The Greatest Sports Story Nobody's Told: The Park

In diamond-shaped kingdom of melted cheese and hand-me-down baseball gloves, we hold onto the sweet magic of childhood and brace for the greatest sports story nobody's ever told.

The Greatest Sports Story Nobody’s Told Series

Part One: The Park

Part Two: The Town

Part Three: The Montage

Part Four: The Championship

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*** Author’s note: This story published on May 18. I’m reposting today as Part One of a Four-Part series about loving baseball, talking trash, diving head first into second, and trying to steal third standing up. A tale about two would-be heroes and a meltdown on the mound. It is, quite simply, the greatest sports story nobody’s ever told. ***

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It happened in Summer ’97, this greatest sports story nobody’s ever told.

The Spice Girls ruled radios, then, while Men in Black owned the box office. Instant messages had just started popping across dialed-up internet, and the same song sung by two different artists from one singularly great Nicolas Cage blockbuster battled on Billboard. Notorious BIG had been killed, Brad and Gwyneth were over, and, personally, I’d gotten big into Jewel and had started dabbling in early teen sentimentality disguised as poetry.

A driver’s license was still a few years off for me and although girls remained a mystery, a nervous curiosity full of butterflies on the level of a Game 7 had replaced the utter terror I had always felt whenever it came time to, you know, actually talk to one.

The Titanic loomed in the not-too-distant future. Frosted tips did, too.

Looking back on these months, I like to think I could sense life changing.

I remember how mopeds were replacing bikes and changing the destination of adventures.

How new friend groups were forming as the ones we’d always known splintered, a reality of life widening, adolescence, and hormones.

But I also wonder if I’m giving myself more credit than is due.

Because do we ever actually know when change is happening? Or do we just wake up one morning and realize things are different? I suppose, like most things in life, change just kind of happens.

What I do know, for this summer at least, is that what still counted for my friends and me played out on the dusty diamonds and busted ball fields where we’d spent so many of our youthful, carefree days. And that meant we still traveled to our small town’s big baseball park, a place that had forever been an oasis under bold, bright lights but whose shine, I remember feeling, had begun to dim.

We moved in an awkward limbo, tethered to childhood memories of long Saturday baseball tournaments played while dressed in a short-sleeve shirt with the logo of the dye shop across town on its front. Of moments of nachos and sno-cones and bikes leaned against fences. Of seeing the same faces we’d always known.

But we were also being pulled toward a mysterious future full of fascinating possibilities. One of used cars and freedom, cruises from the burger joint on one end of State to the bowling alley on the other. Of dates and parties and fresh curiosities to try. Of new characters bringing new stories into our lives.

A new world where this park and its ball fields, the only destination that had counted for us for so many summer nights, would become first a stopover and then merely a pass-through on the way to cooler, older, high school stuff.

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The park we grew up with was like many other parks in many other towns like ours, another of those small places that dot the maps of Ohio or Indiana or Missouri and other states always caught in the middle.

At its heart were four big baseball fields with metal fences dressed in signs for all your insurance, banking, or farm needs. Four home plates converged towards the same center and a concession stand stood in the middle. While there were other baseball diamonds, playgrounds, and basketball hoops orbiting these four fields, it was here at the park’s center where the bright lights cast their glow on the stories playing out below.

A dust cloud kicked up from a slide into second.

A fastball smacking the leather of a hand-me-down catcher’s mitt.

A ding off a metal bat, and a force out at second.

Families in lawn chairs or risking splinters on wooden bleachers. Dads dipping into pouches of Levi-Garrett. Moms rolling their eyes.

Someone, somewhere carrying a rolled-up Eastbay catalog in their back pocket.

While someone else walked with a Beckett’s in hand, cards cased in plastic, and dollars tucked into their socks ready to trade.

Sparks out in the shadows beyond the lights as lightning bugs played pitch and catch.

For a time, our whole world lived inside this park, under those lights, and surrounded by those sights and those sounds.

We didn’t need to look beyond them because everything we needed was right within reach. Dinner might mean stale tortilla chips dressed in melted cheese, and that was okay because it could be dessert, too. Any friend we’d ever had wasn’t a phone call or bike ride away. They were just on the next field.

The games we loved to play and the people we loved to play them with. Everyone together fighting off mosquitos on hot July evenings.

There were laughs and stories, fights and friends. People to see and extra innings to play. Heroes to become and legends to be made. And inside all these imaginations, all this nostalgia, was the game itself: Baseball.

A game full of heroes and legends, storied records and records of great stories - even in towns small like ours.

There was the tale from years back about the kid who called his shot in Little League like Ruth had in the World Series. They said no ball had ever popped from a bat as far or a kid’s smile beamed as big as on that day.

There was another one, too, about the baseball that soared so high and so far it landed in the mighty Sandusky River and made its way north to the lake.

Some claimed that if you braved the tallest rides at Cedar Point on a clear day and stretched your eyes as far as they could see, you might see that baseball still bobbing somewhere out in Lake Erie.

Summertime, friends, and baseball.

A game I never much liked playing, but a sport my friends loved.

And, at this strange and changing time in our lives, that was still all that mattered.

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