Rotund but leathery, the old scout sat across the aisle from me in the box seats behind home plate at venerable Riverview Stadium. With a practiced eye he watched Kevin Walker, the Clinton LumberKings’ starting pitcher, as he warmed up, throwing curve balls that spun right at us before ducking with a thud into the commodious mitt of catcher Marcos Sanchez. The scout clutched a rumpled roster sheet and a small loose-leaf notebook, its dog-eared pages askew, in which he recorded his own arcane scoring. On his finger was a huge gold ring with what appeared to be a stylized “M” on the stone.
Chuck Gedge sat on my other side. His baseball credentials included a Rollie Fingers mustache — the twirled sort favored by turn-of-the-century ballplayers — and a White Sox cap with a built-in radio for listening to the play-by-play. With its unusual competence betrayed by a collapsible antenna, the cap received much favorable and incredulous comment from fellow fans.
Chuck and I were in the midst of a Midwest League baseball safari — the latest chapter of what has become our annual trip to the minor leagues. We’d started a dozen years before with a sweep through the ballparks of upstate New York — Rochester, Syracuse, Niagara Falls, Utica, Geneva, Newark. Subsequently we’ve traveled to the Carolinas, to the mountains of West Virginia, to western Pennsylvania and Ohio.
Initially we chose the minors to escape artificial turf, huge and impersonal stadiums, scoreboards with instant replay and digital instructions to clap or cheer, and businessman ballplayers with what seemed at the time outrageous salaries. We’d been drawn to baseball’s older, quieter ways and to the minors’ elderly, idiosyncratic, intimate ballparks with their endearing quirks. We’d reveled in the ease of getting cheap seats close to the action. We’d fantasized about buying a team ourselves.
But since we began our trips, a boom has transformed minor-league baseball. Now, franchises at all levels are in demand, and the blue-collar, gritty cities that supported the minors through the lean years often lose their teams to richer communities with shiny new ballparks. In the past decade, more than 70 new minor-league stadiums have been built. Attendance has burgeoned to 34.6 million annually (not including the independent leagues), a level not reached since the late 1940s, the heyday of the minors.
With national currents running fast in the direction of change, commercialism and new parks, we thought that hidebound, rural Iowa held special promise for an old-time baseball fix. In spite of empirical evidence to the contrary, baseball retains its aura as a country game, and Iowa is nothing if not country. We knew some older parks survived there. And the state is, after all, the setting for “Field of Dreams,” the mystical, heartstrings-plucking baseball movie.
For all the changes, the minor leagues do still embody much of the magic extolled in that movie: a camaraderie among fans, a game played for the love of it, a physical closeness to the field. On the practical side, ticket and concession prices, though rising, remain substantially lower than in the “bigs.”
“Go the distance” is the mysterious command that runs through “Field of Dreams.” A similar imperative sent us journeying halfway across the country from our homes in New Jersey to see games at four Iowa parks, homes of teams in the Class A Midwest League, near the bottom rung in organized baseball.
One was Clinton’s Riverview Stadium, built in 1937 as a Works Progress Administration (WPA) project. It’s a cozy ball yard, with Art Deco accents on its facade. We and the old scout were part of a sparse crowd of 632 assembled on a hot July night for what proved to be an outstanding game between the Lansing Lugnuts and the LumberKings.
As we filled out our scorecards, we cast discreet sidelong glances as deferential younger scouts came down and chatted with our neighbor — paying court, it seemed to us. That’s when we noticed the ring. Chuck nudged me.
“Ask him about it,” he hissed. I demurred.
The Lugnuts — a brand-new team with a brand-new stadium (10,000-seat Oldsmobile Park) and a clever moniker designed to sell plenty of logo goods — was a Kansas City Royals affiliate, while the LumberKings played under San Diego Padres auspices.
