When in May Batavia Muckdogs general manager Dave Wellenzohn told me that as club vice president and resident minor-league baseball litterateur I was to be honored with “Bill Kauffman Day,” I replied, gamely if lamely, “Every day is Bill Kauffman Day.”
To my horror, the schedule soon appeared with the September 4 game so denominated. For three months I prayed for a rainout—unavailingly. For as grateful as I was to Dave, no one with even a partially functioning nimrod detector can fail to be humiliated by such a day.
“What are you going to do on Bill Kauffman Day?” I heard all summer long. Bobbleheads were out, not because they’re infra dig but rather too expensive. I knew I couldn’t follow through on my threat to take the field and read from my collected works in a fake-English accent as a homonymic nod to Andy Kaufman. Throwing out the first pitch was mandatory: Friends placed wagers on whether I’d reach the plate. (Bets were off in the event of a “strong wind.”)
Brian Paris, coconspirator in last year’s Baseball Poetry Night, was manning the p.a. system for the last days of the season. For Bill Kauffman Day I urged an Americana diet of Townes Van Zandt, Lucinda Williams, Tom Russell, and the local Ghost Riders, the best unsigned country band in America, but Brian played Michael Buble. Oh well; he’s still Mr. Irrepressible of Batavia baseball.
Serves me right, anyway. I am a chronic critic of the blaring of amplified music and sound effects during games. My friend Tom Williams and I want someday to sponsor a “Pastoral Night” in which the only sounds are ball hitting glove, bat hitting ball, umpiric declarations, and the sweet buzz of friends talking in the bleachers and grandstand.
Brian kicked off BK Day with a reprise of my disastrous oration of Bukowski’s “Betting on the Muse,” which begins “Jimmie Foxx died an alcoholic in a skidrow hotel room.” I thought of it as a cautionary tale for the boys.
Dave called me onto the field and out I shambled, wondering, during his funny and much-appreciated encomium, if I should pitch from the stretch or full windup.
Between innings we gave away copies of my books to those who answered questions about Batavia baseball history. I feared that folks would answer the questions but then spurn the prizes. I’d find books littering the stands like dehiscent peanut shells. But neighbors act neighborly.
Gretel and her friend Megan sang the national anthem mellifluously. During the seventh-inning stretch, now unfortunately scored in so many ballparks by that empty cloud of bombast “God Bless America,” the girls ignored post-9/11 protocol and instead sang my favorite, “America the Beautiful.”
Gretel and Megan weren’t past “Oh beautiful . . .” when a heckler started in from the beer deck: “Wrong song! Wrong song!” The girls got a huge kick out of it. How many singers have ever been jeered during “America the Beautiful”?
The Muckdogs lost, 13–4. Maybe Bukowski’s derelict warning induced a dugout-wide fit of melancholia. Aptly, I suppose, the go-ahead run was allowed by our favorite Muckdog, a sidearm reliever who lists his hobbies as “reading and poetry.” (The commonest avocation among the boys is “video games.”) Brian wisely ignored my request to play “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” in the bottom of the ninth.
About that first pitch. After telling the crowd that my brother had promised to buy everyone in the stands a beer if I didn’t throw a strike, I threw a fastball right down the pipe. I thought the radar gun clocked it in the low eighties—others estimated the mid-forties. My brother bought me a Rohrbach’s, and my cousin laughed out a memory of how as kids we’d sneak into Dwyer after church and my dad would pitch us ball after ball. Almost forty years later this little stadium is still larger than all my imaginings.
St. Dennis of the Bleachers
The American Conservative, 2010
Opening day for the Batavia Muckdogs approaches and with it the resumption of a long, leisurely, blissful conversation in which living and dead participate.
(Alas, the dead sometimes play third base or catch for our team.)
I feel intensely the presence of those who have shared these many hundreds—maybe a thousand, by now— evenings of my life at Dwyer Stadium. Let me tell you about one such ghost.
The last time I saw Dennis Bowler was in September 2004, during one of those melancholy late-season games when the chill of summer’s end is in the air, and even though I haven’t darkened a classroom door for decades the thought of school lours over me like a prison sentence.
Dennis had been sick for a couple of weeks with a mystery ailment. But even at half-speed, Dennis was irrepressible.
“See ya tomorrow night,” we both said as he left the third-base bleachers in the twelfth inning for the drive back to Gasport. It didn’t work out that way. Dennis made it home that night and then dropped dead of a heart attack.
If ever you were minding your own business at a Western New York ballpark or high school gym and you were buttonholed by a fast-talking man telling you everything he knew about nuclear physics, British Columbia, or how to make a baseball bat, it was Dennis Bowler.
He loved to talk. He talked more than any person I have ever met, often about his ancestors or daily life in Niagara County. For a frenetic man, he was content in his place, fully at home. His stories included such local characters as the unfortunately named Israel “Izzy” Humen, for whom Dennis had an overwhelming sympathy. He hated meanness and cruelty. I suspect he had been teased and mocked more than once, and he repaid the world not in bitterness but in kindness.
Dennis loved those names and numbers that spice our lives but that we depreciate with the word “trivia.” He’d ask you to name the vice president of the Confederacy (Alexander Stephens) or Hank Greenberg’s lifetime home run total (331). He could recite the starting lineup of every girls’ softball team in the Genesee Region League.
When Dennis turned sixty in August 2004, the Muckdogs’ announcer asked him to stand up and take a bow. Dennis was so busy yakking that he never heard the chorus of “Happy Birthday.”
Even then, he looked forty and acted like a coltish boy. He would race teenagers for foul balls. When he got one he’d hold it aloft, beaming like a prospector who’d just panned a gold nugget. Then he’d give it to a child.
Dennis resided in the family homestead on Ridge Road, fruitbasket of the Northeast. He lived alone and drove a rusting jalopy distinguished by its varying shades of blue. Now and then he’d stop by my parents’ house to pour water down its chronically leaky radiator.
He farmed as many acres as he could and sold his produce at a roadside stand. He brought corn to the games and gave it away. He also painted houses, taught hunter-safety courses, drove a tractor for Becker Farms, and in winter he substituted at local schools. No kid who ever had Mr. Bowler as a sub forgot him.
Dennis worked hard and with an almost beatific cheerfulness, but he could not afford health insurance. He hadn’t visited a doctor in many years. What if? Yeah, what if.
One abiding memory of Dennis: in his last summer, he brought a telescope to Dwyer Stadium. Not to check out the chicks; rather, Mars was at its closest approach in millennia, so he trained the scope on the Red Planet and the moon, and we took our peeks.
Dennis was so utterly without guile, so joyful, so ravenous for knowledge. He lacked entirely the internal brake that keeps most people from bringing telescopes to baseball games. And good for him.
During that game Dennis ran over to the first-base bleachers and taped a napkin to the fence. He dashed back, pointed the telescope at the napkin, and asked our then ten-year-old daughter to take a look. It read HI GRETEL.
He was such a sweet, innocent man, poor in purse but rich in spirit. Sometimes I think of Dennis keeling over in his bathroom, perhaps at three a.m., the soul’s midnight, as Ray Bradbury calls it. But more often I think of him bounding up the bleacher steps two at a time, talking about Western Canada, running after foul balls, telling Gretel corny jokes,