Place No. 74: Bob Feller Museum; and Place No. 74A: Bob Feller statue and the amazing man himself

The only way you could learn more about Bob Feller than visiting the Bob Feller Museum is to spend a couple minutes with “Rapid Robert” himself.

I’m convinced about that after having the pleasure of meeting Feller a couple times.

Josh Pahigian takes us to Feller’s hometown of Van Meter, Iowa and the Feller Museum as place No. 74 in his “101 Baseball Places to See Before You Strike Out.”

I’ve never been there, so I’ll substitute:

Place No. 74A: Bob Feller statue at Progressive Field, Cleveland

It’s a huge statue just outside the rightfield gate at the Indians’ home, a fine meeting spot before or after a game, as you can tell from Will and I hanging out here in the mid-1990s.

If you’re an autograph collector and you don’t have Feller’s signature, that’s on you and not Feller. He is among the nicest and most prolific signers in the game.

My experiences with Feller were a few years prior to the new stadium and that statue. I was living in Connecticut and working in the Bridgeport Post’s Valley Bureau. Feller had relatives in nearby Waterbury.

Each summer he’d visit, and would be sure to line up a handful of appearances in the area. I’m sure he made a few bucks – and not many, based on the low-for-the-time rates he was charging. But I think Feller just liked meeting fans and talking baseball.

I was a little nervous the first time I met him at a card shop in Seymour, Conn. in 1987. I brought a ball for him to sign, and there were only a handful of other people in the small store.

With little prompting, Feller starting telling me about his amazing Hall of Fame career. After asking my name, he wrote on an 8.5 by 11 sheet with his photo on the front, and flipped it over to show me where it listed all his career achievements.

I heard about the 266 wins and three no-hitters, and how he could have had more of each had he not enlisted in the Navy after Pearl Harbor, spending 44 months serving his country and earning eight battle stars.

He pointed out the line reading “The only pitcher in Major League history to win 20 games or more games before age 21,” then crossed out “only” and replaced it with “first,” since Dwight Gooden had matched the feat.

While proud of all he had done, Feller was humble, too. I handed the Hall of Famer a new ball to sign, and he chose the spot above the Rawlings logo, instead of the sweet spot, where only, managers and the best players sign. I met Johnny Mize a short while later, and he had no qualms writing his name in that spot on that ball.

I met him again the next year at a New Britain Red Sox game, sitting at a table near the concession stands, signing photos and telling stories. He signed everything for everyone and then walked around the stands talking, signing and shaking hands.

He come off a little crusty in interviews these days, not having a lot of love for modern players who don’t approach the game the same way. Don’t expect Feller to ever welcome Pete Rose, Barry Bonds or Mark McGwire into the fraternity with open arms.

But he’s also still throwing in Old-timers Games, too, and he's in his 90s. I think Feller views himself not just as a standard bearer for old school hardball, but as an ambassador for the game. And to that end, few are better than the “Heater from Van Meter.”

Place No. 73: Baseball Reliquary; and Alternative Place No. 73A: South Shore Sports Legends and a Mets tragedy

I confess I had to look up “reliquary,” which the American Heritage Dictionary defines as “a receptacle, such as a coffer or shrine, for keeping or displaying sacred relics.”

We need to know this because Josh Pahigian takes us back to Los Angeles for The Baseball Reliquary or place No. 73 in his “101 Baseball Places to See Before You Strike Out.”

Spread over several locations, the reliquary’s mission is to display objects “that more conservative, timid, or uninformed baseball museums have failed to bring to the public’s attention.”

According to Josh, the collection seems to run toward the scandalous, with items like thong panties worn by Wade Boggs’ mistress, a half-smoked cigar Babe Ruth allegedly left behind at a brothel and a signed record from “Disco Demolition Night.”

You can learn more about it here.

“Whereas the sine qua non of most baseball museums are bats, balls, and gloves, the Baseball Reliquary has pursued a more visionary acquisitions policy, which has resulted in many extraordinary discoveries,” reads the organization’s Web site.

“While each artifact is approached with meticulous scholarship and veracity, the ability of an object to invoke a sense of wonderment in, and to inspire the imagination of, the viewer is of supreme importance. The Baseball Reliquary's collections chart an eclectic terrain, and it is the purpose of this guide to introduce the public to the scope of materials that have been procured.”

Considering I once picked up some of Mike Schmidt’s lawn clippings, I suppose I can’t be hard on these guys.

I do like quirky little museums, so that takes us to:

Alternative Place No. 73A: South Shore Sports Legends display at the Indiana Welcome Center

You never know what you’ll find when you pull off the highway.