As the game unfolded, Padres management could feel especially sanguine as their young players (most in their early 20s) jumped out to a 2-0 lead in the first inning on a pair of singles and a double by first baseman Nathan Dunn. The LumberKings added a run in the fifth, while Walker pitched shutout ball through seven.
Our elder statesman neighbor was sans radar gun, the weapon used by the Now Generation of scouts to clock the speed of the pitchers. Often we’d see a battery of them, aimed at a pitcher deemed a genuine prospect.
“Hey, Steve, what kind of time you getting on this guy?” the old scout called over his shoulder when Todd Bussa came in to pitch for the LumberKings.
“Ninety.”
“Ninety,” he repeated. “Thanks. I can’t tell at night — can’t follow it that well anymore.”
Afterward, filing out into the humid night with the rest of the faithful, we bumped into the old scout on the stadium concourse.
“I couldn’t help noticing your beautiful ring,” Chuck said. “Is it a World Series ring by any chance?”
“Yup,” he replied. “I have two. The Minnesota Twins gave them to me for signing Kirby Puckett.” He said his name was Brown, and we shook hands. “I’ll be back tomorrow night,” he said. “See you then.”
But we wouldn’t be back — nor would Kirby Puckett, who days earlier had announced his untimely retirement from baseball because of incurable eye problems. We’d be at Cedar Rapids, the last stop on our circuit of Iowa ballparks.
The first had been Davenport, where our trip seemed off to an inauspicious start. We arrived about half an hour before game time at John O’Donnell Stadium, and the rain was falling in sheets.
“This may not turn out to be one of our better trips,” Chuck said dourly. But before long it let up, and we scampered through a dwindling sprinkle to the ticket window. Then it stopped completely, and in short order this wonderful old brick stadium — it dates from 1931 and is named for a former sports editor of what was then the Davenport Times-Democrat — was bathed in evening sunlight. A rainbow appeared beyond the right-field fence. Our baseball odyssey would have a fine beginning after all.
John O’Donnell, recently refurbished, is a classic park with a fully covered grandstand and a rounded brick facade with repeating arches. Behind first base, Centennial Bridge soars off across the Mississippi to Rock Island, Ill., which — along with Moline, Ill., and Davenport and Bettendorf, Iowa — make up the community called the Quad Cities. As night falls, the lights lining the bridge’s arches and roadway glow like a string of pearls. Crowds at O’Donnell are generally big: 5,516 at the game we saw.
The rain stopping was the last bit of luck for the Quad City River Bandits and their fans that night, as the home team lost 8-3 to the Cedar Rapids Kernels. Nevertheless, the fans didn’t lack for entertainment, as games, stunts and promotions filled each of the between-innings warmups. Most of these have become staples at minor-league stadiums around the country.
Along with these diversions, the Quad City people had laid on a rather good act: “Skydog U.S.A.,” a group of acrobatic canines who did airborne tricks with frisbees for their trainer, Rockin’ Ray. But even better entertainment, I thought, was provided by the sunset’s afterglow backlighting the bridge and the towboats gliding by just beyond the outfield fence.
At Burlington the next night, in a roofless, very ordinary little ballpark (Community Field, built in 1973), amidst a very ordinary little crowd of 411, we watched the Michigan Battle Cats beat the hometown Bees 7-6 in 10 innings.
At 6:45, 15 minutes before game time, with only a few dozen fans scattered through the stands, the grounds crew had finished wetting down the infield to a lovely dark brown, smooth as calfskin. In the lazy stillness of a hot, bright evening, both teams drifted out on the field to throw, play pepper, swing bats or run a few easygoing sprints. It was so quiet that each slap of ball in glove sounded distinctly, and the murmur of voices on the field carried up to the seats.
The Bees jumped out to a 6-0 lead by batting around in the first. As the game wore on the ambience shifted by degrees as the shadows lengthened, the sun set, the sky faded and then darkened. The pale glow of field lights tinged, then replaced the yellow of day, until a high fly to center became a luminous pearl against the blue-black sky.
