Tag: baseball

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Baseball at Four Corners

Story by John Andrews

Photography by Matt Gade

The Four Corners baseball field sits at the junction of three highways about 40 miles west of Pierre.

To say baseball is the only game in town at Four Corners would be misleading, mostly because there is no town. Four Corners is simply the junction of highways 14, 34 and 63 about 40 miles west of Pierre. But there is a baseball field, thanks to a handful of farmers and ranchers who nearly 70 years ago wanted a place to play the game at the end of a busy day tending cattle and fixing fence.

The modern day Four Corners baseball team, which plays in the Pony Hills League of South Dakota’s amateur baseball association, is actually the club’s second iteration. The first dates back to the 1950s, when the fathers and uncles of many current players launched a fundraising drive to create a baseball field. In true ranch country fashion, donations included hay, cattle, machinery and precious time. Roy Norman collected money, and in 1953 purchased 14 80-foot light poles from a company in Ohio for $1,400. The height was important; Four Corners’ rival town of Philip had just installed 70-foot lights. They also gave Four Corners the unique distinction as the only non-municipal lighted field in the country.

Four Corners pitcher Adam Kaus delivers the ball during a Sunday doubleheader. Batters have to contend with sunlight reflecting off grain bins across the road.

Four Corners hosted its first game in the summer of 1954. Crowds of 200 to 300 people came to watch their neighbors play. Despite its remote location, finding players was rarely a problem, thanks to baseball’s great popularity during the 1950s and 1960s. But when needs arose, the men sought creative solutions. One summer, Four Corners needed another pitcher, so Norman placed an ad in the Omaha World-Herald seeking a farm laborer. The final line on the job description said candidates”must be able to pitch for a competitive amateur baseball team.” He found his pitcher. The young man spent the summer sleeping in the concession stand.

Four Corners’ heyday lasted until 1986, when the team’s aging founders opted for softball in other places. The field, no longer used, fell into disrepair. Its chicken wire backstop slowly disintegrated. Grass and weeds overgrew the dirt infield, swallowing home plate and the pitching rubber. For years, cattle roamed where outfielders once glided after lazy fly balls.

About 15 years later, the baseball bug re-emerged.”My cousins and brothers and I talked about the possibilities of it,” says Mike Hand, whose father, Dave, played for Four Corners.”And we just ran from there.”

Volunteers showed up, just like they did 50 years earlier.”We found the dimensions and mowed it,” Hand says.”We sprayed the weeds and grass off the infield. It took us a while, but a baseball field took shape.”

Baseball returned to Four Corners in the summer of 2002, and the team has been going strong ever since, maybe because familial ties unite the players, literally and figuratively. Mike Hand, the manager, is one of six Hands on the team, which includes his brother, his son and three cousins. The roster is rounded out by players who have moved away but still travel home from places like Wessington Springs, Mitchell and Wagner — 215 miles away — just to wear the Four Corners uniform.

Their dedication is remarkable. Because there is no city crew to help with maintenance, the players do it all, a task made more challenging due to the field’s lack of running water. Hand knows the field isn’t perfect, but they do their best.”If you ask players what the problems are, the first thing they’ll mention is the outfield,” he says with a laugh.”It’s not smooth; it’s kind of like playing Plinko because it’s tufts of grass and gopher holes.”

Shade is rare at Four Corners, so the players built small shelters for fans who bring chairs.

The lights, once a point of pride, no longer work, so game times are regularly Sundays at 4 p.m. That leads to another Four Corners quirk. The field faces south, so when batters come to the plate on a sunny Sunday afternoon, trying to catch a glimpse of the pitcher’s grip before he hurls the ball in their direction, all they see is sunlight glaring off seven grain bins on Mike Hand’s farm, which lies on the other side of Highway 34.

Perhaps the biggest challenge is travel.”Because we’re rural and in the middle of nowhere, hardly anybody will travel to Four Corners,” Hand says.”There are a few teams that willingly come every year. But last year we played 26 games and had five home games. It is not uncommon for us to travel 3,000 miles in a summer for baseball games.”

The travel is a matter of perspective. Four Corners once drove to Armour — 195 miles — after work for a game that began at 9 p.m. It finished at midnight, and then the players embarked on the 3 1/2 hour drive home.”Baseball is the only vacation and release we get from our normal, everyday lives,” Hand says.”The love of baseball itself is the best part of it.”

The question now is how long the players can sustain such a schedule. This group is in its 17th season of playing together. Hand says they are most likely the oldest team in the state; two players are over 50, six are over 40, five more are over 36 — and finding good baseball playing farmhands through newspaper advertisements isn’t as easy as it used to be.

There is hope in Fort Pierre, 35 miles away, where a long dormant junior legion program is once again fielding a team of 16- and 17-year-old players. Hand hopes to draw a few of them to their crossroads ball field in western Stanley County. If he’s successful, then even though there’s no gas or groceries at Four Corners, there will still be baseball.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 2018 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

4 Corners warms up before the start of the first game of a doubleheader against the Plankinton Bankers during Pony Hills League action on Saturday, July 1. 4 Corners field sits 22 miles from the nearest town and six miles west of un-incorporated Hayes just Northwest of the Highway 63 and Highway 14 intersection.
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Forever Close to Home

By John Andrews

You could always hear his voice above the crowd.

