 69.15. https://t.co/AGEawqPBKPpic.twitter.com/uINPNa3uq8
== The booktour and signings by Fruth and others started May 14 in her hometown of Healdsburg, Cal, and will reach L.A. at Dodger Stadium on June 4 (with Alan Trammell, the Detroit Tigers’ Hall of Fame shortstop born in Garden Grove). Other stops include Cooperstown, N.Y. on Hall of Fame induction weekend (July 22), Williamsport, Pa., in time for the Little League World Series (Aug. 20) and a gallery exhibit in Chicago from Sept. 8-30.
Fruth’s pinned tweet on Twitter:
"A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives." Jackie Robinson pic.twitter.com/4BE9fo7LkN
The most remarkable baseball park you’ve ever stepped foot into? Onto? Seen out the window from an airplane?
It probably depends on who you were with, when and where it happened, what was involved in the backstory and, more interestingly, how you might define something that is stunning, astonishing, exceptional, impressive, or even too miraculous for words.
First Dodgers game for my 98-year-old grandfather since before the pandemic. He’s wearing his Brooklyn Dodgers jacket — grew up going to games at Ebbets Field. He’s happy to be back at Dodger Stadium! pic.twitter.com/4Pyknf69VY
As many times as we’ve entered Dodger Stadiu during its 60 seasons, from various gates and levels and dugout tunnels, from ages 6 to 60, we’ve always found ourselves needing a moment to pause and take it all in. To this day, our most remarkable viewpoint is from being on the field itself, gazing up at the tiers of sections built into the hillside and thinking of how Vin Scully has described it as “like a wedding cake.”
Dodger Stadium, from page 54 of “Remarkable Ballparks,” credit: Tyler Nix/Unsplash.com
More surreal is participating in a game on the field – as media members are occasionally allowed during the season after a Sunday game. Looking at those color-coded levels, one on top of the other, rising nine stories tall, a pop fly to the shortstop can get distracting. There’s no sky as a backdrop.
Roaming around in center field, there is so much area to sprint toward the wall, then back toward the infield, while misjudging another fly ball. In the batter’s box, a very lonely experience, changes when you rope one down the third base line, realize you now need to run around the bases and end up sliding head first into third with a triple, only to swallow a cheek-full of sunflower seeds. It can happen. Too miraculous for words while catching one’s breath.
Tom Hanks and his son, Chet, sang their hearts out to "Take Me Out To The Ballgame" at Dodger Stadium. https://t.co/4lsBhKNui5
Remarkable implies something far beyond the norm, uncommon. A ballpark’s commonality is strict adherence to 60-feet, 6-inches here, 90-feet there, 330-feet out that a way, giving it structure and form and fairness. Everything else around it seems to be open for creativity and interpretation, even to a point of distraction, but often a place to appreciate beautiful scenery and landscape.
Kinda like Modern Woodman Park in Davenport, Iowa, home of the Single-A Quad Cities River Bandits, about 90 miles south of Dyersville’s Field of Dreams.
Both places have a prominent place in this oversized, visually-stimulating collection of fields for teams.
Modern Woodman Park, from “Remarkable Ballparks,” page 10. Credit: Almay
If you can picture the par-3, 17th hole at the TPC Sawgrass Course, home of The Players Championship, the island green surrounded by water. So when the west bank of the Mississippi River overflows from heavy rain, that’s what Modern Woodman Park can look like. As shown first on full page 10 in the introduction, and then more fully explained on pages 144-145 where it shows better raised walkways that allow accessibility during times of flooding.
In 1993 during The Great Flood, the field was submerged. In 2004, a flood wall was installed, which proved to be successful when the next flooding in 2019 saved the field. They’ve even got a little daring by installing a 110-foot tall Ferris wheel behind the left field wall now.
A flood of memories can also be had with pages 87-89, where the Field of Dreams Movie Site is featured, including highlights from the 2021 Yankees-White Sox game played adjacent to it, with Kevin Costner involved as the connection to the 1989 film.
The Dodgers revive a dog-related promotion this Saturday that has less to do with relishing the history of its former Farmer John-produced foot-long frank than it does celebrating the curious fact some are still willing to go to any extreme to be in the presence of their own wound-up wiener dog.
“Bark in the Park” is what they called it at first. Now it’s “Pups at the Park,” because, really, the only barking in baseball should be between a manager and umpire, and that isn’t even tolerated as it once was.