The Battle Cats chipped away with two in the second, one in the third, two in the fourth, one in the eighth, and one in the ninth to help the Bees snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Cedar Rapids’ Veterans Memorial Stadium, built in 1949, offered the best food (including pork chop sandwiches, a Midwest League staple), best beer (Millstone, a local microbrew, on tap) and a barnburner on the field. After falling behind 6-0, the Kernels beat the River Bandits on a two-out, two-run homer in the ninth by third baseman Ryan Kane.
Though Cedar Rapids was our last Midwest League game in Iowa, we had one more stop, which we made the next morning. Driving out of Dyersville along a narrow country road that undulated gently over the land’s ups and downs, we spotted it across the cornfields: a white farmhouse, a red barn, a brown infield in a broad swath of grass that was pale against the darker green of surrounding corn. There were small bleachers, a backstop and modest light towers with a handful of bulbs. This little ball yard, recognizable to millions, was the “Field of Dreams” movie set, maintained since then as a tourist attraction by the two farm families (one has since sold out to a corporation) who owned the cornfields that had been leased to Universal Studios to build the field — a project that took just five days.
“If you build it,” according to the movie, “they will come,” and plenty do, some 55,000 annually. Visitors stroll the field, gravitating to the corn in left, where the “ghost players” emerged in the movie. Many pose for pictures. Fathers play catch with sons and daughters.
“I have a very emotional reaction to all this,” Chuck said. “I feel guilty that the kids aren’t here.” I did, too, though my daughters are grown women.
There are not one but two chances to buy caps, t-shirts, mugs, postcards, and other trinkets: from Field of Dreams Movie Site (which includes the home, infield and right field — still family-owned) or from R&A Souvenirs (left and center field — now corporate-owned). Inside R&A’s shop, gloves, balls and bats fill a cardboard carton under the counter, free for the borrowing.
We threw popups to each other. We walked in and out of the shoulder-high corn that defined the outfield, emulating the “ghost players” who materialized that way. We pitched off the mound. We ran the bases. Finally, for a few serene moments before heading home, we sat in the first-base bleachers, baking in the blazing Iowa sun, grateful for the cooling breeze that rustled the corn.
“Now we can say we’ve gone the distance,” Chuck said. He grinned, and the ends of his Rollie Fingers mustache twitched.
IF YOU GO
– SEEING A GAME
In 1998, some 240 minor-league teams will play ball in 26 leagues in all the contiguous states but Wyoming and New Hampshire, and in five Canadian provinces — and there is an affiliated league in Mexico as well. Two excellent directories help keep track of them and are invaluable when planning travel:
– The newer is “Minor Trips” ($6 from Minor Trips, P.O. Box 360105, Strongsville, Ohio 44136). This book has three great assets: It’s organized by state, all information (including schedule) is located in a single entry, and it lists anecdotal tidbits about the ballparks, teams, and area attractions. It is subtitled “A Traveler’s Guide to Minor-League Baseball” and serves that purpose admirably.
– The traditional bible is “Baseball America’s Directory” ($12.95 plus $5 postage and handling; call 800-845-2726). Organized by leagues, not geographically, it covers the majors as well as the minors and has some useful additional information, including visiting team hotels (close to the ball parks and good quality, so appropriate for trekking fans). Both books list directions to the parks.
– GETTING TO THE `FIELD’
The Field of Dreams is located a few miles outside Dyersville, Iowa, which is about 30 miles west of Dubuque, Iowa. (Take U.S. Highway 20; follow the signs once you hit Dyersville.) It is about a 4-hour drive from Chicago. The field is open daily from 9 a.m. to sunset, April through November, though the infield closes at 6 p.m. for maintenance. The “ghost players” make an appearance between noon and 2 p.m. on the last Sunday of every month from June through September. Although there’s no admission charge, donations are appreciated. Information: 319-875-8404 (Field of Dreams Movie Site) or 319-875-7985 (R&A Souvenirs).