Every Fourth of July, hundreds of people come to Memorial Park in Lake Norden to cap off the city’s Independence Day celebration with an amateur baseball game and fireworks. It’s a popular time for school and family reunions, so people who grew up in Lake Norden often find their way back. The ball game is a good time to catch up if you missed the pork barbecue the night before, so there’s a constant buzz of conversation humming throughout the park as the game is played.

Mel Antonen

Mel Antonen’s voice always stood out. He’d grown up in a house right across the street from the ballpark and did every job imaginable as his father, Ray, managed the Lake Norden Lakers: groundskeeping, announcing, scorekeeping and, eventually, playing. It was small town baseball that launched him on his career as a journalist covering Major League Baseball for USA Today, Sports Illustrated and, most recently, Sirius Radio and Mid-Atlantic Sports Network in Washington, D.C. But no matter what major league city he found himself in, or what superstar he was interviewing, his thoughts were never far from Lake Norden. He came back on the Fourth of July as often as he could; it pained him to miss even a single year. He sometimes regaled friends with stories from his reporting, but more often than not they relived their own days on the diamond or reminisced about the colorful characters they all remembered. He stayed connected to Lake Norden, and in doing so became a mentor to many of us who grew up there.

Antonen died on January 30 at age 64. For 383 days, he battled a rare autoimmune disease called hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (HLH) that became compounded by COVID-19 and lymphoma, a combination so unlikely that doctors told him he was probably the only person in world battling all three at once.

Antonen on the mound in Lake Norden.

As a kid growing up in Lake Norden, I loved it when Mel came home because I felt like it gave me an inside connection to the world of professional baseball. I’d ask about my perennially hapless Chicago Cubs, and he’d share some nugget he’d gotten at the winter meetings or through interviews. We’d talk about new ideas for exhibits inside the South Dakota Amateur Baseball Hall of Fame, which Ray was instrumental in bringing to Lake Norden and which remained a passion project for Mel.

Our relationship changed in the summer of 2007. I had finished school and was trying to figure out if more education was in my future or if I needed to find a job. With a wife and two kids, my sensibilities pulled me toward employment, so I brought my resume and a few writing samples to the South Dakota Magazine office.

Bernie Hunhoff told me they didn’t have a need for a writer, but there was a marketing position open and that he’d review my materials and get back to me. About a week later he called and offered me the job.

I knew that I probably wasn’t cut out for marketing, but this was South Dakota Magazine. I honestly didn’t know what to do. I needed advice. So I called Mel, who told me as politely as he possibly could that I would be an idiot if I didn’t take it. The marketing thing fizzled out, as I had suspected, but nearly 14 years later I’m still here, and I have Mel to thank, at least in part. I know he was there for others, too.

Suddenly I was working with Mel, which never felt quite right. Me, editing the guy who’d spent two decades at USA Today? I wasn’t sure about that.

He was always emailing me with story ideas. Even though his job took him to major league baseball parks around the country and interviews with the sport’s leading stars, he never stopped thinking about the next South Dakota baseball story he wanted to write.

The first major feature of his that I edited was about six longtime amateur baseball managers in South Dakota, and the dedication that it takes from them to keep a team going. We headlined it”Love for the Game” because it really seemed to capture the passion they all had for small-town baseball, but looking back I think it clearly reflected the passion of the writer just as much.

Brothers Rusty (left) and Mel Antonen as Lake Norden Lakers.

He worked through his illness, not only for his regular job on the East Coast but on pieces for South Dakota Magazine. Just last fall he finished a story that had long been discussed around Lake Norden but never written down. I’d grown up hearing about the time the great pitcher Satchel Paige came to Lake Norden on a barnstorming tour. The whole town was abuzz for the game, but it quickly turned to anxiousness when the time for the first pitch arrived and Satchel was nowhere to be found. Turns out that Satchel ran into two boys (one of whom happens to be my cousin) and they all went fishing together south of town. The rest of the story is in our September/October 2020 issue.

Sometimes Mel would email just to reminisce about playing baseball in Lake Norden. One day we got on the subject of the state amateur tournament. He told me he hit a double in his first state tournament at-bat in Madison.”I could hear Danny Olson’s play-by-play voice when I got to the plate. My knees were shaking,” he said. “I also remember striking out three or four times versus Dave Gassman of Canova in the quarterfinal game.”

Then there was the year the hometown Lakers lost to Eureka 6-5 in the semifinal game.”The game ended when manager Dale Jacobsen had our best base stealer, Mike Murphy, try to steal second with two outs in the ninth inning. He was out on a close call, and Jake argued and argued, following the umpire all the way to his car. Jake was still arguing as the umpire was taking off his equipment and putting it into the trunk.

“Chad Lavin, Steve Brown and I were pick-up players from Bryant’s Legion team. I didn’t play, but I’ll never forget the sinking feeling that goes with a season that ended like that.”

One day, he wrote to tell me about an amazing South Dakota connection he’d experienced in Washington, D.C.”I have been going to breakfast at a dive bar on the Hill for a long time,” he said.”The other day, I was there meeting a friend. The friend was late, and I ended up talking to one of the waitresses about baseball. She started talking about how her dad played ‘amateur baseball,’ but didn’t tell me where.

“‘You wouldn’t know where,’ she said.

Antonen and his son Emmett at the South Dakota Amateur Baseball Hall of Fame in Lake Norden.

