Baseball's Johnny Appleseed

"Baseball was the most favorite pastime," says another ranger, "next to drinking cheap whiskey. We still have kids playing out here sometimes, right where a visitor could get shocked on the head. We have to run 'em down to the flat."

GLENROCK, WYO. It is 19-7 in the sixth inning, an oil well pump is grasshoppering beyond the right-field fence, and the four-foot batsman is named Dean. This has to be a Wyoming Little League game. A quarterhorse mare and her spindly-legged colt stand outside the park, the entrance to which runs under a wooden railroad trestle, and within a centerfielder's throw of the diamond is a monument to the wagon trains that camped on this very ground within the memory of present residents. Alexander Cartwright camped here, too.

CASPER, WYO. In Babe Ruth Stadium there is a new Service League pitcher because the starter has committed the indiscretion of wild-pitching with the bases loaded. "After one-half inning of play," the announcer intones, "for Big Horn Life we have eight runs on three hits." The Big Horn Life manager is not satisfied. "C'mon, get the lead out," he requests.

A little tow-headed, blue-eyed, freckled girl about 6 years old, one of at least four look-alike brothers and sisters, happily initiates a conversation with a stranger. "That's my cousin Donny out there," she confides. "Donny Reynolds. He wears a red hat. I have a cousin Kenny in Little League, too. I don't know what color hat he wears. Donny is the one near the man in blue." That is reasonable, since Donny is coming to bat. Unfortunately, he flies out, but by that time his cousins are too busy playing in the sand behind first base to notice anyway.

JEFFREY CITY, WYO. In this uranium shanty and trailer town, population 800, the Game of the Week is on. At one of the city's two nameless cafes—boasting, honest truth, a paint-by-numbers nude over the bar—tiny portable color TV vies with jukebox country and Western. Amidst the collection of Western hats watching the game sits a Hemingway type in frayed demi-derby and rusty-red mustache and beard. The Tigers fall far behind the White Sox, and attention languishes.

LOGAN, UTAH. The top-of-page headline in the Herald Journal blares:

AL'S, CHEESE, HARDWARE TEAMS WIN IN GAMES

CARLIN, NEV. Four tykes from a trailer camp, one a Basque boy, arrive at hot, treeless, grassless City Park trailing gloves and bat. A Southern Pacific diesel idles beyond outfield fence signs advertising an iron mine, and a long-unlimed block C marks the dusty foothills above the desert-quenching Humboldt River. More even than in most kids' games the object is less baseball than bickering. The catcher misses the pitcher with almost every throw, and each time the chucker screeches, "Awright, Ronnie, you go chase it." The pitcher has his own control problem. When the yard-high batsman refuses to offer at any of a bad assortment, the Basque first baseman loses patience. "If you don't swing," he threatens, "we're gonna hafta fast-pitch you."

RENO. The Reno Silver Sox look up, interested, when a skinny, bespectacled sportswriter walks in. "You another new player?" asks one Silver Sock. When the visitor says he is just looking for Duke Lindeman, he is directed to a cubbyhole under the stands by one Sock who betrays elder-statesman status by knowing the general manager's name. A locker-room sign lettered in red says, DO NOT ASSAULT UMPIRES.

"We had 31 guys in or out in a couple of days because the Cleveland Indians had 30 signees in college," GM Lindeman explains, between answering the phone ("Yes, ma'am, game time is 7") and making change for moppet concessionaires. He excavates statistics from the tiny concrete-block office he shares with a mimeo machine, boxes of bats, pipes and steel lockers. They show that the Sox have been leading the California League in hitting, that Shortstop Jack Heidemann (.342) is still third individually and that Catcher Rick Underwood is up there at .333. "Heidemann is the kind everyone looks for," Lindeman says. "I'd defy any major-leaguer to make all three of the plays he made the other day."