A field of baseball memories

For most of my life, baseball and softball seem to have dominated my summers. Two purchases I made at the recent Children’s Hospital Book Market got me delving into my baseball memory bank and planning a series of related columns over the summer.

In the book If You Build it…, Dwier Brown, who played a catcher and father in the movie Field of Dreams, writes about playing catch and about father-son relationships. The Twins at the Met covers the history of the Minnesota Twins at their first home, Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, MInn.

The summer before COVID-19 hit, I visited the Field of Dreams site in Iowa with my longtime Touring All-Stars slo-pitch teammates Rob McKenzie and Bryan McTaggart, and played catch after coming out of the famous corn field. The Met was where I saw my first major league game the year the Washington Senators relocated to the Twin Cities. With me on that journey were former Elmwood Giants catcher Ted Nakano and a future Canadian 10-pin bowling champion Paul Yoshimasu.

My first real memory goes back to Grade 1 at Laura Secord School. We were playing softball at recess and I was on third base. When the catcher threw the ball back towards the pitcher, I ran home. Unfortunately for me, the pitcher immediately threw the ball back to the catcher. The batter thought it was a pitch but instead of hitting the ball he connected with my forehead. The doctor told my mother I was lucky to survive with nothing more than a few stitches and a scar. I know some readers and teammates will suggest that I never completely recovered.

This first column will focus on baseball in The Pas, Man., while I was growing up. I had just started Grade 5 when our family moved there due to my father’s job transfer. The next spring, I started organizing baseball games in the southwest part of town on a small, diamond-shaped lot where three streets converged. At the opposite end of town, boys played on a better field beside the large lumber company where the majority of their fathers worked. Our team would go there for games. Wally Hasker from that team often said that I was the person who got young boys playing baseball rather than the softball they played at school.

When we were in our teens, we made up a team and played games against the boys from The Pas and Big Eddy reserves. Charlie Constant, who later became the chief of The Pas Band, was our opponents’ top pitcher.

The main town diamond was on the school grounds and home to a local men’s league, older boys who were members of the Boys Athletic Club, and the town team that brought in many opponents. I remember one game in which the town team beat the famous Ligon Colored All-Stars 1-0. When I wasn’t playing myself, that’s where I seemed to be. I even got to play catch and have infield practice with the men’s team.

When The Pas school division decided to build a new high school on the baseball diamond, the town went without a senior team for a couple of years. In the spring of 1956, when I was in Flin Flon to watch a junior Bombers playoff game, I was told about a meeting scheduled the next day in Cranberry Portage in the hope of forming a northern baseball league. People suggested I attend as a representative of The Pas. When two teams from Flin Flon and one from Cranberry Portage had committed to play, the organizers badly wanted a fourth team.

I agreed to try to form a team and approached Swede Grant, a former pitcher who was the father of a friend, for help. He recruited a few interested baseball fans and found a location where a team could play. I placed a notice in the local newspaper inviting players to attend a practice. Several veterans showed up along with former members of the Boys Athletic Club, so a team from The Pas entered what was named the Polar League. An infielder, I was the youngest member of the team. The Flin Flon Cardinals, led by Bomber centres Teddy Hampson and Ron Hutchinson, eliminated The Pas in a five-game playoff series and won the championship in the first season.

That ended my baseball days in the north, as I moved back to Winnipeg the next spring where I played junior baseball for a season and then switched to softball. As a result of my nomination, the 1959-1964 The Pas TeePees, who won four Polar League titles in those six seasons, were inducted into the Manitoba Baseball Hall of Fame in 2005. To commemorate the induction, I self-published a book titled Baseball in The Pas, the Polar League and The Pas TeePees, that was given to team members and placed in northern libraries and the provincial library.

Future columns will focus on baseball and softball stories in Winnipeg, trips to major league parks and spring training, attending a World Series in St. Petersburg, Fla., membership in the Society for International Baseball Research, and my baseball library and collectibles.