“But we continued to talk. I found out she was from Arlington, and her dad was Hall of Fame pitcher Chuck Petersen. She’s donated money to the Hall. Her dad and my dad were close friends, teammates, rivals.

“I would have never continued the conversation had she not said, ‘amateur baseball,’ which is, in my mind, is a phrase that you only hear in South Dakota.”

And, for much of the last year, there were health updates.”Survived one near death disease and COVID-19 is next to be knocked out,” he wrote last April 23 with the hashtag #finntough, ever proud of his Finnish heritage.

“I am in hospital, but I am feeling fixed and should be able to go home today,” he wrote a month later, while double checking details of the Satchel Paige story.

“Still battling HLH, but we hope to have it in remission by the end of November,” he said in the last message I ever received from him three months ago. But in the end the diseases proved too much for even a tough old Finlander from Lake Norden.

One of my favorite stories about Mel came from an interview he did with Cal Ripken, Jr., the longtime shortstop of the Baltimore Orioles and the holder of baseball’s longest consecutive games played record at 2,632. Mel asked Ripken about playing in Baltimore and what made it different from other major markets like New York and Boston. Did he ever think about playing somewhere else?”Mel,” Ripken said,”you just don’t understand what it’s like to play baseball in a small town.”

Mel knew it better than the Iron Man ever would have realized. It’s what brought him back every Fourth of July. He stayed connected to Lake Norden and to South Dakota, the people and the stories, and we’re all richer for it.

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Field of Dreams

By David Schoenfield

Redfield is the self-proclaimed”Pheasant Capital of the World.” That’s because in the summer of 1908, local entrepreneurs brought three pairs of ringnecks to Spink County from Oregon and released them in Hagmann’s Grove, just north of town. The birds adapted well to their new home, giving South Dakota a tourism boost and a multi-million dollar industry.

Redfield is where Hank Aaron went hunting and gave a baseball clinic to residents of the Redfield State Hospital and School (originally called the State School and Home for the Feeble Minded) when he played for the Milwaukee Braves.

It’s also my dad’s hometown. When I was a kid, every few years my parents would pack me and my three sisters into our station wagon and we’d head to Redfield from Seattle. I remember my grandparents’ big garden in their backyard behind the small white house with green trim. My sisters and I argued to see who slept in the screened-in front porch — cooled by the evening breeze — instead of one of the hot and stuffy bedrooms. And I recall old family stories, like when my grandfather ran the local creamery and hired women during pheasant season to clean the birds, pack them in ice and ship them around the country.

And the baseball field. I have never forgotten that field. When I played baseball as a kid, all our fields had dirt infields, so I thought the diamond in Redfield, with its grass infield a dark shade of emerald, was the most wonderful place in town, the perfect place for a kid obsessed with baseball to pass a few minutes of his summer vacation.

When my dad was growing up there in the 1940s and’50s, the Redfield diamond had a grandstand that wrapped around the field from first base to third base, with bleachers extending down the foul lines. It sat around 2,500 people — nearly the entire population of the town at the time — and was often packed when the Redfield town team played. Before television exploded, local baseball was a primary source of entertainment in small towns across the Midwest.

My dad’s family moved to Redfield from Watertown when he was 7 years old. He remembered rooting for the Watertown team that summer, but he eventually switched his allegiance. He sold peanuts and popcorn at games as a kid, and can still reel off many names of the players on the 1949 team that lost the state amateur championship game to the Aberdeen Preds.

Ed Carter, a right-handed pitcher, was the star of that team. In 1950, Watertown picked him up and went on to win the national amateur championship. Carter died in 2010 at age 86, still living in Redfield. He’s a member of the South Dakota Amateur Baseball Hall of Fame in Lake Norden.

South Dakota was once home to minor league baseball. The Class C Northern League operated from 1946 to 1971 and Aberdeen, 42 miles north of Redfield, fielded a team each year — the Aberdeen Pheasants. My dad’s grandfather loved baseball and often took Dad and his older brother, Ray, to games. My dad said the Aberdeen park was even better than Redfield’s, and he remembered seeing Don Larsen and Bob Turley pitch, long before they became World Series heroes with the New York Yankees.

My dad got to play on the field at Redfield one summer when he played for the American Legion team. But he also worked at the garage across the street from his house, and during a particularly busy time of the summer he had to miss some games.”Dale,” said the owner of the shop,”I’d let you play if you were any good, but we both know that isn’t the case.”

By then, my dad had other interests besides baseball. He’d known since he was 13 that he wanted to be an engineer. Besides working on cars in high school, he also learned to fly, getting lessons from old Doc Perry, who ran the local airstrip when he wasn’t treating patients. My dad worked there one summer and on one slow day, Doc turned to my dad and said,”Dale, go ahead and take a plane and get up there.”

My dad wanted to build airplanes. After getting his degree from the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City, he got a job at North American Aviation in Los Angeles. He later got a job at Boeing and worked on the second-stage Saturn rocket for the Apollo space program. A few years ago, he was at Cape Canaveral in Florida with my sisters and their kids and got to show his grandchildren the rocket he had helped to build.

In December of 2013, my dad had surgery for thyroid cancer, which added more meaning to our latest trip to South Dakota. It was my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary and they wanted to make one last trip to celebrate (my mom is from Rapid City). My wife and I flew out a few days early to meet my parents and drive across the state to Redfield.

