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Pure Sole: Hats off to the little league
Sports editor recounts his brief time on the field of his youth
By Klas Stolpe
Juneau Independent
A “Hats off” to the end of the Little League season.
Juneau’s boys and girls made us proud, some traveled to fields locally and down south, many graced our own little fenced-in ballparks.
Dinner time can now return to normal, cleat marks once removed from house floors will not reappear for another nine months, washers and dryers won’t be such a drain on electricity bills. And while high school and American Legion boys follow the base paths to college, those left behind will chase fly balls long into their dreams at night.
My Little League was just that, a tiny version of life in a small Scandinavian town where games might be canceled if the salmon run went long — but never due to weather.
A hard plastic mat was brought in from the warehouse to cover the 10 or so steps from our front door to the kitchen for when we little rascals forget to remove our cleats.
Players’ names were not on jerseys, but we were easily recognized by size and shape, as half a dozen would fall out of a weathered car or truck adorned with fishing buoys, pots or nets, or by the family dog dragging us up the dirt road to our “stadium.”
As the great Yogi Berra said, “Little League baseball is a very good thing because it keeps parents off the streets.”
I have no clue when I discovered baseball. I do remember my first award, however.
The fanfare of walking up to the podium at the Elks Club or the Moose Club, whichever the current head umpire of the league had been pledged to.
The out-of-sync applause from teammates, opponents and adults who monitored our sportsmanship.
The awkward handshake.
And then my mother, the awards presenter, announcing:
“For getting hit the most times by pitches… Klas Stolpe.”
And my friends laughed.
Most of them were the opposing pitchers, anyway. One of them was a catcher.
They knew my base-reaching abilities were not on par with the finest players in our league, but they also knew that plunking me with a pitch was safer than those higher-than-average swings in which the ball found a nice spot on the field to avoid the opposition.
And, to be honest, I wasn’t very good at avoiding pitched baseballs.
Looking back, it took all I could do to balance that wooden club on my shoulder. I could feel my hiked-up uniform pants slip slightly, my hat bill dropped over one eye, my helmet echoing the beating rain. My head tilted sideways to see the huge side of beef that was glaring at me, his blazing eyes peering over the path of his fiery pitch, and my grimace as the burgeoning orb was about to impact some part of me.
My first season I spent playing in P.F. Flyers, the namesake shoe of my cartoon hero Johnny Quest, or in white high-top Converse Chuck Taylor’s, my playground basketball go tos.
Yes, they were for top adventurers or rulers of the hardwood, but at age 10 I couldn’t care less what type of shoe I used to splash mud puddles on the field when the interest in play waned.
My first time in cleats at age 11 resulted in a misjudgment of speed on a polished linoleum kitchen floor, the braking of which involved a full-body back flip that propelled me forward only to be stopped by a refrigerator.
My team pants were always too short, and I had only one uniform sock, which I switched from foot to foot game by game.
My jersey top was of heavy cotton construction that differed only from every other team’s by the red piping of our Tigers mascot.
The Braves were piped in green, the Yankees blue and the Pirates black.
I never had a clean hat. We seemed to drop them straight from their issuance, and their bright colors were forever faded by rainforest days and Scandinavian nights.
I didn’t play at age 9. You see, my brother played for the Tigers and he was 12, thus, per our league rules, you went to the team of your heritage.
We were the yin and yang of bunk bed mates and wanted no part of each other and thanked the stars when the older sibs moved on and bedrooms opened up. We fought enough at home that I figured fighting on the field was a waste of time when I could safely jeer at him from the bleachers. And all my neighborhood gang played for the Braves so I thought I would be drafted by association.
I learned you don’t always get what you want, as my mother would bring me to every game anyway, and I would have to watch my friends play while my brother wore the red and white of the Tigers.
My attempt at free agency failed because at age 10 I was still drafted by the Tigers coach, who assumed I could throw a baseball with the same velocity as my brother. In another cruel twist, he presented me with his uniform number.
The coach’s judgment was not entirely misguided as I was accurate, but unlike my brother who could knock me over in the winter with a snowball thrown from 30 yards away, I relied more on the beautiful slow pitch.
Thus my velocity resulted in a nice array of opposition batters placing my pitches all about the field.
And since our team had been drafted more for other qualities, none of which seemed to relate to anything “baseball-y,” and opponents knowing they had the “Stolpe fastball” coming, well, we were often chasing balls until they stopped rolling.
