“Take me out to the ballgame”

By Jacob Wheeler
Sun editor
Play ball in northern Michigan!
Wuerfel Park, the new minor league ballpark in Traverse City and home of the Beach Bums, isn’t quite as glamorous as Chicago’s Wrigley Field or Detroit’s Comerica Park. The pitchers don’t throw fastballs as hard as they do in The Show, and that crafty batter laying a squeeze bunt down the third base line just a few feet away from your box seats will probably never play on national television.
Photo by Ryan Romeike

But you’ll forgive that, just as you’ll forgive the cookie-cutter architecture of Wuerfel Park that looks more like a subdivision development than a ballpark. You’ll forgive the radar gun behind home plate, which records erroneous pitch speeds of 40 or 50 miles per hour every time a gust of wind blows off Lake Michigan. For here you are in northern Michigan, no more than 45 minutes away from your house or cottage or campground, watching professional baseball. You are safe at home.
For $6 each the “bleacher” seats in the grass picnic area beyond the outfield walls are a steal. Or better yet, cough up an extra four greenbacks and place yourself in the box seats behind home plate so you can follow the intimacy of the game. Watch the pitcher shake off signs as the sweat rolls down his forehead. Watch the shortstop move a couple steps toward second base when he expects the runner to break on the next pitch.
These are rituals that bloom every spring in towns and cities, stadiums and sandlots across America: a rebirth, a budding of optimism that this year could be the one for your team. Out come the lilacs and forest green, and with them the t-shirts and grill kits, and the smell of leather gloves and peanuts.
Northern Michiganders finally got to honor this tradition on May 24, which was opening night for the Traverse City Beach Bums, as nearly 6,000 fans gathered at Wuerfel Park at Chums Corners to honor this greatest of all American traditions. It mattered not that the home team got walloped, 10-2, by the Kalamazoo Kings, for after years of patient waiting, team owners John and Leslye Wuerfel finally brought professional baseball home to Traverse City.
No one bellyached too much about the traffic on US-31 on the way here. And the fans shrugged off having to wait in different concession lines for their beers and ballpark franks. Instead, they cheered when starting pitcher Robbie McClellan opened the game with a strike and punched out the first Kalamazoo batter with an impressive curveball. They clapped for the Beach Bums’ hustling leftfielder Mike Reese who gave chase after a foul ball that dropped out of his range.
And the Traverse City fans confirmed their reputations as orderly and polite stewards of the game during the Grand Traverse Pie Company-sponsored “pie eating contest” between innings when two locals were invited to walk onto the field and eat more raspberry and cherry goodness than their competitor could, but both refused to even dirty their faces.
They were just happy to be here, not unlike the nine Beach Bums out on the diamond, chasing their dreams of playing in the Majors some day, even though they play for only a few hundred dollars a month and most will never make it past A ball.
For those players, and for all of us, baseball is a game that invokes our childhood memories — a fountain of youth in the heartland. The first time we see that green outfield grass we can’t help but think back to the very first time we caught a ballgame, even if it was eons ago.
At Wuerfel Park on opening night I found a cameraman/aisle attendant/grounds crew worker named Dale manning his post by the Beach Bums’ dugout on the left side of the field and looking out for any errant foul balls that he hoped to snag with his ancient left hand, marred by broken, purple fingernails but every bit as good as a mitt. Dale thought back to when he was in sixth grade and his father, an automobile worker in Flint, took him to old Tiger Stadium for the first time. He was scared, he remembered, as they drove down Trumbull Avenue through the bad part of town, until he passed through the turnstiles and spied the green grass, that is, and he couldn’t help but smile.
Dale is retired now, but his wife encouraged him to get this part time job and pushed him out of the house, just to give him something to do. Worried about the chance of rain, he showed up early to the ballpark on opening night, just as anxious as any player on the field. For this game, in this setting, means as much to the hometown fans as it does to the men in the dugout.