We had dinner at Terry’s Bar — a steak dinner and salad bar for $9.95. We ran into two of Dad’s old high school classmates. The garage across the street from my dad’s childhood home was still there, now called Schroeder Motors. The little warehouse my grandfather built to store beer when he owned the Pabst Blue Ribbon distributorship was still there as well.

We drove out to the baseball field. The light standards, looking like they were from the 1950s, stood high above the field. The grandstands were gone, replaced by a newly constructed wooden platform along the third-base line for lawn chairs. Maybe they don’t draw crowds of 2,500 any longer, but two amateur teams and the American Legion team still play there — and they’re every bit as good as those teams from my dad’s childhood. Redfield Dairy Queen won the state tournament in 2000 and 2006.

And the field? The field was beautiful, exactly as I remembered it, with thick, dark green grass.

I walked out to the pitcher’s mound and I could hear my dad and his brother talking about Ed Carter, Kenny Phillips and Barney Clemens. I could smell the popcorn, and I could see the people of Redfield and a young kid selling them bags of peanuts.

Editor’s Note: David Schoenfield’s father passed away in 2016. Schoenfield has been with ESPN since 1995 and is currently a senior writer for ESPN.com. This story is revised from the May/June 2015 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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South Dakota’s Death Valley

By Colin Kapitan

Major League Baseball has long been known for its blend of interesting and controversial characters. One of the most interesting of the pre-1920 era was Deadwood native James “Death Valley” Scott.

Scott was enshrined in the South Dakota Sports Hall of Fame in 1985 for his nine years of excellence as a big league pitcher for the Chicago White Sox. He is unquestionably the most successful pitcher among native South Dakotans.

Scott was born in Deadwood on April 23, 1888. His father, George, was a weatherman and telegraph operator for the government. The Scotts moved to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation west of Mobridge and later to Lander, Wyoming. It was in the country fields around Lander at the turn of the century where Scott first found the joys of hurling a baseball past aspiring hitters.

Scott refined his pitching skills as a one-year college student at Kansas Wesleyan. He also spent one summer at Oskaloosa, Iowa, pitching for a semi-pro team. In 1908, Scott signed on with a Wichita, Kansas, team in the Western League. After only one season of professional baseball, he was sold to the Chicago White Sox and made his debut in the big leagues and celebrated his 21st birthday just days apart. He spent nine years in the majors, all with the Sox.

Scott’s first appearance in a major league game was indicative of his career to follow. He won his debut 1-0, and he was glorified in print the day following by noted sports journalist Ring Lardner, who covered the game for a Chicago newspaper.

In his 1909 rookie season, Scott went 13-12, through his won-loss record is somewhat misleading. He pitched five shutouts that summer and was on the losing end of five 1-0 games. Scott lost four other games by a 2-1 score. It was the harbinger of his career.

The following year, Scott posted a 9-17 record for the White Sox. He spent that winter in Imperial, California, and upon his return for the 1911 season, he was quickly dubbed “Death Valley” after the legendary desert character called Death Valley Scotty.

The next two seasons were so-so for the tall, burly 235-pound, right-handed pitcher. In 1911 he was 12-11 and the following year only 2-2 as he saw limited pitching time.

But over the next three seasons, Scott was as good as any pitcher in major league baseball. In 1913, he was not only a 20-game winner but a 21-game loser for a second division ball club. He fashioned an outstanding 1.90 earned run average and highlighted the year in a game against the St. Louis Browns when he struck out 15 batters, including six in succession. Scott pitched in 48 games and totaled 312 innings that summer.

Scott’s hard luck pitching was perhaps personified in the 1914 season when he pitched a no-hitter …. and lost. His record was 16-18 that year, and his toughest loss occurred on May 14 when he shut out the Washington Senators on no hits for nine innings only to lose the no-hitter and the game, 1-0, in the 10th inning.

(According to no-hitter historian Dirk Lammers, in 1991, the Committee for Statistical Accuracy amended its definition of a no-hitter, “declaring it a game of nine innings or more that ends with no hits.” Scott’s “no-hitter” was officially wiped from the record books, along with 49 other such games that had been played throughout the history of Major League Baseball. Learn about them at Lammers’ website, www.nonohitters.com.)

His biggest season was 1915. Scott won 24 games in 35 decisions and led the league with seven shutouts. This was also the year that he was on the mound when Detroit Tiger Hall of Famer Ty Cobb’s 35-game hitting string came to an end.

Scott’s record slipped to 9-14 the following year. In 1917, he was 6-7 with a sparkling 1.87 earned run average when he left the team in the middle of the season and enlisted in the U.S. Army. He was the first major leaguer to do so. He later earned a commission as a captain before his discharge in 1920.

His major league totals for nine years read 111 wins, 113 losses, 26 career shutouts and a 2.32 career earned run average. Scott’s career was noted by his character and sportsmanship almost as much as his superb curveball and deft pickoff move to first base.

Scott was one of the first baseball players to form a link with the world of show business. He and White Sox teammate Buck Weaver were married to two of the four Cook Sisters, whose singing act was the talk of Chicago in those days.

In 1914, Scott took his turn on the mound as the White Sox and the New York Giants spent the off-season touring places such as England, Paris and Tokyo. He even pitched before the Pope at the Vatican.

