‘And then he took me to a real game. We went into Iowa City and watched a commercial league in action, and it was just like I’d discovered the meaning of the universe.
‘After my uncle left I kept on exercising my imagination. If you look around on the side of the garage, Gid, you’ll see a piece of board nailed to it in the shape of a strike zone, and if it hasn’t rotted away, you’ll find a piece of plank imbedded in the earth right in front of that strike zone. Me and my friend from down the street, we made our own baseballs, according to my uncle’s recipe. We soaked Life magazines in a mixture of milk and kerosene. Uncle Jim said that combination made the balls tough but spongy. They certainly smelled bad enough. Dried them in the sun, we did. We used a little piece of one-by-two for a bat. There were no bases or running or anything like that. It was pitcher against batter. I sneaked some lime out of the garage and we made white lines down the middle of the garden, like lines on a football field. If the batter hit the ball a certain distance it was a single. A little farther, a double, then a triple, and finally over the garden fence was a home run. We spent most of the time searching for the ball in among your grandmother’s cucumbers. In the fall, when we raked up the leaves and vines from the garden, we’d find a dozen or two of our baseballs. But, oh, the imagination we had.’
I played the same game; my father taught it to me. There was nothing surreptitious about our laying white lines across the garden until it looked like a golf driving range. Eventually I found a playmate with an imagination; his name was Stan Rogalski, and though he played real baseball, too (in fact, Stan is still playing semipro ball), he and I passed hours on summer afternoons and evenings, batting and pitching, searching for the ball among the cucumbers, keeping accurate box scores for our imaginary teams. Then, after the game, we would sit in either my or Stan’s kitchen and bring all our statistics up to date.
Neither my father nor I ever played anything but sandlot baseball. I was on the Onamata High School team, but only because there were just ten boys in our high school and one of them was in a wheelchair, making his handicap only slightly worse than mine, which was lack of ability.
‘Why not baseball?’ my father would say. ‘Name me a more perfect game! Name me a game with more possibilities for magic, wizardry, voodoo, hoodoo, enchantment, obsession, possession. There’s always time for daydreaming, time to create your own illusions at the ballpark. I bet there isn’t a magician anywhere who doesn’t love baseball. Take the layout. No mere mortal could have dreamed up the dimensions of a baseball field. No man could be that perfect. Abner Doubleday, if he did indeed invent the game, must have received divine guidance.
‘And the field runs to infinity,’ he would shout, gesturing wildly. ‘You ever think of that, Gid? There’s no limit to how far a man might possibly hit a ball, and there’s no limit to how far a fleet outfielder might run to receive it. The foul lines run on forever, forever diverging. There’s no place in America that’s not part of a major-league ballfield: the meanest ghetto, the highest point of land, the Great Lakes, the Colorado River. Hell, there’s no place in the world that’s not part of a baseball field.
‘Every other sport is held in by boundaries, some of absolute set size, some not: football, hockey, tennis, basketball, golf. But there’s no limit to the size of a baseball field. What other sport can claim that? And there’s no more enigmatic game; I don’t have to tell you that. I’m glad what happened to me happened to me, Gid. I created imaginary baseball leagues when I was a kid. Now I have a real imaginary league to worry about, if there can be such a thing. But I’m glad it happened to me. I consider myself one of the chosen. I’m an evangelist in a funny sort of way. It ain’t easy, but you should be so lucky.’
I am.
A few statistics on batting from A Short History of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy:
| Batting Averages | ||
| 1. | Bob Grady, Husk | .368 |
| 2. | Simon Shubert, Blue Cut | .360 |
| 3. | Jack Luck, Iowa City | .358 |
| 4. | Horatio N. Scharff, Big Inning | .357 |
| 5. | Henry Pulvermacher, Shoo Fly | .351 |
| Home Runs | ||
| 1. | Ezra Dean, Blue Cut | 27 (1906) |
| 2. | Orville Swan, Big Inning | 26 (1903) |
| 3. | Jack Luck, Iowa City | 22 (1906) |
| 4. | Bob Grady, Husk | 20 (1905) |
| 5. | William Stiff, Frank Pierce | 20 (1907) |
In the summer of 1907, the Detroit Tigers, who were burning up the American League, were invited to Big Inning, Iowa, to play the Iowa Baseball Confederacy All-Stars on July 4. In May, the Tigers sent a former player of theirs named Norman Elberfeld, known as the Tabasco Kid, to Big Inning to scout the IBC. The Tabasco Kid sent back a report saying that though the players were for the most part unknown, the caliber of play in the Iowa Baseball Confederacy was so high that it could prove embarrassing to a major league team experiencing an off day. The Tigers politely declined the invitation.
My father submitted his thesis, his 288-page manuscript, to the University of Iowa, Department of History, in the spring of 1946. It was about the same time that my sister, Enola Gay, poured a large tin of Golden Corn Syrup into my crib, very nearly causing my demise.
A few days later, my father was called to the office of Dr. E. H. Hindsmith, his supervisor.
‘He looked at me over the top of his bone-rimmed glasses, his eyebrows like crusted snow, his face grizzled, snuff stains in the creases at the corners of his mouth.
‘“There is no evidence to indicate that the Iowa Baseball Confederacy ever existed,” he said, coming right to the point. “In fact, Mr. Clarke, it seems that I and my colleagues have repeatedly warned you against writing on such a topic.”’
My father could reproduce the exact inflections of Hindsmith’s voice. I interviewed Hindsmith after I became obsessed with the Confederacy, and it was like speaking with an old friend. Hindsmith’s voice inflections betrayed his roots, he having been born in a place called Breastbone Hill, Kentucky, the son of a miner. My father reenacted that conversation at least once a month for all the years I knew him.
‘His eyes met mine, sending out a frank, blue stare, solid as steel rods. “This is a masterfully written thesis,” he said, pausing dramatically.