In 2010, L.A. Times writer Chris Erskine attended the very first promotion and wrote in his lede: “That was some party in the right-field pavilion Saturday night — some 500 dogs in attendance, a minor league stunt in a major league venue. In order to enter the stadium, the dogs had to have proof of vaccinations, a requirement so successful that Dodger brass might one day extend it to the fans themselves.”
It is an odd event where waivers must be signed releasing the Dodgers of any legal rights and liabilities, and the team must also remind everyone: Please be sure quantity of dog tickets and human tickets are accurate at checkout. Also: This is a live sporting event and loud noises may occur.
Erskine noted that fans had to pay $25 for a seat in the then-all-you-can-eat right field pavilion, as well as fork out $25 for a ticket to accommodate their dog. The next year, tickets went up to $30 each. In 2018, it was $46 for humans and $40 for dogs. Now, its $78 each for this Saturday’s game against Philadelphia. It’ll be a more modest $63 a ticket when the event happens again on Labor Day Monday, Sept. 5, vs. San Francisco.
Former media hustler Roy Firestone was prompted to post on Facebook:
The Dodgers, like many teams, can and will get away with this ticketing arrangement. Increased prices work with any and all promotional event.
Last year during COVID recall, the Dodgers didn’t have one of these events, but eight other teams did. They weren’t the first to come up with the idea – at least five other teams were doing it in 2005, five years before the Dodgers’ first one. The Padres (at Petco Park) and Diamondbacks have expanded to have “pet-friendly sections” at their stadiums since 2016, converting a patio area with “premium boxes” in left field that go for $100 a game – four fans, two dogs.
Mike Veeck, the son of Bill Veeck, a co-owner of several minor league and independent teams, including the Charleston RiverDogs, poses with a bronze of The Citadel’s mascot on campus in Charleston, S.C. (Associated Press)
Dog days seems to be an event that a team owner like Bill Veeck would have unleashed years ago. And who knows, maybe he thought of it first and never pulled it off.
A New York Times piece on the subject in 2005 notes: The Chicago White Sox, who have a long legacy of unusual promotions dating to the former owner and marketing maverick Bill Veeck, were the first major-league team to hold a dog day, in 1996. “It’s one of our most popular promotions, one of the few that fans call about immediately after tickets go on sale for the season,” said Katie Kirby, director of public relations for the team.
To get the real read on Veeck, whose ability to circumvent conventional wisdom in the name of baseball fun, there are more than 400 pages devoted to his life and times thanks to Paul Dickson’s 2012 book “Baseball’s Greatest Maverick.” We’d love to see the outtakes.
It is a far deeper dive beyond the classics Veeck wrote with Ed Linn, starting with “Veeck – As in Wreck: The Chaotic Career of Baseball’s Incorrigible Maverick,” which came out in 1962, and then the 1965 version of “The Hustler’s Handbook,” which attracted a cover story in Sports Illustrated. He said at the time “Handbook” is a “chronicle of the roughest 18 months baseball has been through in a long time. … I hope the book does well. The first one will put three of my kids through school. Now I have to worry about the next three.”
Veeck wasn’t just a bulldog owner, but one you imagine could have had more bite had he been surrounded by other breeds of creative canines working in the name of the National League (aka, the Senior Circuit) during the game’s transformative years. Instead, relegated to the American League, he must have felt as if he was herding cats trying to get anyone not associated with the New York Yankees to invest in the growth of what was cutely known as “The Junior Circuit” in the post-World War II era.
Veeck, navigating the AL as the majority owner of the Cleveland Indians (1946-’49), St. Louis Browns (1951-’53) and Chicago White Sox (1959-’61 and ’75-’80), made his mark with employing the league’s first African American player, signing a midget to a contract and having him draw a walk, and having a bunch of disco records burn on his home field. He was as American as the AL would allow.
But he loved to tell the story about how he wanted to buy the NL’s Philadelphia Phillies in 1943 – and how he was going to stock the roster with Negro League stars. Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis wasn’t going to have any of that, and found out the rest of the National League owners assumed ownership of the team even though Veeck agreed in principal to the deal from previous ownership. Dickson covered that in depth in his book about Veeck and the topic is still up for debate about its truthiness.
For those who love to reconstruct baseball history, wonder what would have happened if some things fell differently, and why franchises ended up here, there and everywhere except when logic came in play, here are two more viable entries to pour through and try to reconnect the dippin’ dots of days gone by.
Veeck, enjoyably, is all over it in both editions.