I think for young lads and lasses, the youth of spring and summer is tied up along the base paths of the Little League circuit and, in the eyes of those who tie our tiny cleats as we head out the door, we are the stars and heroes of their own youth.
And my mother, while working two jobs, found the time to be the town scorekeeper for our league, and lesson giver for her offspring players.
In my first game, I somehow found myself stumbling past second base and around third when I was struck in the back by the unleashing of a fielded ball in center by the cannon-arm of Dougy Homer. The impact sent me careening in an unwarranted slide of indignity, resulting in painful wailing.
The reality, of course, was that Dougy’s throws usually bounced once before reaching the infield and this one probably was on a downward spiral after such a bounce when it clipped me and being a balanced athlete of 10 I was tripped up and stumbling forward with my face as the cushion.
The embarrassment was the pain.
And my dear scorekeeper mother made it a point to stop the game, come down to the field, pick a bit of something growing from the woodland marsh along third base line and hand it to me. These were lupine, her favorite wildflower.
That game also provided my first lesson. I had survived the flower show and was determined to show I had earned my brother’s mitt. Standing on the mound, delivering pitches and pretending I was all that, I pointed after strikes and kicked dirt after balls spun past me and my infield, many gliding far enough in the air until they nestled in muskeg and thus were determined home runs (as we had no fence). I cursed once.
I discovered it was better to have the scorekeeper hand you flowers than stop the game, stand and admonish you in front of your peers and call you “skunk cabbage” as teammates searched for a ball in the field.
Our field was just that.
A field.
There were rocks and holes that showed only when the rain subsided.
Right field extended only 20 yards past first base.
It featured a large wooden gymnasium that was considered the home run fence if a ball hit the roof on the fly, which was easy to do if you were left handed. But since most of the players were righties, many of the delayed swings would strike the iron, mesh-like coverings on the windows or the weathered boards and bounce back toward the infield.
Usually the weaker-armed fielders were in right as the ricochet bounced back to the infield anyway. A team’s larger-armed youths could better spend their time chasing after balls hit to the fenceless field in left that instead was lined by muskeg and small pines, or the spots between the center field shop building which was too far back to be hit on the fly, except for that one game when Freya Thorsen proved she really was stronger than all the boys.
A gap between the shop building and the gym was where balls seemed to ricochet and settle. Center fielders were usually agile and would steal balls from every other position and quite frankly, the rest of us could care less.
Left field was wild and open.
The dirt outfield stopped where muskeg and shrubs began. There was no dead ball area. Only Inga Christenson had connected hard enough on a pitch to put the ball in flight into the muskeg; the rest of us poor Scandinavian lads were thrilled just to watch our little hits get past distracted fielders.
Left fielders usually played back until their shoes were wet from muskeg, and they could run forward as the ball slowed enough to be picked up by a bare hand.
Anyone who could actually stop a ground ball was in the infield.
I became very adequate at doing so as most of my pitches made a wonderful sound connecting off of opponents’ bats and returning to me at a higher rate of speed. I was thankful when batters swung hard enough to crack their wooden implements of destruction and produce a less hearty ball, albeit with other debris.
Needless to say we got dirty.
God bless our parents, who dried our tears as balls struck body parts, and old Norse grandmothers, who would still pin washed uniforms to dry on clotheslines in the yard.
When we went for a family ride in the International pickup or in the neighbors’ Rambler there was always a “boo” emitted from the back seat if we saw another team’s colors dangling in the wind.
The dirt of the field could never be limed out, but some of the stink would subside.
Unless, of course, jerseys were washed with an older siblings fishing clothes or the lutefisk baker’s wardrobe.
Mine would have a faint tinge of salmon scree, something that bothered me if I was stuck in left field where the warning track emptied into blueberry bushes lining the migratory trek of black bears, who were either bemused or tickled at my errant athleticism.
Our Little League history began at age 9 and ended at age 12. Our town had nothing beyond that at the time. At age 11 and at 12 I made All-Stars, we traveled to Wrangell and Haines, respectively, and were crushed by Juneau. I was homesick both years and had to have my mom comfort me.
The lessons learned, though, were enough:
Don’t wear cleats in the house, don’t be skunk cabbage and turn your side into the pitch to soften the blow.
• Contact Klas Stolpe at sports@juneauindependent.com. (Portions of this column first ran in the Sitka Sentinel in July 2019).
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