Sandor Boatly saw his first baseball game in Providence, Rhode Island in 1887, when he was eleven, and his experience that day was more emotional, more magical, more prophetic, more of a grand call to service than that of other boys his age who claimed to have had religious experiences which inspired calls to the priesthood.
His father, Szabo Boatly, a glazer by trade, worked long hours in a crockery factory. Saturday afternoon was his only time off, except for Sunday, a day reserved for pious inactivity. On Sunday the Boatly children were not even allowed to play with their home-made toys.
On a spring afternoon in 1887, the father took Sandor and one of several sisters, Evita, for a walk. A few blocks from their home, outside the Eastern European ghetto, they were attracted by crowd noises, and the clear sharp thwack of bat on ball. The sounds reminded Sandor of his early childhood in Hungary. As he listened he recalled the crack of a woodsman’s ax biting into a strong tree.
Sandor Boatly pleaded with his father to take the little family into the baseball park, and the father, being in a jolly mood, agreed. A man wearing a straw boater with a beautiful red sash collected fifteen cents from the father; the children were admitted free. Once inside the park they made their way down the right field line to a spot where they could see most of what was happening on the field.
The elder Boatly was expecting a soccer game. He had played rather well in the old country, if his accounts could be believed.
‘What is this?’ he kept repeating in Hungarian.
By then Sandor knew the word baseball. He had been exposed to childish versions of the game played on the streets, playgrounds and school yards of Providence. He had seen American boys trouping off after school, tossing a small hard ball in the air, wooden staves perched on their shoulders like rifles. But he had never seen a professional contest, never dreamed that grown men engaged in the game, playing it with deadly seriousness.
Sandor Boatly had never guessed that, properly played, baseball consisted of mathematics, geometry, art, philosophy, ballet and carnival, all intertwined like the mystical ribbons of color in a rainbow.
It was years before Sandor Boatly encountered a magician, but the thrill of seeing an orange turned into an endless string of bright silken scarves was nothing compared to what he experienced that afternoon.
There was a river to the left, the outfield sloped gently upward. There was no outfield fence. The game was unenclosed, the foul lines forever diverging.
‘Bah!’ said Sandor’s father, settling on his haunches, chewing on a blade of grass. ‘A stick and a rock. What kind of game is this?’
But Sandor understood instantly. He intuited that baseball was somehow akin to the faded picture on the wall of the Boatly living room where two ballerinas twirled on toes as stiff as inverted fence pickets. It was only a semi-professional baseball game they were witnessing, two local athletic clubs, one sponsored by the Sons of Erin, the other by the Christopher Columbus Society.
Sandor, transfixed, studied the pitcher and catcher, connected inexplicably by the rope of leather they tossed back and forth. He watched the infielders scurrying after ground balls, leaping like cats to take a grounder on a high bounce and brace themselves in mid-motion to throw out the sprinting runner at first base.
Somehow, as if by divine revelation, Sandor Boatly was filled with baseball expertise; he understood the aesthetics of the game and explained each play to his father and sister, who after an inning or two had taken to cheering for the Sons of Erin, while, like the rest of the crowd, deriding the single umpire who wore a tall silk hat, and stood like an undertaker behind the pitcher, from where he made all decisions concerning the game.
In the space of a few moments, Sandor had not only become enchanted by the magic of baseball, but came to understand it instinctively. But, miracle of miracles, he was able to communicate his newfound love to his father and sister.
‘Look! Look!’ he kept saying. ‘The field is not enclosed. The possibilities are endless. There is no whistle to suspend play, there is no clock to signal an ending.’
‘Look! Look!’ he must have repeated the words a thousand times that fateful afternoon. And when the game ended, the little family drifted dreamily away from the ballpark, the odor of fresh cut grass still in their nostrils, gauzy memories of plays that were and plays that might have been mingling in their minds.
It was Sandor’s father who, as they walked toward home on the gritty streets of Providence, Rhode Island, articulated the essence of baseball.
‘When,’ he asked his son, ‘may we return to this land of dreamy dreams?’
While his father remained a lifelong fan, Sandor Boatly dedicated his life to baseball. Instead of becoming a priest, as many of his boyhood friends did, Sandor Boatly became an evangelist of baseball, a Johnny Appleseed, who instead of flinging apple seeds in rainbow-like arcs as he walked the fields and backwoods of America, carried a strange and wondrous canvas sack across his shoulders so that at times he looked as though he was bearing a cross. The sack was filled with baseball bats, hand-carved from hickory, crafted with love to last forever, by men who knew and appreciated the feel of a smooth and sleek weapon, which like a gun, became an extension of the holder. The sack also contained baseballs, horsehide, handstitched with catgut, hand-wound by people who knew what they were building.
The day he turned fourteen, Sandor Boatly refused his father’s offer (it was more of a command) to become an apprentice glazer and contribute to the family finances. Sandor set out on his mission, which was to introduce the magic of baseball to those who did not know of it, or if they did know about baseball, to teach them to regard it with the reverence it deserved.
On foot, Sandor moved across Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, and eventually made his way to the plains of Iowa and Nebraska, where like a true evangelist he spread the word of baseball to the scattered multitudes.
Along the way he abandoned his name, for he found it took too much time to explain his ancestry, his recent history, his roots, for people were forever wondering if his family might have traveled to America with their family, plumbing the depths of their memories for common ground.
‘Call me whatever you like,’ Sandor said to his multitudes, which, on the prairies, consisted often of a single farm family, dirt farmers living in soddies, some living in virtual caves built into the sides of hills. Sandor would thump at the gunnysack-reinforced door of a soddy. The pale face that answered would shade its eyes from the sudden glare of the prairie. He was often mistaken for a preacher, for he dressed in black broadcloth, wore a wide-brimmed hat and, as soon as he was able, grew a bushy black beard.
After introducing himself, though not always his mission, for the tough pioneer women tended to frown on sport of any kind as frivolity, Sandor would find his way to where the men were working. He would pitch in and work side by side with the farmer and his sons, picking roots, or pulling stumps, perhaps carrying rocks to a homemade stoneboat, or walking behind an ox as it pulled a plow.
At the end of the day, by the fading rays of a low sun, or as the plains horizon flamed like prairie fire, Sandor would open his magical sack and toss a ball to a burly farm boy in work pants too short and clodhopper boots awkward as wood blocks. The three or four or five of them would lay out a rough diamond, perhaps using a barn wall as a backstop, if the homesteaders were fortunate enough to have built a barn. Sometimes