On our family’s summer visits to Radford, Virginia, my grandfather paid keen and careful attention to his grandchildren.
In my case, at least to the point that old memories can be trusted, a primary focus was baseball. He bought me my first (four-fingered!) glove, took me out into the backyard to throw and hit. He signed me up for the tiny-guys league, and also sat me down on those glorious Saturdays to watch the Game of the Week on the biggest TV I had ever seen. He was a big fan of Dizzy Dean and his penchant to take delicious liberties with the language.
I’m not sure of the connection between these grandfatherly teachings and my instant and ever-abiding love for the baseball team that came to my hometown around that time, but as soon as they got there, I was the best-fan-for-my-age the Orioles have ever had. I fell in love with Ryne Duren and Billy O’Dell and others, and memorized the back of their baseball cards when I got lucky enough to get one in my weekly-allowance purchases of those magical penny-apiece bubblegum cards.
Given my predilection for the home-town team, I had a hard time understanding why my grandfather loved to talk so much about a guy named Bob Porterfield, who by the time I came to love the game was a washed-up 30-something guy struggling to stay in the majors.
I never came to know the answer during my grandfather’s lifetime, but over recent weeks I’ve come to understand: Bob Porterfield was born in Newport, Virginia, about a 20-mile drive from Radford. Porterfield told the story that after he came home from the army in 1946, he joined a semi-pro baseball team, and that that team challenged the Class D Radford Rockets to a game, after which the Rockets offered him a contract. And seven years later, just before injuries derailed his career, Porterfield won 22 games in a season for the Washington Senators, leading the American League with nine shutouts that year. Add to all that that Bob Porterfield was apparently a wonderful raconteur who tended not to let objective truth get in the way of recollections of his accomplishments.
No wonder my grandfather kept a close eye on Bob Porterfield.
Which brings us to the point for today. No, we don’t have any big-league teams in our mountain region. But there are still six MLB-affiliated teams—in the towns of Salem and Lynchburg, Virginia; Asheville, North Carolina, Chattanooga and Kodak, Tennessee, and Greenville, South Carolina. Not to mention 10 teams in the Appalachian League, in recent years reborn as a June-July summer college-players league.
The view from this desk is that baseball—the Great American Game—is a beautiful thing to watch. And when you take the time to learn a little about this player or that one—that he was born in a part of the land that’s precious to you, too, that he’s only 19 and he’s already in Double A ball, that you remember his father from your favorite big-league team, that he goes to the same college or high school you did—then that appreciation of the game can deepen as you pay attention to a young man lucky enough to go out and play baseball on most of the warm days of the year.
Study up on your favorite local roster and add another layer of magic to an evening at the ballyard. Or even, for the 11 of us who still do so, reading the box scores.
The story above first appeared in our March / April 2023 issue.