It was while Scott was at war that the famous Black Sox Scandal occurred. It involved eight White Sox players who contrived with gamblers to throw the 1919 World Series. In his later days, Scott confided to his son, “Had I still been with the team in 1919, it never would have happened. When I found out about it, I would have reported it for the honor of the game.”

Scott returned to baseball after his military service, but not to the White Sox. He refused an invitation because of conflicts with team management. Instead, he finished his professional career in the minor leagues, pitching four seasons with the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League and two years for the New Orleans Pelicans of the Southern League.

In 1923, Scott needed permission from Pacific Coast League president W.H. McCarthy to wear a mustache on the playing field. Such facial hair had long been taboo in pro baseball. Scott grew the mustache as a result of a winter Canadian hunting trip. It quickly became a good luck piece, as he pitched a no-hitter in one of his first games that year.

His playing days ended the summer of 1927, when he suffered a broken leg. Scott remained active in baseball, working as an umpire in the Southern League. In 1930, he became one of the few big-league baseball players ever to return to the majors as an umpire, working for three National League seasons.

During his minor league days in the Pacific Coast League, Scott worked winters in the movie studios. Following his retirement from umpiring, he went to work full time with such major studios as Warner Bros., RKO and Republic Pictures. He retired in 1951 and died on April 7, 1957 in Palm Springs.

Although he left South Dakota at an early age, there was a return of sorts in 1939 when his son, Jim Scott, Jr., pitched for the Northern League Sioux Falls Canaries under manager Rex Stucker. Years later, the younger Scott compared his own and his father’s pitching skills.”I was a thrower,” he said.”Dad was a pitcher.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November 1986 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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This Isn’t Yankee Stadium

By Colin Kapitan


Editor’s Note: Colin “Kap” Kapitan, a fixture on the South Dakota sports scene for six decades, died Dec. 28. Kap was a fun-loving character and a man who could both tell a story in the bar or hammer it out on a keyboard. He was a sportswriter and editor for the Yankton Daily Press & Dakotan. But he will be best remembered as a dedicated sports official who reffed countless high school and college football and basketball games. He also umpired one baseball game in his hometown of Yankton, and he wrote about the experience in our May/June 1994 issue.


People often ask me why baseball umpiring is not part of my summer activity since I’ve officiated and reffed high school and college football games for years and years. Actually, I did don the umpire blue for three seasons. How clearly I remember my last stint behind the plate. That day, I decided shin guards, chest protectors and face masks were not conductive to me having fun. Here’s the background story.

Baseball umpiring was a tradeoff for me. In 1962, I was looking for a basketball referee partner. A friend, Darrell, was seeking a baseball-umpiring sidekick. We compromised. Darrell would work basketball with me. Together, we would work college baseball six weeks in the spring.

I worked a lot of games. Southern State, Yankton, Wayne, Morningside and the University of South Dakota. Three, sometimes four doubleheaders a week. For three years. Three long years.

I don’t know why, but I couldn’t get into balls and strikes. Certainly it wasn’t that I didn’t love the game. Or that I didn’t know the game.

Maybe it was those doubleheaders. Start at noon and go ’til dark. No daylight savings time then. Maybe it was the dreary weather. Wind and rain. More wind. More rain. I wore more clothes on the diamond than when shoveling snow.

My last afternoon was a day much like just described. Riverside diamond in Yankton. The wind was whipping off the river, bringing slow and steady precipitation. The temperature was in the mid-30s. Your regular college baseball doubleheader. The Yankton College Greyhounds were entertaining John F. Kennedy College of Wahoo, Neb. Both schools are now defunct.

I was behind the plate for the first game and should have suspected this would be worse than your ordinary game when the JFK catcher came out for the bottom of the first. Despite the weather, he wore a t-shirt. Maybe he figured all those tattoos would keep him warm. He looked 35 and sounded like a Marine drill sergeant. Jose was his name.

Jose didn’t like most of my decisions. His coach agreed with him. The coach? Bob Cerv. Not a name that rings a bell with your average baseball fan, but Bob Cerv was a good player on the New York Yankee teams of the mid-1950s. He played with Mickey Mantle. He had several World Series championship rings. This day he was as big as a house. Three hundred and fifty pounds, plus. Over a 6-foot-4 frame. With a growly voice and a vocabulary that put his foulmouthed catcher to shame. He visited me often during the first game.

I struggled through the contest. Actually the seven innings went pretty fast. I figured I had it made. Just seven more innings on the bases, collect my $30 and get home to a hot bath.

It wasn’t that easy. I forgot Murphy’s Law.

First play of the second game. A bang bang at first base. My call went against JFK. Here came Cerv across the diamond as fast as a 350-pounder can make it.

I made up my mind right there. Before the ex-big leaguer could utter a word, I had my say! To my surprise, Bob Cerv grinned. He left the diamond, never to return that afternoon.

Darrell could hardly wait to get to me after the game. “What happened?” he asked. “What transpired that Cerv never again left the dugout?”

As Cerv approached in that first inning, I chose my words carefully. “Excuse me, Mr. Cerv, but this isn’t Yankee Stadium. Don’t think you’ll make it there as a manager nor I as an umpire. But I will tell you one thing. If you leave me alone the rest of the afternoon, I promise you that I’ll never umpire another baseball game so long as I live.”

The lumbering giant stopped. He looked dazed for a moment, then gathered himself and smiled. “You got it, kid.”

He kept his word. And I have kept mine.

