Chris Epting's guidebook, Roadside Baseball, is a sometimes exhaustive look at America's ballparks.
By BRUCE LOWITT
Published July 13, 2003
If there is such a thing as too much of a good thing, Chris Epting has found it. It came in his journey along highways and byways, through big cities and small towns, in parking lots and vacant lots throughout the United States, with a brief foray into Canada.
What Epting found is laid out in Roadside Baseball (Sporting News Books, $16.95), the culmination of remarkable research into major-league, minor-league and community ballparks, here and gone. And ballplayers, Hall of Famers and obscure, here and (mostly) gone, honored and memorialized, their birthplaces, homes and burial sites.
And halls of fame and museums from Cooperstown, N.Y., to Kansas City, Mo., (honoring the Negro Leagues) to the Stephen and Mary Birch Foundation Baseball Museum in San Diego, honoring former San Diego State State teams and players (look for the locker of Devil Rays first baseman Travis Lee).
Fans might delight in seeing Huntington (Ind.) League Stadium, where A League of Their Own was filmed; Horlick Field, where the real Racine (Wis.) Belles of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League played, and the Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa, where Kevin Costner's paean to fathers and sons was filmed. Or those who treasure the game might enjoy seeing what remains of Braves Field in Boston and League Park in Cleveland.
They might not be so happy to learn that churches, industrial parks, malls, nondescript apartments and parking lots occupy sites where many of our shrines from childhood once stood.
There are anecdotes about the evolution of the Louisville Slugger, about Lou Gehrig's last game (no, it was not the day before he took himself out of the Yankees lineup), and the mystery of Babe Ruth's piano and his first professional home run (against the Toronto Maple Leafs).
This 288-page paperback includes photographs of ballplayers, and numerous statues and historical markers indicating where they were born or lived, and where they played. There are markers, too, honoring their ballparks or their parks' former sites.
But there's a fine line between history and minutiae. How soon any of us crosses it depends on the depth of our love of the game and our love of the trivial: Do we care to know about a Homestead, Iowa, restaurant run by journeyman pitcher Bill Zuber until he died in 1982, or (and this is not a joke) Len Dykstra's car wash in Simi Valley, Calif.?
Roadside Baseball is best read in short bursts, lest each chapter begin to look and sound like the one before. Cozying up for too long, reading all at once about Gabby Street Park, the Happy Chandler marker and a Deadwood, S.D., hotel where the Babe slept during a 1921 barnstorming tour might make the pages begin to blur into one amorphous ballpark-statue-marker-museum-street . . . .
One state at a sitting might be the solution, with exceptions. New York occupies 25 pages and California 22. Utah is covered in one-half page (Franklin Covey Field, Salt Lake City), and Wyoming gets three lines.
To end the suspense, here's what you'll learn about Benjamin Franklin Hunt's burial site at at Hillside Cemetery in Greybull, Wyo.: "Ben Hunt, a 6-foot-5 lefthander, compiled a 2-4 record in 1910 and '13 with the Boston Red Sox and St. Louis Cardinals. Hunt, a native Oklahoman, died in 1927 at Greybull."
If you've stayed with Epting's odyssey this long, you can skip Wyoming and head to Alaska, Hawaii and Canada, where you'll learn that the plaque honoring Phil Marchildon, a pitcher with the Athletics and Red Sox from 1940 to '50 (his record was 68-75), is in the Phil Marchildon Memorial Park in his hometown, Penetanguishene, Ontario.