I had a mission while traveling back from Texas last month, trying to find postcards, key chains and a snow globe from each state I drove through, presents for my nephews.

Indiana was destined to be a challenge, since I’m only in it for the stretch from Chicago to Michigan City, and most places along that stretch offer souvenirs featuring the Windy City. Guess there’s not a huge demand for Gary snow globes.

But there is an elaborate welcome center in Hammond, partly shaped like a barn with a large exhibit space and a museum about John Dillinger, including his “death trousers.”

I have no interest in learning anything about bank robbers. They’re evil, like Yankees, but not as arrogant. And I was mildly offended to see photos of his corpse for sale in the gift shop near items from “A Christmas Story.” Ick.

And the key chain-postcard-snow globe selection was rather poor, too.
But I did wander over to a temporary exhibit called South Shore Sports Legends, saluting athletes from Northwest Indiana. There wasn’t much to it, other than a series of banners for each inductee and a small display case.

Among the 2009 inductees, I saw a baseball player in a Mets uniform, a blue batting practice jersey with the tail under the team name -- the short-lived style from the mid-90s – and pants with the racing stripes from the 1980s and early 1990s.

I had only a faint recollection of Tim Bishop, and was sad to read at the bottom of the banner that he passed away April 18, 1997.


It said he was one of only two players ever selected for state all-star teams in three sports, was selected by the Mets in the 1994 amateur draft, batted .325 for Kingsport in 1996 and that he played for Columbia.

A quick Google search revealed the rest of the story, and it’s pretty sad. In a New York Times story from June 1997, Buster Olney reported that Bishop and a Bombers teammate were driving home after a game was postponed.

A tire blew out and the car spun around into a highway passing lane. The players got out, but Bishop went back to turn on the hazard lights. As he was doing that, the car was struck by another car, throwing Bishop over the median and into the path of another vehicle. He was just 20.

Olney reported the Mets two months later asked for resignations from Bombers manager Doug Mansolino, pitching coach Dave Jorn and coach Tim Leiper.

Olney reports that a “high-ranking official in the Mets' front office,” told him the three men did not appropriately address whether players had been drinking on the team bus before the crash.

Frank Thomas, from the original Mets team, also is in the Sports Legends hall, along with baseball players from lesser teams, like Ron Kittle, Don Larsen, Kenny Lofton.

Sadly, the display was taken down this month and is looking for a permanent home. That’s a shame, because it will make it more difficult for fans to learn about player like Bishop. And I'd rather learn about people like him and Frank Thomas as I stretch my legs and buy a post card than some outlaw.

Baseball place No. 71: Phoenix Municipal Stadium; 71A: Oldsmobile Park

Sometimes you go to a ballgame and something just seems ... off.

I can't exactly put a finger on why we didn't have that great a time during what should have been a nice day at the park.

But first we have to deal with the formalities. Josh Pahigian takes us to Phoenix Municipal Stadium, the spring home for the Oakland Athletics, for place No. 71 in his “101 Baseball Places to See Before You Strike Out.”

Phoenix is one of the rare cities that host both spring training baseball as well as regular season games. And the city is Arizona's state capital, too.

The stadium sounds nice, with red rocks of Papago Park rising above the field.

I’ve never been there, but I have attended a game is a ballpark built in another state capital.

Alternative place No. 71A: Oldsmobile Park

Lansing isn’t far from either of the places in Michigan where we’ve lived, only about an hour away.

But I’ve been to Oldsmobile Park, home of the Lansing Lugnuts, for a game just once since it was built in 1996, and I really can’t say I’m in a rush to get there again.

It’s a nice enough ballpark, made of brick with a retro feel. It replaced an entire block of buildings that were historic but in bad shape, filled mostly by porn shops, according to one report I read.

But something sure seemed unfriendly when we attended a game against the Fort Wayne Wizards in 2005.

We have a tradition of the whole family attending a game as a Father’s Day treat, and we had high hopes checking out a park for the first time.

You have to remember that I always bring my backpack to games, and just about everywhere else. I got the blue Jansport for my freshman year in college, and it’s held up remarkably well since. It’s my essential game companion, holding pens, pencils, a small pencil sharpener -- for keeping score, of course -- packets of sunscreen and whatever else I think I might need for a game.

My youngest was seven at the time, and when we’d go to see the Whitecaps here in Grand Rapids, I’d bring along some Capri Sun juice packets. Sometimes they’d get left in the backpack if she didn’t drink them all.

