7.23.04 DANVILLE
DANS vs SPRINGFIELD RIFLES
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Okay, personal aside time. In keeping with the degree of autobiographical reveal on offer in earlier incarnations of this project, and by way of explaining just what I was doing the other night in Danville, Illinois, it falls to me now to account for the wealth of changes in my life since we left off two years ago or so. First off, I don’t live in Rochester anymore. Second, I ain’t married anymore either – or actually I am, or, if certain parties with questionable grips on reality are to be believed, never was, but it kind of depends on whose lawyer you’re talking to, and this is something that will be worked out in time; suffice to say that for all practical intents and purposes I’m no longer married. It’s a turn of events that astute readers of these pages might’ve long ago anticipated; I mean, did you really think that the kind of compulsively escapist behavior on display here for three years was somehow indicative of a happy and fulfilling home life? What are you people, fucking high? No, of course it wasn’t. And so it happened, finally, that I left. Upon which, having no money, few possessions, and – my wife having taken great care to ensure my status as persona non grata in both the places I’d previously called home – nowhere in particular to go, I followed the possibility of a new relationship to the safe harbor of the midwest. The Heartland. The Prairie. The em-effin’ Crossroads of America. Eastern central Illinois, to be specific.
You might be a little vague, as I’d always been, about the precise location of the twin cities of Champaign-Urbana. Lemme help. Picture in your head the state of Illinois. Up in the upper-right corner is Chicago. Everybody with me? Okay, everything outside of Chicago constitutes the Bumfuck region of Illinois. Champaign-Urbana sits squarely in the middle of Bumfuck.
I’d been to midwestern college towns before, and liked ’em. Crunchy bastions of eccentric liberalism like Madison, Lawrence, Bloomington are the kinds of places I can easily tolerate, even enjoy. What I didn’t realize before coming here – and should have, as I’d been to these places too – is that there are actually two distinct species of midwestern college town. The first is the good kind, outlined above; the second is different, and characterized by the following: beer, a highly visible Greek (and I don’t mean the Sophocles and feta kind) presence, Jagermeister taps, ripped dudes with sun visors, Red Bull in combination with any hard alcohol, girls with pony tails and shorts that have things written across their asses, and beer. Think Lincoln, think Columbus, think, alas, Champaign-Urbana. Did I mention bitterly contested battles over the fate of racist school mascots? No? My mistake: that, too.
It ain’t all bad, don’t get me wrong. The livin’s easy. I ain’t exactly above taking advantage of the ready availability of dollar Old Style and PBR pints. The demolition derby at the county fair the other night immediately took its place high on my list of The Greatest Things I Have Ever Seen. I get to help send Barack Obama to the U.S. Senate in November. And half an hour to the east through the corn and soy sits Danville Stadium.
It’s funny: I used to think, as I’m guessing most of you reading this do, of Major League baseball as being paramount among forms of the sport; as being, somehow, if not explicitly so, real baseball. Minor league, independent league, summer league ball, while not, of course, unreal, or necessarily less real, were at least to be considered as unquestionably other.
I went to exactly four baseball games last year. An early-season Red Wings game. Ever find yourself having to manage the competing demands of visiting friends and an imploding marriage? Here’s some advice: take everyone to a ballgame! Good times. A solo trip during the ensuing two-month period of postmarital nomadism to a Dodgers–Giants game at Chavez Ravine, where I looked down from the top deck at home plate and recalled the words of somebody, I can’t remember who, in Ken Burns’ Baseball musing about the semiotics of home plate – home, he emphasized; then, memorably, “I mean, it’s got a roof on it!” – and it struck me that that white piece of rubber with the roof on it a couple hundred feet below me was in fact the closest thing I had in the world to a home at that moment. A Dodgers–Angels game later that week, accompanied by some regulars from Baseball Diaries past whom I haven’t seen since and likely won’t see again, after which, perhaps sensing this, I walked back to my car stifling sobs (my grief doubtless compounded by a second painful Dodger loss).
Finally, a month or so later, my fourth and final visit to the diamond. Having come to rest for the time being in my prairie hovel, I happened upon a piece in the local fishwrap about Danville Stadium. Built in 1946 for Branch Rickey’s class-B Three-I League Danville Dodgers, filling in forty-five years later for both Fenway Park and Forbes Field in The Babe, the park is currently home to the Danville Dans of the Central Illinois Collegiate League, who were, that weekend, wrapping up their brief two-month season. I grabbed girlfriend Wanette and my camera and we headed into the cornfields. And what do you suppose I felt upon climbing into the wooden stands under that gloriously ponderous old roof, taking my place among the thousand or so locals chomping peanuts and sucking down sno-cones, and looking out onto the slightly worn field at these kids on leave from college baseball programs around the country? It was the shock of recognition, of something that I hadn’t seen in a long time. It was, no shit, real baseball.
I saw my first real baseball of the 2004 season last week. The sub-.500 Springfield Rifles got the better of the just-above-.500 Dans in a tight 3–0 game in which all of the scoring took place during an eventful sixth inning. Up until then Danville starter Mike Bonura had been nails, keeping pace with the Rifles’ crafty side-armer, Craig Brooks, who worked out of jams inning after improbable inning. Strangest moment came in the top of the eighth, when, with one out and men on first and second, the Rifles grounded into an easy 6-4-3 double-play. Upon making the out at second, though, the Dans infielder – did I mention that the scoreboard had been struck by lightning a couple nights earlier, and wasn’t working? – instead of making the throw to first simply rolled the ball toward the mound and started trotting off the field. It was convincing enough that everybody else quickly followed suit, the other two Rifles baserunners included. With most of the Dans back in the dugout and a handful of Springfield players headed to their posts in the field, the umpire finally raised the issue of there being only two outs, and the attending consequence that the ball, sitting where it came to rest just aft of the pitcher’s mound, was still quite live. After a spell of continuing confusion, a couple Dans ran back onto the field, one grabbing the ball and the other dashing across the diamond to cover first, while the Rifles dude who put the ball in play turned himself around and headed for second, only to find himself caught instead in an anticlimactic pickle, the inning-ending double-play now complete. Not sure how to score that one.
In any case, CICL baseball rules. And Danville Stadium rules. It was Something-Something-Sheriff’s-Something Night, which explained why, when we approached the park entrance, we were greeted with kids offering us free tickets to the game. Thanks! Free programs too, filled with impressive trivia about players who’ve graced the field here, from the ’47 Dodgers – Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, Gil Hodges, et al – to Satchel Paige and the Kansas City Monarchs during a 1961 exhibition, not to mention future major leaguers like Pedro Guerrero (’75 Danville Dodgers) and – whoo! – Devon White (’82 Danville Suns). Then there was the comically overweight caricature of an umpire working behind the plate and his perfectly Ichabod Crane–like complement in the field; the crowd hollering ritual abuse at them both throughout (justifiably so, especially in the case of the latter, given a couple exceedingly questionable did-he-go-around appeal calls); the Danville Dans player who’s on loan from UC Irvine – “Mesa Court in the house! Yeeeeah!” I yelled – the fact that these are college players wielding wooden bats, just as they should be; and the general small-town middle-America John-Fogerty-on-the-P.A.-of-course atmosphere, which, too, is just as it should be.
And home plate. It’s got a roof on it.
FINAL SCORE: Rifles 3, Dans 0.
MEMORABLE HECKLE: I yelled it at the umpire in the field after the first of the outrageous appeal calls, but Wanette gets the credit, as it’s what she frequently says to me: “Eat a sandwich!”
NB: Photo above from last year’s game, as I was a dumb-ass and brought a camera with no memory card in it to this one.
Peter Hughes
