Phthursday Musings: All-Star Life

Last week it was my pleasure / honor to play in the Kup Media League 16 Inch Softball All-Star Game in Forest Park. Admittedly I am probably not exactly an All-Star by any traditional metrics. I am however easily recognized in the league as the guy who wears a Montreal Expos hat, so anyone who might have thought "Hey who's this guy?" would have instead thought "Hey it's that guy" and that, friends, is an All-Star.

My team is Scandal, so dubbed years ago because the team was a collection of people from Gapers Block (an early Chicago specific blog site (RIP)) and Coudal Partners (not traditionally speaking a "media" entity; more on them further down.) So this was sort of a team that had non-media people in the Media League... that's a scandal. (Now that we're many years out, I'd guess half the people in the league have no current affiliation with a media entity, which is to a real extent tied up in a different sort of scandal: the scandal of how local media has been destroyed by corporate bullshit. But I digress.)

Media League games are held Monday nights at Mozart Park in the Hermosa neighborhood of Chicago. The All-Star Game and Championship Game, though, get the special treatment now: We play at a diamond in Forest Park next to the 16 Inch Hall of Fame, and then the post Championship pizza party is held inside the Hall of Fame.

The 16 Inch Hall of Fame is a small facility on Forest Park Park District property, open to the public only on Saturday afternoons. It is immaculately kept, a true labor of love for the people intimately involved. It is also, I would argue, the most "Chicago" of any museum of I've ever set foot in. It's not just a collection of artifacts but a place where the subtle interpretations are fascinating if you're already considering some of the material. Consider:

And it just so happened that I was there a day after running a race in Cicero, so I was indeed already considering some of the material.

I've written in the past about growing up around ball diamonds. The two places I was at most often were Roy Gayle, the collection of Pony League diamonds where I played for five years; and Forest Hills, the collection of softball diamonds where my mom played on Friday nights for way more than five years.

I think I've told this one before, but it keeps coming up in my memory as something of an allegory. There was a men's league on Friday nights, spanning two diamonds. In my mind the guys who played tended to be big and strong but not guys who you might call "athletic". Mom tells about how one year, a team of younger, more athletic guys joined the league, figuring they would just run over the comparative old-timers. After all, when you watch a baseball game, you don't see many 45 year old guys out there. You didn't even see that decades ago, unless they were throwing knuckleballs like Charlie Hough or were dedicated elite pinch-hitters like Rusty Staub.

Well, as her story goes, the "old-timers" understood what they had on their hands, and set out to prove a point, and they took that team of upstarts and wore their asses out.

I can imagine this sort of thing being even more true in a 16 inch league than in a 12 inch league. 16 inch, well, 16 inch is a ridiculous game. The ball is huge. The fielders don't wear gloves. It has been and is still played in other places, but it's very much a Chicago thing, and like so many other very Chicago things, it is not the way you would invent it if you were starting from scratch. (I mean, you wouldn’t invent baseball either. Baseball is totally bonkers. But still.)

Athleticism definitely helps in softball, and 16 inch is no exception. And if you have lousy hand to eye coordination, you're probably not going to be a great hitter. But in my observation, the two physical attributes which most help are upper body strength and, especially, strong hands.

You know who will tend to have upper body strength and, especially, strong hands? Factory workers. In the 16 Inch Hall of Fame, one of the spotlighted categories (along with Women and African-Americans) is Industrial. It's easy to imagine a time when the steel mills of the South Side could account for dozens of teams. And by extension, there being old-timers and upstarts, and pecking orders inside the mills, and how softball was more than just a game, it was a critical component of the social dynamic of these men and their families. How many of those kids, like me, grew up around the ball diamonds?

Forest Hills was a complex, with three (later four) diamonds, concessions, batting cages, all next door to a bowling alley with video games. Where else would a ten year old want to be on a Friday night, if he didn't have a game of his own to play?

One of the things at the complex was I guess what you’d call a bulletin board. Every Friday the standings would be posted, kind of like standings were posted in my baseball leagues. But they didn’t just post standings. The league Mom was in also posted batting averages. And, very reliably, when I would look at the board on Friday nights, Mom’s name was high on the list, often at the top.

Now, I didn’t need statistics to know Mom was one of the best out there. She hit in a corresponding part of the order, she usually played one of the most important positions (left center), and she clearly had the respect of teammates and opponents alike. But the thing that I most remember is how, when in the field, when a play was substantially over, she as an outfielder would be standing on the infield dirt, putting her hand in the air, and calling out "TIME!". This could help keep a runner from advancing, but the way I think back, it was also her way of staking some command on the field. The awareness, focus, and targeted intensity she left out there wasn’t a result of athletic ability. It was something more, intangible. It was the sort of thing which allowed the old-timers on the men’s fields to hold off the upstarts.

Don’t ever think that that kind of awareness and focus doesn’t translate off the diamond. I learned more from her doing that than anything she might do in terms of positioning or throwing. And not just about softball.

Our team won the All-Star Game 11-7. WGN Radio won the Championship Game over Audacy (a radio conglomerate which includes WXRT, WBBM, and a lot of other stations in Chicago.) It was the perfect night: clear, just a little bit cool:

The Media League this year had 11 teams. Because of a scheduling quirk, Scandal won its first 6 games, then lost 4, finishing 5th. Then we lost in the playoffs to the 4th place team, Chicago4Real, which is… I have no idea what they are, actually. I think they’re a composite of people who have been on other teams that aren’t around anymore. The Chicago media landscape is constantly changing.

A few blocks down from Mozart Park is a little throwback bar, Weegee’s Lounge. It’s the go to after the Monday night games. We were there after our playoff game.

The outstanding operating firm behind Scandal is Coudal Partners. I have to confess, I don’t understand half of what they do. But you know them, even if you don’t realize it - they’re the firm behind Field Notes, the small memo books you have seen in dozens of places. Jim, the propeitor / instigator / insert-your-action-noun-here, is also our pitcher. And that night after our playoff game he was talking about a bat, and a book about a bat. This book, in fact:

The iconic moment in question is Roberto Clemente’s 3000th hit, and if you’re one of those META-SPIEL readers who… well, who’s still reading this installment… then you should get your hands on this slim volume. Order some Field Notes memo books along the way.

In response to Jim’s recap of the book I told him the story of the bat that Joe Posnanski and Michael Schur found in the basement of Cooperstown:

A bat can tell a lot of stories.

When I play 16 inch, I use my mom’s bat.

I’m a little off track with one of the points I wanted to make. That’s okay! Musings don’t have to be tidy.

I feel like the 16 Inch Hall of Fame was not just about sports. It’s about Chicago, the Midwest, America. I cited the industrial teams, and I think that’s a key element to understanding labor history. Many of the women who joined the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League in the 1940s - you know, A League of Their Own - came from 16 inch teams in and around Chicago. And of course all of these leagues and teams and players weave a narrative about baseball, not Major League Baseball per se, but about the broad American pastime, of playing organized games involving hitting a ball with a bat. It’s not just a game or collection thereof, it’s something much more central to America and how it understands itself. I dare say the 16 Inch Hall of Fame can be a better place to understand elements of that than much much larger museums.

Consider some of these artifacts:

At the center top is a magazine page announcing a 16 inch softball circuit sponsored by… a cigarette brand. Note also how the player there is a big dude with a fine stache. That ad says so much all by itself.

Then there is this:

Yes, that’s an autographed headshot of Gary Sinise in the middle. He was born in Blue Island, and played 16 inch ball in the theater league for Steppenwolf.

So, yeah, I’d say, if you’ve got any fleeting connection at all, take the trip to Forest Park some Saturday, and see the Hall.