“Heinhammer and McGuire both had singles for the Phils, who had three hits overall.”
Joseph Mackereth
That quote, from the Radford (Virginia) News Journal sometime in the mid-1950s, is the first newspaper clipping in a series of notebooks of yellowed snips kept over the decades since.
Among the significances to no one but me are the pretty-close spelling of a strange German name that was pronounced “Ranhammer” on that red-dirt ballfield all those decades ago, and that my maternal grandfather was kind and connected enough to make sure his first grandson got to play organized baseball as a 10-year-old visiting from Baltimore over the summer.
It is also a classic case of peaking early. Such a sad thing when your highest athletic accolade in print occurred not too long after you learned to read, though I did get mention in a high school paper baseball-team preview that, “Rheinheimer will add defense in the outfield.” Pretty sophisticated damning with faint praise from a high school baseball coach.
The broader significance of the Radford high point—when put next to the arrival of the Orioles to my hometown in 1954—is that putting me on a real baseball field served to create and cement a lifetime love of going outside every spring since with a ball and glove, and going inside a stadium a few times a year to watch a game played by men who give the game its supreme manifestation.
Those two loves—playing baseball every day I could and watching the fledgling Baltimore Orioles—created a fantasy that I nurtured for decades: That one of these springs, I would travel to Bluefield, West Virginia, for the tryout camp the Orioles operated there for many of the years the team fielded a rookie-league team there, from 1958 to 2010.
The fact that I never got close to doing any such thing—deep in my heart I knew the likelihood of success was roughly equivalent to somehow becoming six feet tall—didn’t diminish the every-spring fantasy all that much, as baseball perhaps more than any sport is built on such make-believe: You’ll find a way to keep your front foot from stepping toward third base at the too-late recognition of a right-hander’s curveball; and the home-town team will win the pennant.
The new hope for baseball in our part of the country emerges out of the fact that after Major League Baseball gutted the low minors after the 2020 season—eliminating more than 40 teams—the no-longer-affiliated 10-team Appalachian League underwent a rescue of sorts: It would be reconstituted as a summertime, wood-bats league for college freshmen and sophomores.
Yes, our region still has professional minor league teams in our “big” cities—places like Chattanooga and Knoxville in Tennessee, Roanoke (Salem) and Lynchburg in Virginia, as well as in Asheville, North Carolina and Greenville, South Carolina.
But just-into-college boys using wooden bats must certainly open up a whole new world of fantasy, hope and joy for a generation of mountain guys who made the college team and now have the chance to go play baseball all summer long.
Whether you’re one of them or a boy just discovering the game or an old man looking at another season of hopelessness for the Orioles, it’s time to get the glove, go outside and throw with somebody. And if that somebody is a young grandson, say, to savor every second of your chance to do so and to enjoy his chance to hope and pretend and dream with every pop of the mitt as he perfects the American art of catching and throwing a baseball.
The story above first appeared in our March / April 2022 issue. For more like it subscribe today or log in with your active BRC+ Membership. Thank you for your support!