Minor Story Is Making a Major Impact

Sometimes I almost feel sorry for the modern baseball fan. I mean, he’ll never come to know the game as we used to know it.

How can he, in an era when the average pay per player in the big leagues is about $800,000, the minimum is more than Lou Gehrig used to get for batting .374 and driving in 184 runs, and “star” players pout and hint darkly that they can’t give their best for $2 million a year. These aren’t athletes, they’re tycoons. Brigands.

There are places in this country where the game is still being played the way it was. These are the minor leagues, the anterooms to fame, the last stand of baseball Americana.

There are no pampered darlings, superstars selling their autographs for $10 a pop, arrogant beneficiaries of a megabuck age. No limos wait at the hotel door for these guys. It’s the team bus or walk. All they have are their dreams--and $7 a day meal money.

Channel 7 doesn’t televise their games at a billion every four years, the “crowd” numbers several some nights. They get on the news only when a game runs 29 innings--or a league folds.

Everybody reminds himself Ty Cobb started out this way, but some of these guys have been down there since Cobb left. The ballpark lights are bad, the infields are pure anthracite. No individual hotel suites, you sleep three to a room on the road. You don’t fly anywhere, you ride a bus in which the engine overheats and so does the cabin.

A colleague, David Lamb, recently undertook a sentimental journey into this link with America’s past and has written a book about it, “Stolen Season” (Random House, $20).

David is not a sportswriter. As long as I’ve known about him, he has been off in exotic places in this world, chasing down wars and rumors of wars--Lebanon, Kenya, the Far East, the Near East, the Gulf, Malaysia. He has been at the cutting edge of World War III. He has had comrades shot down, he has huddled in a Beirut hotel room while the upper floors were being cut down by artillery fire, he has covered stories where the payoff could either be a Pulitzer Prize--or a dictator’s death sentence.

David, I guess, got pretty fed up with the 1980s. So he got himself a recreational vehicle, a bottle of Scotch and a notebook and decided to make a trip into yesterday, into 1910, a better time, to be sure. He knew right where he would find it--baseball’s minor leagues.

He set off on a 16,000-mile land voyage to the last stand of the way we were in this country, out-of-the-way ballparks in the old Sally (South Atlantic) League, the Carolina, New York-Penn, Texas, California and Florida State, seeing America the beautiful with a baseball in its hands.

There are 15 sub-major leagues and 150 teams in this country. There are 4,000 players. They all want to get to the big leagues, where there are 624 jobs and about 20 of them come open each year.

Ted Williams has said that hitting a baseball is the single hardest thing to do in sports. Others may opt for hitting a one-iron or hitting Mike Tyson, but Lamb finds plenty of evidence in the deep minors that Teddy Ballgame was right. Class-A baseball is awash with young men who were all-everything in their hometown high schools, leading hitters, leading runners, all-league, all-state--but the merest whisper of a major league curveball usually sends them packing back to the lube rack or a career at a drill press.

Lamb’s book chronicles his return to the America that time forgot and television never found out about. Here is the real field of dreams, the land of perennial adolescence found even in the most wrinkled and grayest of coaches and managers. He finds salesmen and bank loan officers who gave up six-figure careers to go back to hitting fungoes to 20-year-old kids for one-fifth what they used to take home. It’s a place, like Shangri-La, where no one ever ages.

Not all his heroes are on the playing fields. He writes of the young wives struggling to make ends meet--and baby bottles filled--on $800 a month. And dreading the nights when hubby comes home with a long face and a six-pack with the glum news, “I went oh-fer-four today--one more and we better pack.”

Lamb takes you to a diner in Pulaski, Va., where three ballplayers who get $200 a week before taxes--Pulaski averages 389 paid attendance per game--are dickering for a discount on the hamburger steak while the radio chatters with the news the New Yankees have just cut pitcher Pat Dobson and given him his release but will continue to pay his $800,000 salary for two years.

Lamb finds umpires who are paid less than janitors but who go down to the riverfront on game days and scrape up mud and sludge to rub up the balls for use in the game (a shiny new baseball is considered unfair to the little darling with the bat in his hands).

Lamb tells of the owner of the Peoria Chiefs, who charged out of his box and at the umpire one night and, when banned for nine games, built a rooftop box outside the left-field wall for himself. There, he cooked hamburgers for the patrons, led cheers and phoned the Chicago Cubs’ announcer, Harry Caray, between innings to keep him posted on the affair. Attendance soared.

The minor leagues have enjoyed a renaissance of a sort, Lamb reports. Owning a team has become trendy. Hollywood discovered the minor leagues (“Bull Durham,” starring Kevin Costner) and the collectors’ mania that has hit this country has slopped over into minor league baseball. Collectors have gone from bubble-gum cards to live teams. The economic graph has gone up. The Durham Bulls, who cost $4,500 a decade ago, have a book value of $4 million since the movie about them, Lamb reports.

Silent movies are gone. So are open trolleys and Mississippi riverboats. But minor league baseball remains as a reminder of what we were. After all, it was in the minors that Casey came to bat. Mudville didn’t have a television contract. “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” probably meant Elmira-Binghamton.

For Lamb, it was an escape. For us, it is a glimpse into a simpler, better time, before America became middle-aged. As Lamb writes:

“The America I passed through was not the America we read about in the big-city dailies. It was a place that seemed largely at peace with itself, a place I could wander for countless miles and months and never feel threatened or get hassled or be part of a crime statistic. Maybe I was lucky. Or maybe this was the America I sought in the first place, the America of my youth where there was plenty of open land on which to build a baseball diamond and sufficient time to play a game that theoretically could go on indefinitely.

“I was lucky to find it before it slipped away.”