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My Favorite Time of Year

By John Andrews

Dell Rapids and Canova square off in a state tournament game at Mitchell’s Cadwell Park.

I know one South Dakotan who lives all year in anticipation of the Turner County Fair. Others yearn for the first Forestburg melon stand to open, or for the leaves in Spearfish Canyon to turn color, or the state capitol to be decked out in its Christmas glory.

My favorite time of the South Dakota year is the 12 days in August during which the state amateur baseball tournament is played.

For about 50 years after its inception in 1933, the tournament moved to different ballparks around the state, but since 1981 it has mostly been played at Mitchell’s Cadwell Park. This year, for the first time, the event was moved to Ronken Field at Augustana University in Sioux Falls, but Cadwell is the environment that I most closely associate with the State Am.

Allowing it to remain in one place for so long has allowed traditions to grow, and I look forward to them just as much as the baseball games. The Mitchell Exchange Club has become famous for its grilled hamburgers and onions. It’s one of the first aromas you detect when you wander into the ballpark, and very few spectators leave without eating one or two.

Every year, the same group of fans sets up lawn chairs on the lower levels of the concrete grandstand, or watches the game while standing directly behind each team’s dugout, a perspective that also offers an opportunity to catch in-game strategy or witty banter between players. The State Am is often the only time all year that these folks see each other.

For years, I kept an eye out for the guy wearing a blue T-shirt that read”Official Tamper,” who ran onto the field between games, filled the holes on the pitching mound and pounded them smooth. I always thought he must have been good at his job if they made him his own T-shirt.

Buying a state tournament program is often the first thing I do when I get to the park. The first six pages are packed with regular season and tournament records that delight anyone interested in baseball and history — Lefty Grosshuesch’s 62 strikeouts in a 28-inning game for Bonesteel in 1952, Wessington Springs collecting 36 hits in one game in 1988, Kevin Leighton’s whopping 501 career home runs.

I began attending the tournament regularly in 1991, when my hometown Lake Norden Lakers fell in the championship to Dell Rapids. Lake Norden is one of a handful of towns in South Dakota that is synonymous with baseball. Games have been played there nearly as long as there has been a town. It’s also home to the South Dakota Amateur Baseball Hall of Fame. Growing up immersed in baseball, it was impossible not to fall in love with the small-town version of our national pastime, which is why I love going to the State Am every year, whether the hometown Lakers are in the field or not. I suspect there are other South Dakotans who feel the same way.

Maybe one of these years, I’ll witness something that becomes part of South Dakota sports legend. The State Am already produced one of our most treasured baseball stories. Claremont and Aberdeen were tied 4-4 heading into extra innings of the 1938 championship game in Aberdeen. It was getting dark, so umpire Tommy Collins ruled that if no one scored in the 10th inning the game would be replayed the next day. Aberdeen went scoreless in the top of the 10th. In the bottom, Claremont’s Bill Prunty stepped to the plate. He worked the count to 3-2, and then crushed a home run over the center field fence, giving Claremont the championship. The ball was recovered the next day and is now exhibited at the Hall of Fame in Lake Norden.

I don’t know where the rest of the year will take me in my travels for South Dakota Magazine, but I know where I’ll be in early August of 2019. I can already taste the onions.

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From Bridgewater to Cooperstown

By Paul Higbee

When Sparky Anderson was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, New York, during the summer of 2000, he became the first South Dakotan to reach the sport’s most famous shrine.

The Bridgewater native certainly belongs there. Anderson ranks sixth all-time among major league managers in wins, with 2,194. He managed the Cincinnati Reds and then the Detroit Tigers, winning the World Series with both teams (twice in Cincinnati), becoming the only manager to bag world championships in both the National and American Leagues. Because there’s no question Anderson belongs in Cooperstown, the only topic for debate among sportswriters and commentators was whether he should be remembered chiefly as a Red or a Tiger. Anderson chose to be depicted on his Hall of Fame plaque wearing a Reds cap, because the Cincinnati club gave him a chance when he was unknown.

Knowing Anderson’s love of his home state, though, I’m guessing he wouldn’t have minded being the only Hall of Famer to wear a feed-and-seed cap.

“I remember more about South Dakota than any part of my life,” Anderson told Dan Ewald, who helped him write an autobiography. “I remember all the sights, the sounds, the smells, the people. Maybe I remember Bridgewater so well because I was so happy there.”

He was born George Lee Anderson in 1934, when the Depression and dust storms were ravaging South Dakota. His family had next to nothing in material wealth. Neither did their friends and neighbors in Bridgewater. That, Anderson noted, isn’t a bad way to start life, because you expect to work hard for everything, and you never take anything that comes your way for granted.

One comical image of Depression-era South Dakota stood out in Anderson’s mind. Kids used to hijack outhouses in Bridgewater on Halloween. So Anderson’s grandfather sat in the family’s privy on Halloween night with a shotgun.

“We didn’t have much, but nobody was going to get our outhouse,” Anderson recalled.

So how was a man affected by moving from that humble life to the very pinnacle of pro sports? In Anderson’s case, not much. “He’s the same as he was 45 or 50 years ago,” baseball broadcaster Vin Scully told the Detroit Free Press shortly before Anderson’s induction. “He hasn’t changed. I think the greatest thing about Sparky is that he really does feel that he was blessed. He is as modest as anyone who will ever reach the Hall of Fame.”