Well, the Lugnuts are one of those teams that search every backpack, and the guy working the gate poked around mine.

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t see that Capri Sun,” the worker said.

Huh?

“There’s a Capri Sun in the backpack. No outside food or drink allowed.”

Seemed kind of weak. I was bringing a family of four there for Father’s Day, and it’s not like one Capri Sun was going to sustain us for the whole time. Clearly we were going to be buying more food and drink inside park.

And when it was time to grab some lunch, I found out why they didn’t want anyone sneaking in snacks. You expect to pay more at a ballpark, but these prices seemed excessive, especially for the Midwest League.

The team store wasn’t any friendlier on the wallet. The team had tweaked the uniforms that year, keeping the logo but changing the caps from red to black. Not only were the out-dated caps not on sale, but they had a sign reading “retro caps” or “heritage caps” or something along those lines.

And lets talk about the logo. The team is called the Lugnuts. And the logo is … a screw. Did nobody realize this, or didn’t they care?

The mascot is a dragon-like monster with lugnuts – not screws – where his nostrils should be.

On the bright side, we won a bottle of warm Sprite for doing “the Twist” during a between-inning promotion.

In the end, the Lugnuts won, 4-3, and the kids seemed to enjoy running through a fountain on the plaza outside the ballpark.

But something left a bad taste in our mouth, and we’ve never been back.

No one likes to feel gouged. A major league team can get away with it. Fans expect it, especially when they see $10 million players on the field. But minor league teams have to realize they’re selling the experience.

We do appreciate the fan-friendly West Michigan Whitecaps.

Baseball Place No. 43: Mavericks Stadium; and 43A, Lamphier Park

The path to Michigan minor-league baseball goes through Springfield, Ill. I had no idea.

Josh Pahigian takes us to Mavericks Stadium, home of the High Desert Mavericks in Adelanto, Calif. as place No. 43 in his “101 Baseball Places to See Before You Strike Out.”

He praises it as an intimate park in a beautiful desert setting, not too far from the hustle and bustle of Los Angeles.

My visit to California was brief, and I slipped in some Major League visiting. But I have been to another small park, and that’s when I discovered the Springfield-Michigan connection.

Alternative Spot No. 43A) Lamphier Park, Springfield, Ill.

Springfield’s just an hour from my in-laws, so naturally we went there in 1991 to check out a game, and even stopped at some Lincoln sites along the way.

Actually, it would be difficult to take a step in Springfield and not run into a Lincoln site, but I digress.

Lamphier Park had room for 5,000, though that seems generous. At some point it was named Robin Roberts Stadium at Lamphier Park after the Hall-of-Famer and native son.
Check out the houses just beyond the outfield fence.

It was a small park located in a neighborhood. You’d look beyond the outfield fence and see houses. It didn’t seem all that much bigger than recreation league complex. Heck, if they were short players they might have looked to the stands for volunteers.

The park opened in 1952, and was renovated 1977, and I can only guess what it was like before the renovations. The Springfield Cardinals, Single-A Midwest League, were there from 1982 to 1993.

I like the batter's eye -- evergreens growing behind a short, chain-link fence.

The Cards departed for Madison, Wis. In 1994, becoming the Madison Hatters. The Hatters, for all one year of their existence, had one of the coolest minor-league cap designs ever, with a mouse with a bat, wearing a hat like the Mad Hatter from “Alice in Wonderland.”

I suppose it’s a mouse because mice like cheese, and Wisconsin is famous for it. But I suggest this is the only team in baseball – in all of sports, perhaps – drawing inspiration from Lewis Carroll.

The team left Madison for Battle Creek Michigan, where it was scheduled to be named, and I kid you not, the “Golden Kazoos.” Battle Creek and Kalamazoo are pretty close.

But there was much ridicule – all of it earned – and legend has it that someone went and trademarked the name before the team could, and it opted to get a new name rather than pay what the name-owner wanted. I think they saw an opportunity to drop the name and grabbed it.

So they became the utterly bland Michigan Battle Cats. As if things weren’t bad enough, the team was later affiliated with the Evil Empire, and changed its name to Battle Creek Yankees. Would have been better off with Golden Kazoos.

With instability being a franchise trademark, the team was later liked with Tampa Bay, and became the Southwest Michigan Devil Rays.

Giving up altogether, the team moved across the state to Midland, becoming the Great Lakes Loons, which I suppose is better than Yankees.
Back to Springfield.

