The Greatest Sports Story Nobody's Told: The Town
Two kids dream of big baseball glory in a small town known for soybeans and sports glories. Heroes get remembered, and legends never die. But what happens if you're neither?
The Greatest Sports Story Nobody’s Told Series
Part One: The Park
Part Two: The Town
Part Three: The Montage
Part Four: The Championship
Baseball is a game of great sounds.
The first keys played from Randy Newman’s piano at the start of Major League. How the dirt crackles when James Earl Jones first steps atop a field of dreams (~ 0:56 seconds). The crack of peanut shells in the bleachers. The whssshp of a fastball disobeying the wind.
Booms from a wooden bat. Dings from metal ones. The shortstop who calls, “two down, just get ‘em at first,” and the pitcher who closes their eyes and hears only the thump of their baseball pocketed reaching safety in the catcher’s mitt.
July afternoons can be sleepy and tired.
Baseball, I think, is the beautiful music born to liven them up.
The greatest sports story nobody’s told is about two kids who loved baseball, a couple of dreamers who heard the sounds of the game each night when they slept and again each morning when they woke craving another day of practice, as if all the hours spent playing the afternoon before had never happened.
Two early teenagers who longed to stand in center, squint against a bold sun, and never stop shagging fly-balls.
This story is about friends, one named Derek and another named Scott, and a rec league team officially named the Tigers or Bengals or something boring like that, but who they renamed The River Rats because, in their words, it fit their “bring your lunch pail to work and get your hands dirty along the river” style of playing ball.
The River Rats, and by that, I mean Derek and Scott, laughed big and swung bigger. They cheered for the early 90’s Phillies and rooted for Wesley Snipes in Demolition Man.
They swung at the first pitch, then eye-rolled any coach who dared preach patience at the plate. They sprinted to first, led with their heads sliding into second, and dared to steal third.
They teased and taunted, barked and smirked. They’d swiped chunks of Levi-Garrett from a pouch my dad left lying around our house and lived to boast about it. They spent the season telling everyone how they were damn good and there wasn’t nothing nobody could do about it.
But The River Rats had a problem. And the problem was that the team wasn’t actually very good.
In fact, for two-and-a-half months in that summer of ’97, they piled on more antics than wins, and if not for a new quirk in the league giving even the last place team in the regular season a shot in the end of year tournament, they’d never have even made their rec league playoffs.
Still, as July crept towards August and Hanson and The Backstreet Boys sandwiched Mark Morrison on Billboard’s charts, one of baseball’s many summer miracles began to play out.
The River Rats strung together a movie montage of bold plays and brash style, and somehow, some way, my friends, family, and I found ourselves down at our town’s big game baseball field watching The River Rats strut from the dugout under big, bright lights three outs from unexpected glory or three outs from being forgotten forever.
Summertime baseball is magic.
So, too, is what happened to The River Rats.
Our town is a town where although many people may leave, everyone always calls it home.
Maybe it’s all the nights we spent chasing lightning bugs in heavy, humid air. Or it could be the mosquito bites that seem to need scratched so many years later.
Whatever it is, if you grow up there it sticks on you, and once it’s in your blood there’s no getting it out and certainly no leaving it behind.
Home isn’t a one stoplight, one store, one restaurant, two churches type place, but when you get older and can go out for a beer you better expect to know someone who knows someone who raised some h**l with your grandpa back when.
At one edge of town, a water tower tells anyone coming or going that this “is a great place to live.” A big sign at another edge reminds us this is “where people come first.” And while these signs were nice and all, for kids raised in a place whose best exports were soybeans and sports heroes, there were other signs that mattered.
Because on still another end of town stood the signs that counted, the ones that called glory to the names and accolades of the legends we spent our childhoods pretending to be.
A Heisman winner, national champion, Super Bowl victor, and the GOAT.
A couple Big-10 champions, a Big 10 MVP, and everybody’s All-American.
A swimmer, a diver, a wrestler, all victors who had conquered the world in their chosen sport.
League champs, state champs, moms, dads, older brothers and sisters.
Heroes we idolized. Ghosts some of us still chase.
We played sports—days into nights and nights into days—and never wanted to stop. We’d race home in the afternoons and tear open the newspaper, hoping to catch our names in the box score.
Seeing you’d gone “2 for 4 with a double and an RBI” in the newspaper doesn’t seem like much now, but it sure played a sweet tune back then.
We played because we loved it, of course, but also to be remembered, and maybe one day see our name on one of those signs, forever reminding anyone who passed through this small corner of the world that once - one day and a long time ago - we were really something special.
A chance, we hoped, to reach that rarefied place—kids who grew up believing in heroes one day becoming heroes of their own.
We learned early that not everyone could make it to college or the pros. That sometimes dreams were just dreams, and that was okay, because we saw how all the memories grew sweeter with time, and knew that as long as we played, those sweet sweet memories could be ours one day, too.
And look, cold beer always tastes good.
But cold beer tastes better when reminiscing on a championship, even if that championship happened before you needed to shave.
Which brings us back to where we started—The River Rats—and their mishmash of hard-practicing, baseball-loving, trash talk spewing, tobacco spitting, lost more games than they won but sure as s**t weren’t gonna let that shake any dirt off their brashness collection of personalities and their magic run to the cusp of sports glory in the final inning of the final game of our town’s Championship Week, the 5 Day, 5 Night showcase where every softball and baseball league crowned its winner.
It was a week of big nerves and butterflies turning in stomachs.
Of celebrations and bragging rights before the start of school.
Of balls and strikes, ground outs and pop flies. Of pitchers versus hitters and young kids paying homage to the game of Ruth and Robinson, Hobbs and Hinson, Mays, Mantle, Griffey, and Candy Maldonado.
A week when new legends wrote hero stories into old dust and dirt.
A week where two-speeds lay atop the tired, prickly grass separating ball fields, and families sat on bleachers and lawn chairs down the baselines.
Where classmates, friends, too intense fathers, and future boyfriends and girlfriends all gripped metal fences to stand close enough to the action to talk trash, pump up, or do a little of both.
A week that had now reached its apex—of pressure and stardom, of hope for rec league glory—as Derek stood on the pitcher’s mound, stared down the inning’s first batter, shot both arms high into the air, and gave baseball another one of those great, memorable sounds when, just loud enough for us fans to hear, he said:
“Okay, motherf****r. Let’s dance.”
And threw the first pitch.
Friends, stay tuned for Part Three: The Montage coming tomorrow.
We love you, and we’ll see you when we see you.