Anyone who met Sparky Anderson remembers two characteristics — the firm handshake, the kind that seals business deals on the prairies, and the natural warmth directed toward anyone: a marginal player whose time in the big leagues would be short, a sportswriter who needed extra insight so his story wouldn’t read like every other, a wayfaring South Dakotan who dropped by the ballpark to say hello.

Anderson credited both his handshake and his manner to his father, Lee Roy Anderson. The elder Anderson painted barns, worked for the postal service and played semi-pro baseball. He was “lead-pipe tough,” Sparky told Ewald. He walked with a self-assurance that let him treat everyone with dignity. Powerfully shaped by the Depression in South Dakota, Lee Roy Anderson taught his son that kindness is a valuable gift that doesn’t cost anyone a cent.

It will be a long while before another South Dakotan makes Cooperstown. Even if one stepped onto a major league field tomorrow, it takes a decade or two to craft Hall of Fame credentials (longer for a manager), and then there’s a five year waiting period before eligibility.

So, for the next few decades, and maybe forever, Sparky Anderson is our lone Cooperstown representative. It’s another South Dakota story of low quantity but high quality.

Editor’s Note: This column is revised from the July/August 2000 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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The Stars of Summer

By Katie Hunhoff

In 2009 Madison slugger Kevin Leighton hit his 500th home run for the Canova Gang. He broke the state record 169 homers before.

Leighton was just one of many memorable South Dakota baseball players — many of whom we’ve written about in South Dakota Magazine.

Like Leighton, Bill Prunty played amateur baseball for many years. But he’s best remembered for a single blast, known for years as the Home Run in the Dark. In a 1938 state championship game, Claremont and Aberdeen were tied 4-4 in the 10th inning. Umpire Tommy Collins announced that if there were no runs at the end of the 10th, the game would be replayed the next day. That was bad news for Claremont because their pitcher, Clayton Feser, had already beaten Watertown that day and all 10 innings against Aberdeen. It would have been impossible for him to pitch again in the morning.

Aberdeen didn’t score in the top of the 10th. Claremont had two outs in the bottom of the inning when Prunty came to the plate. He worked the count to 3-2, even though he could barely see the ball. The sports editor of the Aberdeen American News later wrote a poem about his next swing:

A sharp, clear crack and out through space

The leather pellet flew,

A blot against the darkening sky,

A speck against the blue.

Above the fence in deep right field,

In rapid, whirling flight,

The ball sailed on, the speck grew dim

And soon was out of sight.

No one needed to see where it landed — the resounding crack from the bat was enough. The ball was found in the morning and is now exhibited at the South Dakota Amateur Baseball Hall of Fame in Lake Norden.

Red Loecker’s baseball career is most notable because no one expected it to happen. After being hit with sniper fire in Vietnam, he was told he might never walk again. But he was determined to get on his feet and play baseball back home in Yankton. He not only returned to the ball field, but won batting titles in 1969, 1970 and 1976, and was the state tourney MVP in 1969.

Women are also part of our state’s baseball history. Amanda Clement of Hudson was the first umpire inducted to the South Dakota Hall of Fame and the second female. Born in 1888, she grew up next to the Hudson ballpark and often played ball with her brother, Henry, and other kids in town. Because she was a girl, the boys often made her call the balls and strikes. She umpired her first real game at age 16 when Renville played Hawarden; it was the first game on record in which a girl earned money for umpiring.

Clement’s services were in high demand. She knew the game, plus coaches learned that they could sell more tickets with a pretty, young umpire behind the plate. She worked about 50 games each summer in Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota and the Dakotas. Her earnings paid her way through college. The Boston Post reported that she had turned down 60 proposals for marriage while umpiring, dubbing her the”heartless arbitrator.” Clement also broke a world record when she threw a baseball 279 feet.

Those are just three of our many heroes of summer. Every town has different memories and different stars. For a state with long winters and short baseball seasons, we have more than our share.

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Of Birds and Baseball

By John Andrews

What comes to mind when you’re asked to think about South Dakota? Two images rise to the top of my list: the iconic ring-necked pheasant and amateur baseball on a summer night, and it seems that no where in South Dakota are these more ingrained in the local culture than in Spink County.

Many other cities in South Dakota call themselves”The Pheasant Capitol of the World,” but Redfield has claimed the title since June of 1908. That’s when a group of city leaders acquired three pairs of pheasants from Grants Pass, Oregon, and released them in Hagmann’s Grove, just north of Redfield. The newcomers seemed to do well in Spink County, and in 1919 the first one-day open season on roosters was held. Pheasants have since become the state bird and have transformed the state’s outdoor tourism industry. Thousands of resident and non-resident hunters will roam the fields when pheasant season opens on the third Saturday of October.

The national pastime has also been an important part of life in Spink County, and affects those who are only tangentially connected to the area. ESPN.com writer David Schoenfield wrote a tribute to baseball in Redfield that appeared in our May/June issue. Schoenfield’s father grew up in Redfield, and later brought his wife and children back to his hometown. Among the memories that still stand out for Schoenfield are baseball games on Redfield’s emerald green diamond.

Pheasants were introduced near Redfield in 1908. Now they come in fiberglass.