After the Cardinals departed in 1993 for their trail of discarded names, it appeared Springfield would be left with many Lincoln sites and no baseball.
But two weeks before the 1994 season, the Waterloo Diamonds could seal the deal on a stadium lease, and bolted to the conveniently open Lamphier Park, and became known as the Sultans of Springfield.

How a team can find a new home and create a new identity in under two weeks is a mystery to me, and “Sultans” is pretty exotic for a place like Springfield. I suspect that “Top Hats,” “Honest Abes” and “Railsplitters” were considered.

Also as an aside, Manny’s Baseball Land, the catalog company, had a warehouse in Hobe Sound, Fla., and used to sell things there at great discounts. So I had all kinds of cool minor-league caps before these were readily available to anyone with an Internet connection. I have both a Madison Hatters cap and a Sultans of Springfield cap, which I used to wear frequently because it was both obscure and fit absolutely perfectly.

The Sultans went to the playoffs their first year, but drew just 54,000 fans. The second year was worse, attracting fewer than 40,000 people.

But someone must have liked the idea of playing in a capital, because the team uprooted after 1995 for Lansing, Mich. where it became the Lansing Lugnuts, and remains there today.

If you see a Lugnut, please do not point out that the logo on his cap is actually a screw, and not a nut, lug or otherwise.

Lamphier Park attracted a Frontier League team, the Capitals, for 1996, but that team, too, departed after 2001 for a lack of fan support.

So there it sits, waiting for another team to come and stay for a while before adopting a nutty nickname and moving to Michigan.

Baseball Place No. 40: Centennial Field, Burlington, Vt.; and No. 40A: Community Field, Burlington, Iowa

Centennial Field in Burlington, Vt. is one of the oldest parks in the minors, cozy and reflective of the small town it calls home.

Community Field in Burlington, Iowa, is also a pretty small park in a rural state.

I’ve been to Vermont, but not to Burlington. I’ve been to Burlington, Iowa and went to the ballpark, but couldn’t get into a game.

But stories of this week’s flooding in Fargo, N.D. and Josh Pahigian taking us to Vermont remind me of one of the great adventures of my reporting career.

Josh taps Centennial Field in Burlington, Vt. as place No. 40 in his “101 Baseball Places to See Before You Strike Out.”

I offer up the other:

Alternative Place No. 40: Community Field, Burlington, Iowa


Community Field is a neat story all to itself.

The home of the Bees was built in 1947 and rebuilt by community volunteers after a 1971 fire. The stadium was upgraded in 2004, but was in is small, older self when I visited in 1993.

Put on the plus side, it wasn’t underwater.

Here’s a tale from the archives. I spent time with a Red Cross team as it brought aid to communities in Missouri, Illinois and Iowa ravaged by floods.

I was finishing a travel story in St. Louis when I got a call from the editors to send my wife home, rent a car and catch up with a team of volunteers from Flint who were headed to Iowa.

The flooding was national news, and there was plenty of evidence in St. Louis, where the Mississippi was climbing the steps to the Arch.

But I was amazed by the size of the devastation on the outlying farmlands I saw while driving north on U.S. 61 through Quincy and Alton and Keokuk. Take away an occasional tree top, power line or silo, and I would have thought I was passing Lake Michigan instead of miles of crops.

The water level had already started to slip back by the time I reached southeastern Iowa. I’ll never forget the stench of the water, which smelled like rotting garbage. And there were flies everywhere.

Just touching the water was considered dangerous, and tetanus shots were dispensed like breakfast.

It was in this kind of environment that I caught up with the volunteers. Some were based in high schools, helping people get their lives back in order and providing a shoulder to cry on.

I was amazed at how much the Red Cross provided — clothes, food, cleaning supplies, mattresses and even hotel space until homes were livable again. All of which is provided through donations from folks like you and me.

The goal is to get people out of the shelters as quickly as possible, because there is nothing dignified about sleeping on cots in a high school gym with your possessions stacked around you.

Other volunteers hit the road, bringing meals to National Guard members and ordinary folks stuffing sandbags along the swelling Des Moines and Mississippi rivers.

Volunteers are asked to stay about three weeks, which is about as long as a person can last before enthusiasm and energy dissolve into depression and exhaustion. And they were largely the kind of people who can take three weeks off from work, a lot of good-hearted retirees, teachers in the summer and people with home businesses.

A helper named Norma was dubbed "The Sandwich Queen" for her ability to quickly turn 80-pound stacks of turkey and seven racks of bread into meals.

The paper let me take own photos in addition to reporting the story about the Red Cross and the flood.

