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Phthursday Musings: Stickney Nights
or, the 11th Hour Post
The Brookfield Blazing Dragons played a night game tonight. The hosts were the Stickney - Forest View Ninja Tigers, the venue Baley Field at Rench Park.
Due to some vague scheduling conflict, these teams of 7 and 8 year olds inexplicably started their game at 8pm. By the time the 90 minute limit for starting a new inning rolled around, the game was still in the 3rd inning, so that’s as far as we got.
In the end, the Blazing Dragons won 4-1, or maybe 5-1, I think one of those runs didn’t really count.
It may have been the weirdest baseball game I’ve ever seen, in one of the weirdest places I’ve ever been.
I didn’t think that I’d get the Musings in this week. I started writing this at about 10:58pm. The week seemingly should have lent itself to some writing time, as my family was literally off on a beach somewhere, but I had no topic in mind, and my usual Thursday night writing time was wiped out by a combination of an extended airport pickup and the late game. The night in Stickney couldn’t go without comment though.
As it turned out, I was at the game, and my own kid wasn’t. It was pretty clear that he and mom were in no shape to go out anywhere after a 2 1/2 hour flight delay, then the flight itself, then O’Hare. Seriously, how about, if you’re going to spend another $417,000,000,000 on O’Hare, why don’t you just come up with an easy way for people to be picked up when they land? That’s what everybody wants. Not 48358230 new flights a day, not a Terminal 29 with Concourses Omega and Ralph. Just a freaking convenient place to pull up and collect your exhausted family.
So I wound up driving out to Stickney myself. I’m not sure “out” is the correct adverb there, but some adverb is certainly in order.
Stickney is one of those super weird suburbs. The village itself is small, about 7,000 people. There’s also an unincorporated area within Stickney Township, and anything unincorporated, but populated, within Cook County is automatically super super weird. Stickney’s claim to fame is that the world’s largest wastewater treatment plant is there. Wikipedia helpfully informs that the village is named for one Alpheus Beede Stickney, a railroad executive, because once upon a time, that’s how things worked: You do some minor railroady thing, they name some weirdly shaped municipality after you, and then treat everyone’s poop there.
To get to the park, you have to go past the forest preserve, go up Harlem Avenue, turn into the village, go around the huge cemetery in the middle of the village, and then you get there, and you feel like you’ve reached the end of the world.
The setting looks essentially unchanged for at least 30 years. It was very reminiscent of the old Bronco diamond at Roy Gayle in Rockford, where beyond the fence there’s a wooded area. But unlike Roy Gayle, here there were only two diamonds, and the woods felt much more ominous. This makes sense: on the far side of the woods is none other than the wastewater treatment plant.
The diamond itself was in fine shape. Weirdly though out by the concession stand there was a random shipping container off to the side. You know how these days you just find masks littered all over the place? It was like somebody littered a full-sized orange shipping container and it just blew off to the side of the diamonds.
Essentially every municipality in the near western suburbs of Chicago has its own park district, and more or less by extension, its own Little League setup. When I grew up it was in Pony ball, not Little League ball, and there’s also Babe Ruth ball, and I think Cal Ripkin ball is different… I get lost. But all of these villages have their own leagues. And this is very strange. In Brookfield, at the 7-8 level, it means there are 5 teams. But over in Lyons it means 2 teams, and up in North Riverside it means 2 teams (I think?), and out in Stickney, there’s apparently just the one team. So while we have playoffs where the Brookfield teams face off against one another, we also have these weird non-league games. Think of it like college basketball, where Illinois and Indiana and Wisconsin all play conference games against one another, but then you also get annual non-conference games like Illinois - Missouri. That a structure like this is in play for 7-8 year olds is super super strange. And then that every one of these places is liable to have their own rules is even stranger.
The Brookfield teams are weirdly competitive. Us coaches do some strangely intense strategizing. But in Lyons or Stickney, there’s no need or occasion for anything ridiculous like that. They just send the boys out to play, and the boys play.
Another odd thing is that all of the Brookfield teams are overwhelmingly white, and every non-Brookfield team we’ve played has been overwhelmingly Latino. Our immediate neighborhood in the south third of Brookfield feels like the only place where the school aged population is notably diverse. I don’t know that that’s truly the case, but it’s been truly eye-opening to see what the demographics are all around the area.
I myself had never had occasion to go to Stickney before tonight. I’d driven through along one of the large roads but I’d never really been in the town. That’s how it tends to work with a lot of the smaller villages around here.
So I - and, it seemed, almost all of us - were in Stickney for the first time, in an odd setting, and the game just wound up being super odd. We had a couple boys pitch who don’t usually pitch. We only got three innings in. The guy who was umpiring would call a strike but nobody could hear him. We’d be staring at the field and not knowing how many balls, how many strikes, how many outs, how many runs.
One of the boys who pitched tonight had never ever pitched before. He’s the smallest guy on the team, and he went out there, and when he started pitching, my goodness, was he serious. He would get the ball back from the catcher, step on the rubber, and immediately start his pitch. One of the other coaches said it was like Kerry Wood out there, and he just meant the direct approach, but even the look on his face, he looked like Kerry Wood, if Kerry Wood was one-seventh the size. You just never know what’s going to happen with these kids.
When I went back to the car after the game I noticed that one of the houses across the way from the park was lit up on the outside with blue lights. I’ve seen this before, but it’s still fairly unusual…
… except, apparently not in Stickney, where multiple houses had some sort of weird lighting going on, including one where a tree trunk was wrapped in what seemed like extremely bright white tape with lights embedded inside, and one where for some reason there was a neon palm tree out front.
Truly, by night, there was a strange but very visceral personality to this town. Crammed within its borders are churches and a library and the aforementioned cemetery and some kind of township medical clinic (?) but otherwise it was all residential or semi-industrial. Like a lot of these towns, it didn’t really feel suburban and it didn’t really feel urban, it felt like something totally different. These places feel more like Rockford than like Chicago. I really do think there’s a poor understanding of what “urban” and “suburban” mean and a lack of appreciation for the weird mainfestations of urbanity that you get in some of these places.
I actually found it all quite beautiful.
There is something to the idea that a place which is an afterthought to so many would defiantly have some kind of a personality. Maybe more of one than most places. Stickney felt like a place. Not a place you’d almost ever have occasion to be, but a place where, if you’re there, you know you’re somewhere, you know you’re in a real community.
There’s this wild Chicago Tribune article from 1991 about Stickney… the more things change, the more they stay the same?
Anyway, it’s 11:59. These are Phthursday Musings, so I need to hit the Publish button.
Come and join me some summer night in Stickney, won’t you?
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