In the introduction to “Stumbling Around the Bases,” McCue pulls a quote from Veeck that explains how the league known as “The Junior Circuit” operated from his point of view: “Planning is wholly out of keeping with the American League tradition of confronting all emergencies, head on, with Panic and Patchwork.”
The marvelous quote is one McCue, a SABR member since 1982 and organizational president from 2009-11, found from an unpublished manuscript called “Good Grief, They’ve Done It Again!” included in the Bill Veeck Papers at the Chicago Historical Society, attributed to Veeck and Linn and likely written in 1967, in what would have been the third in a Veeck-Linn trilogy.
Any mom would be proud reading about the historic achievements accomplished by these three baseball people over the last month:
== Kelsie Whitmore did something this past Wednesday no woman has ever done before.
Michael Macor/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty
After becoming one of the first women to sign with a professional team affiliated with Major League Baseball last month, and then the first woman to be in the starting lineup for an Atlantic League club on May 1, Whitmore was the first woman to take the mound in an Atlantic League game on May 4, making a relief appearance in the Staten Island FerryHawks‘ 3-1 loss to the Lexington Legends.
The 23-year-old, a member of the United States women’s national baseball team from 2014 to 2019 out of Cal State Fullerton, needed to get her team out of a bases-loaded jam with two outs in the top of the ninth inning at Richmond County Bank Ballpark at St. George. She inherited the high-leverage situation with the FerryHawks in need of an out to keep the deficit to two runs. Whitmore got Ryan Jackson to fly out to left after getting ahead in the count, 1-2. Even though Staten Island was unable to come back in the bottom of the ninth, Whitmore delivered. (In her next game, she gave up six earned runs in less than an inning and has an ERA at 54.00 at the moment for the 1-11 squad).
== Alyssa Nakken did something on April 12 no woman has ever done before.
She joined the team in its operations department in 2014, working on health and wellness. A year later she earned a masters in sports management from the University of San Francisco and was the chief information officer with the team. In 2000, she was promoted to assistant coach – the first woman to have that title in MLB history. She has been a coach working with baserunners and outfield defense, watching game from an indoor batting cage near the dugout.
It was a notable achievement when she served as the first-base coach for the Giants during an exhibition game against Oakland in July, 2020, as the teams were ramping up for the pandemic-delayed seasonreboot.
When Giants first-base coach Antoan Richardson was ejected from a game in the top of the third inning against the Padres last month, manager Gabe Kapler summoned Nakken to throw on her off-brand creamsicle-colored No. 92 jersey andstep in. Announced as Richardson’s replacement, Nakken received a warm ovation from the crowd at Oracle Park, and a congratulatory handshake from Padres first baseman Eric Hosmer.
“I just introduced myself, congratulated her,” Hosmer said. “It’s obviously a special moment for her, and a special moment for the game. … It’s something she should be really proud of.”
Jeff Dean of NPR wrote: “For years, the MLB has sought to diversify the league’s on-field and operations positions by introducing programs such as its diversity pipeline and a diversity fellowship program. And while it takes time for such programs to bear fruit, the league no doubt sees these as encouraging signs.” And Stephen Kennedy wrote for the SB Nation McCovey Chronicles: “Baseball’s ‘unwritten rules’ need to be tested. Some of them need to be broken. Alyssa Nakken is a rule breaker and baseball is better for it.”
Tampa Tarpons manager Rachel Balkovec watches from the dugout while making her debut as a minor league manager of the Yankees’ Single-A affiliate on Friday, April 8, 2022. (AP Photo/Phelan M. Ebenhack)
== Rachel Balkovec did something on April 8 no woman has ever done before.
The 34-year old was the first woman to manage a minor league affiliate of an Major League Baseball team. She guided the New York Yankees’ Class A Tampa Tarpons to a win in her first game.
With a masters in kinesiology from LSU and another in human movement sciences from Vrije University in the Netherlands, she became a strength and conditioning coach for the St. Louis Cardinals’ Johnson City, Pa., rookie league affiliate in 2012.
A year later, she was waitressing and working at Lululemon, hoping to advance her coaching career. She changed her name on her resume and her email address from “Rachel” to “Rae,” but once she started doing phone interviews with teams …
Four years later she was in the Houston Astros’ Latin American player development and learned Spanish. In the winter of ’19, the Yankees hired her as a hitting coach – the first woman with a full-time position in that role. The Yankees named her manager of the Tarpons in January, 2022.