His article prompted a reader to share the memories he has of watching Redfield win the state amateur baseball championship on its home turf in 1954. Redfield had amassed an early 10-0 lead, but Aberdeen slowly chipped away until it was 10-9 in the ninth inning. Aberdeen had the bases loaded with their most feared hitter, Blackie Engelhart, coming to bat. With one out, Engelhart crushed a ball that seemed destined to be a grand slam, but Redfield’s center fielder leaped and caught it before it sailed over the fence. Then he wheeled around and fired the ball to the second baseman for a double play (the runners had been certain Engelhart would at least have a base hit, and took off running as the ball soared into the outfield).

Redfield is the hub of activity in Spink County.

Spink County was also the site of a unique baseball battle in 1920. Redfield had secured a professional team, but because the Congregational church owned the field and grandstand, no games were allowed on Sundays. Ten miles south in Tulare, Mike Anderson, editor of the town newspaper and manager of the Tulare baseball team, invited the Redfield squad to play its games there, provided Redfield would finance the cost of a new grandstand.

Both towns agreed, the grandstand was constructed in record time and games began. That’s when the Methodists of Tulare began to suspect something might be amiss. They thought the charging of admission on Sunday might violate one of South Dakota’s”blue laws.”

Six Methodist church members agreed to attend a Sunday game. Once they had purchased tickets, they filed a statement at the courthouse in Redfield. The judge ultimately ruled that Sunday baseball could continue, and admission could be charged, provided a separate area was maintained for those who wished to watch the games for free.

Chief Drifting Goose was a thorn in the side to Spink County’s early settlers.

Spink County has even produced a Major League Baseball player. Deacon Phillippe grew up learning to play baseball in the small town of Athol. As a member of the Pittsburgh Pirates, Phillippe defeated Cy Young in the first World Series game ever played in 1903. He won 189 games in a 13-year career that began when he was 27.

Long before the days of pheasants and baseball, the settlers who trickled into Spink County as early as the 1850s had to contend with the notorious Chief Drifting Goose. His Hunkpati band of Yanktonai was headquartered at Armadale, an island in the James River four miles northeast of Mellette. He’s remembered as a peace-loving leader who preferred pranking homesteaders to violence. Legend says he once stole the clothes from a settler and then made him run back to his sod shanty naked. When railroad surveyors marked a line through his encampment, he moved the stakes. Eventually the rail was routed through Northville, a more respectful 10 miles west of Drifting Goose’s camp.

Locals tell Drifting Goose stories with a chuckle, but they also respect the leader who never signed a treaty and, in his mind, never ceded any land. Historians have named a bridge that spans the James River on Highway 20 after Drifting Goose.

Redfield’s Carnegie Library is the oldest of its kind in South Dakota that has been continually used as a library.

Of course, the colorful leader’s tricks couldn’t stop the eventual settlement and organization of Spink County, created by the territorial legislature in 1873. The area was named for Solomon Lewis Spink, a New York native who worked in law and journalism before President Abraham Lincoln appointed him secretary of Dakota Territory in 1864. He also served in Congress and practiced law in Yankton until his death in 1881.

Several towns emerged along rail lines that passed through Spink County. The largest is Redfield (pop. 2,385), where the state legislature placed the Northern Hospital for the Insane in 1902. Called the South Dakota Developmental Center, the facility still cares for roughly 145 people with disabilities. Redfield is also home to the state’s oldest continually used Carnegie Library. Built in 1902, the red brick building with a sandstone foundation and domed cupola stands at 5 E. Fifth Ave.

Hubert Humphrey as a boy in Doland.

Fisher Grove State Park, east of Redfield near Frankfort, straddles the James River. It’s where the old Watertown-Pierre stage line crossed for the first time using a traditional rock crossing used by Native Americans. Further east on Highway 212 you’ll find Doland, the hometown of Hubert Humphrey, vice president of the United States under Lyndon Johnson from 1965 to 1969.

Follow Highway 37 north of Doland to Turton, (pop. 49) home of the Frogs. The tiny town still holds a Frogtown Festival every June, even though the Jim River is 15 miles away and the closest stream is called Dry Run. The pillar of Turton is the St. Joseph Catholic Church, where St. John the Baptist’s birthday is celebrated in June. The tradition dates to 1899, making it one of the nation’s oldest birthday parties for a saint (besides St. Patrick and St. Nick).

Five generations of Glenn Overby’s family have grown wheat in Spink County.

Spink County covers 1,500 square miles, and much of it is ideal wheat growing country. Farms are plentiful and elevators dot the horizon, especially along Highway 20 through Conde, Brentford, Mellette and Northville in the northern third of the county. The South Dakota Wheatgrowers’ Co-op at Mellette can store 5.5 million bushels, but chances are good you’ll see the overflow of this year’s harvest piled outdoors.

Several years ago we visited the Glenn Overby farm near Mellette. Glenn’s father, John, was a self-taught agronomist who developed his own varieties of wheat: Marvel Wheat and Spinkcota. You can see an exhibit about John Overby and his other inventions at the South Dakota Agricultural Heritage Museum in Brookings.

Wheat farming requires long hours, but we noticed this summer while attending the state amateur baseball tournament in Mitchell that the Northville team’s roster included A.J. Overby, the fifth generation of Overbys to work the Spink County land. That means there’s still time for baseball, and probably pheasants in October, too.

Editor’s Note: This is the 10th installment in an ongoing series featuring South Dakota’s 66 counties. Click here for previous articles.