8.12.01 ROCHESTERS vs LIVE OAK
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If going to Batavia is like stepping back in time half a century, then a visit to the Genesee Country Village & Museum is like going back a century more. That’s by design, though. See, the Genesee Country Village is one of those living history museums, filled with old, relocated and restored houses and buildings, and peopled by friendly artisans in period costumes, like the tinsmith who will talk to you in his shop for half an hour, making a compelling case for the idea that, really, the history of the United States is the history of tin, and getting choked up in the process when he realizes, as he must every time he gives this spiel, that this truth will forever be lost on just about everybody. It’s that kind of place. And, to be honest, it’s pretty fascinating, and beautiful to boot.
In what is either a stroke of genius or a bow to the inevitable, the Genesee Country Village & Museum has added baseball to its list of activities. Or, as they make a point of calling it, “base ball.” They’ve built an authentic 19th century ballpark—basically, they cleared a field—and put together a league of four teams, each representing a ballclub that played in the Rochester area during the mid- to late-1800s. This was their opening weekend, so we went to check it out.
The ballpark is at the far end of the village, and to get there one must cross a great lawn to reach a gatehouse, and then proceed through the village proper. The walk has the pleasant effect of recalibrating one’s frame of mind, allowing one to adjust from the noisy, wired, familiar world to one where the streets are all dirt and gravel, traffic consists of a horse pulling a cart, and you have to walk three miles to the general store to pick up your mail. Ballplayers from both teams were warming up on the lawn, shagging fly balls, and just as we got to the gatehouse we heard a great crash, the alien sound of untempered glass shattering. They’d hit the ball through the gatehouse window. Oops.
Silver Base Ball Park, the name at once a tribute to Rochester’s patron saint of baseball, Morrie Silver, and a commemoration of the village’s twenty-fifth anniversary, is a minimalist triumph. It consists of little more than an outfield fence with a hand-painted, hand-operated scoreboard in left field; two small wooden grandstands with three benches each on either side of the infield; a small, railed-in box about twenty yards behind home plate with raised seating for the press and unaccompanied young women—the historical benefits of affording the latter a prominent position having been twofold: first, to temper the behavior of players and unruly spectators, and second, to give those spectators a little something extra to look at, and reason to come back—a wooden box on stilts for the scorekeeper and announcer; and a tent serving peanuts, pretzels, and popcorn (hot dogs didn’t come along until the 20th century, but you knew that). This summer in Rochester having been what it’s been, the field itself was covered with irregular patches of dead and dying grass, and not planted grass, either. When I say they cleared a field, I mean they cleared a field. These guys are playing on what amounts to meadow stubble.
After an informative but seemingly interminable opening progam, the game finally began. Unsurprisingly, the rules of 1866 make for a slightly different dynamic than what we’ve come to expect in baseball’s modern era. Fielders don’t use gloves, of course, but this is less of a handicap than it might seem, given the soft and springy nature of the hand-stitched leather ball; imagine a twice-as-heavy tennis ball and you won’t be too far off. Pitchers toss underhand from a line drawn several feet forward from the center of the infield, and the idea is less to fool or overpower the batter—here, the “striker”—than simply to get him to put the ball in play. Kind of a Greg Maddux approach. A fielder can catch a ball on a bounce for an out, though, so it’s easy to see why that would make sense.
The cumulative effect of all these differences, combined with the uneven playing surface and the occasionally inept defense of the volunteer players, is that there tend to be fewer base hits; balls in play are generally either easy outs or extra bases, and lots of ’em (we saw no fewer than four inside-the-park home runs today). Still, even though some of the elements have been shuffled around a bit, the system of checks and balances that makes baseball as we know it work so well remains largely intact. The game was tight and entertaining and came down to a dramatically manufactured run in the bottom of the ninth—what more do you want?
As for the players, a racially homogenous but biomorphically diverse group of men ranging in age from their mid-twenties to mid-forties, well, most of them thankfully averted the great risk of their endeavor. I mean, what we’re talking about here is the potentially disastrous intersection of two cultures that rank right up there with Idaho militias and Scientologists on the avoid-at-all-costs list: on one hand, there’s the overzealous, overcompetitive, self-serious cluelessness of Jim Rome’s amateur-league “Softball Guy”; on the other, more frighteningly still, the annoyingly clever, unbearably self-satisfied dorkiness of what we could call Renaissance Fair Guy, or Society for Creative Anachronism Guy, or Civil War Reenactment Guy, or Fucking Star Trek Convention Guy—they’re all the same guy, after all.
Alas, there was one player who fit that description. He spoke only with an acutely affected air that I guess he thought evoked the 19th century—the accuracy of which seemed pretty dubious to me, anyway—addressing his teammates as “my dear sir” and assuring the crowd of his “prowess at the striker’s line.” He ran the bases with his back stiffly upright and his arms locked straight, suggesting nothing so much as a dopey cartoon. The one thing he did all day that wasn’t purely for effect was when he pumped his fist, Tiger Woods–like, after stepping on the bag at first for an inning-ending out. Like: Yes! He honestly couldn’t contain himself. A routine out at first. What a nob.
People laughed at his hammishness, but he just seemed obnoxious to me, and what’s worse, his antics detracted from what was so cool about the rest of the scene, which largely succeeded in creating the illusion that one was watching a ballgame in the mid-1800s. Anyway, he was on the Live Oak, and I was rooting for the Rochesters, and the Rochesters won. So there.
FINAL SCORE: ROCHESTERS 6, LIVE OAK 5
FOOD CONSUMED: A village-baked pretzel, which more closely resembled an eclaire-shaped piece of bread than the knotted cracker the word connotes today, salted and served in a paper bag with mustard. Good, in a slightly ascetic way. I was also offered a handful of peanuts by the guy sitting next to me, and I don’t know if they roast them here or what, or by what means their uniquely delicious, slightly buttery flavor and delicate texture is achieved, but it’s something I intend to look into upon subsequent visits. Great freaking peanuts.