A tangible example of how added tech has undeniably changed the sport forever – for better (for pitchers) or for worse (for hitters). @dan_aucoin13https://t.co/jgoGfFLZvO
In late March at the Yankees’ spring training camp in Tampa, she was hit in the face with a batted ball during workouts, forcing her to miss the Tarpons’ home opener. And sporting a wicked shiner.
The Tarpons’ 6-5 loss to Bradenton on Mother’s Day dropped their record to 13-13. There are T-shirts now in the Tarpon’s team store referring to “Shatting Baseball’s Barriers” and sporting quotes from Balkovec, such as “Grateful for the women who’ve come before me” and “I’m not done yet.”
My mom, a cradle Catholic who struggles with all the dogmas of a religion that can be a frightful challenge to those who go in with blind faith and a hopeful outcome, pointed me into the theological teachings of baseball at a very early age. Her love of the game was cultivated as a young girl watching the achievements of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League in South Bend, Indiana. So much of that deep love emerged in linking it to a review of Anika Orrock’s book, “The Incredible Women of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League” in 2020.
I enjoy honoring her on Mother’s Day Version 2022 — her 60th such celebration — with a copy of this book, hoping that someday names like Kelsie Whitmore,Alyssa Nakken, Rachel Balkovec are as important to women in the future as names like Lou Arnold, Jean Faut and Bea Chester are to my mom and they too will become worthy of classic baseball documentation, essays, analysis and gratitude.
One other reason these three names resonate today is, in the legacy created by 2003 inductee Ila Borders, consider Whitmore, Nakken and Balkovec as future candidates for the Shrine of the Eternals, the Pasadena-based creation of the late Terry Cannon and his Baseball Reliquary. Today, the Reliquary seems to be on pause following Cannon’s passing in August, 2020. The website seems to have come down, hopefully to be updated and revived soon. There hasn’t been a new vote or ceremonies for the Shrine of the Eternals since July 2019. There are 66 members in the Shrine so far.
In the more than two-dozen stories Rosengren includes in his book, one is dedicated to the Baseball Reliquary, which he wrote for Vice Sports in August of 2015, guided there by fellow SABR member John Leonoudakis.
And while there are those who will logically seek out Rosengren’s new collection of baseball-related pieces he has written over the years as a worthy idea for a Father’s Day gift this June – he spend many paragraphs talking about his own father who took him to Minnesota Twins games in the 1970s as well as watching Minneapolis Millers’ minor-league contests – may we also suggest it’s a nice thing for mom to settle in with and go back in time.
Rosengren notes his dad passed away in 2006. He writes about going with him to Cooperstown a year before that, and lessons learned from his old baseball glove.
We have some of those same memories with our still-kicking mom. Her gloves, bats and balls she collected and used to play the game with us are still in the garage, slowly making their way to my garage so they don’t go missing.
“These stories about baseball, they outlive those in them and even those who tell them,” Rosengren writes in the introduction. “I find something beautiful in that.”
We do as well.
How it goes in the scorebook
Here’s to you, mom. And, yes, dad can read it too. But you first. Then share, like you taught us. Check out the chapter on Sandy Koufax’s 1965 Yom Kippur decision, which Rosengren pulls from his 2015 Sports Illustrated story. And I will be over soon with the corndogs and peanuts to watch the Dodgers-Cubs game from Wrigley Field shortly. As per our tradition.
= “Hank Greenberg: The Hero of Heroes,” NAL, 2013 A chapter in “Classic Baseball” is focused on Greenberg from a feature Rosengren did for Michigan History magazine in the fall of 2014.
== Rosengren’s interesting piece recently for the Washington Post tries to size up the political aspirations for former Heisman Trophy winner and Georgia icon Herschel Walker. It ends this way: “Details of Walker’s violent past and his outrageous statements already trouble the Republican cognoscenti. Some worry what more could emerge from investigative reporting — or Walker’s own mouth. ‘The unknowns associated with Herschel Walker, with his history and what his statements in the future may be, make him a foolish risk for Republicans,’ says John Watson, former Georgia GOP chair. “At the moment, though, he may be protected by a cocoon of willful ignorance among his supporters. Several people leaving the Dahlonega event had not heard about the accusations that Walker made violent threats toward ex-wife Cindy and others — incidents recently reported by the media. When told about the incidents, they brushed them off. ‘I’m not the same person I was 20 years ago. We learn from our mistakes,’ says Donna Brantley of Dahlonega, carrying an autographed ‘Run Herschel Run’ yard sign. ‘He’s got the right morals’.”
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