Others are kind of colorful. One volunteer from Colorado was teamed with the Flintites, and wanted to talk about writing. He said he made good money writing for a particular kind of magazine — the kind with a lot of pictures and very little writing, if you know what I mean.

The impact on these close-knit small towns is hard to describe. One of them, Wapello, was so small that people not only don’t lock their house, but they leave their keys in their cars.

It was so small that my arrival was news, and it was known that I had touched water and not yet had a tetanus shot. A nurse from the local public health department tracked me down and gave me the shot.

The scariest thing happened when I was driving back to St. Louis, crossing a two-lane metal bridge somewhere near Keokuk. It was one of those bridges with the metal grates for a road, and if your car is stopped you can look straight down into the water.

And I was stopped for a while because a backhoe was stretched over the guard rail to dislodge fallen tree trunks and utility poles that had washed downriver and was stuck against a support pillar.

The water was rushing quickly, and was so high that it seemed to be only about five feet under the bridge. And at one point I looked upriver and saw something dark bobbing in the water.

As it got closer, I realized it was a tree — not a branch, but a full tree. As it got closer I realized there was nowhere I could go, with traffic stopped in both directions.

The tree finally struck the bridge with a large KLANG, and it seemed to shake for a second, but that was it, and I could exhale.

Naturally, I attempted to work some baseball into the trip. O’Donnell Stadium in the Quad Cities — not too far north of Wapello — was famously under water.

But Community Field was on high ground and not affected. It was locked up tight on the day I had some time to explore. I already had a cool Bees cap anyway.

But as I was headed out of town I saw the stadium lights on, a sign that life for these folks was slowly returning to normal. As long as there is baseball, things were looking a little better.

Baseball Place No. 37: Joe Engel Stadium; Alternative Place No. 37A: Vonachen Stadium, the new Shea

Unlike glorious major league stadiums we know and love, minor league parks tend to stick around after their teams move on to newer, fancier digs.

Josh Pahigian takes us to Chattanooga, Tenn., where historic Joe Engel Stadium is named spot No. 37 in his “101 Baseball Places to See Before You Strike Out.”

The former home of the Chattanooga Lookouts was built in 1930 after Senators owner Clark Griffith sent Engel, a former pitcher and vaudeville entertainer, to construct a park for one of Griffith’s farm teams.

Engel stayed with the team, and filled the stadium with stunts learned from his years in show business. Perhaps his most famous was to place Jackie Miller, 17, on the mound against the Yankees for an exhibition game. She struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.

Ever-inclusive Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis then banned women from the game.
The stadium also was famous for its deep outfield, with centerfield stretching back 471 feet.

The Lookouts fled for a modern stadium in 1999, and Engel has since been used for high school games.

I’ve passed through Chattanooga just once, and didn’t stop at the stadium. But I do know of another unconventional and abandoned minor-league stadium that’s seen some great players. That would be:

Alternative Place No. 37A: Pete Vonachen Stadium – now called Shea Stadium.

There’s a charm to unusual ballparks. And Vonachen Stadium was charming.

Built in 1968 for Bradley University’s baseball team, my guess is that the stadium was little more than one short level of bleachers and a press box until the Peoria Chiefs came in 1983.

It’s more of a ballpark campus, with concessions, a store and picnic areas all in separate buildings away from the seats.

The seats seemed to hang right on top of the field, which led to another quirk. The screen behind home plate stretched all the way to the opposite side of the dugouts. So unless you were sitting beyond first and third bases, you were watching the game through mesh.

Like Engel, there were some goofy promotions. I’m not sure why, but a giant loaf of bread was running around all over the place.

Despite the giant screen, it was a fan-friendly park. We had a good time visiting in 2001 with my son and brother-in-law Jeff. My son even made it atop the dugout to dance.

Also like Engel, Vonachen Stadium saw some big stars. Raphael Palmiero played there when the team was affiliated with the Cubs, and Albert Pujols was there the year before we arrived.

Not that anyone too exciting played in our game. Looking back at my scorecard, the only player of note was Chiefs’ hurler Matt Vriesenga, and that’s only because he was from Grand Rapids.

Alas, the Chiefs moved to a new downtown stadium in 2002, abandoning Vonachen.
But Bradley University gave the yard new life with a glorious name for a not-so-glorious use.

It’s now been reconfigured as a soccer-only stadium, named after a Bradley alum and local businessman – Tim Shea.

That’s right, Shea Stadium lives, and they play in Peoria.

I just hope a giant apple rises out of a hat when the Bradley team scores a goal.