Baseball's Johnny Appleseed

In Moana Park, where outfield signs advertise, with fine impartiality, all three Republican candidates for Senator, Heidemann does look good against a Visalia team that had arrived in a bus marked Orange Belt Stages. He goes behind second on one ball, grabs it and in the same easy motion flips the ball with his gloved hand to the second baseman. Centerfielder Ed Southard makes a rouser of a diving catch of a windblown liner. Third Baseman Mike Parks, three days out of high school, a cocky young man who says he plans "to make the Bigs," drives in two runs with his first pro hit.

"But this is the good part," Lindeman says. "It's something else when they come to you asking if they have a future. What can you tell them? They're limited? It's a business. Pretty brutal. You get attached to these kids. They're a nice bunch."

These are not the bush-leaguers of yore, jokers staggering around under fly balls and relaying throws to the hotdog vendor. The sparse crowd still vanishes almost immediately after the game and the lights still go out quickly to save electricity, but now wives—a pretty collection, as ballplayers' wives always are—wait outside the dressing room with babies in their arms. They look too young to be wives, just as their husbands always look too young to be—some of them—two years away from the Bigs.

LODI, CALIF. The name of the man who discovered gold at Sutter's Mill in 1848 was James Marshall. By one of those graceful coincidences whose meaninglessness is exceeded only by their extreme improbability, James Marshall is also the name of the manager of the professional baseball club nearest Sutter's Mill in 1968.

This Jim Marshall, rookie skipper of the Lodi Crushers, is an amiable ex-Cub outfielder whose Nixon nose and sky-blue eyes are continually wrinkled by an easy grin. "I just can't tell you enough about minor league baseball," he says. "The inspiration and desire of the American boy to succeed hasn't lessened at all. When I returned from the Orient [ Marshall played three years with the Chunichi Dragons] I wondered if players here would work as hard as Oriental boys do. But my boys have shown me a lack of nothing.

"Sometimes they do wonder, I think, if anybody upstairs really cares. I constantly let them know that Mr. Wrigley and Mr. Holland do care." Does the manager, Mr. Marshall, care? There are subtle clues. A notice on the dressing-room wall reads, "SHAVE ONLY AFTER BALL GAME [signed] Manager." Manager protests the handling of the game that night with so much spirit that the umpire not only throws him out and calls him a nasty name, but also summons the police and forfeits the game 9-0.

Marshall's Japanese orientation fits right into the Lodi mode. In an area rich in Japanese-Americans, the Crushers have a Japanese owner, program ads for Japan Air Lines and Pan Am to Tokyo, a large box reserved for the Nisei Society, a Japanese pitcher and a Japan Night.

The Crushers just plain have color. One good pitcher is a Cherokee Indian named Lloyd Kingfisher. Previously they had millionaire 20-year-old pitcher Lee Meyers and another pitcher named Fast, who was slow but went to the parent Cubs anyway because he had an excellent sinkerball.

Even the name has to be the best since the Mud Hens. "No, they're not ore Crushers," Marshall corrects. "They're grape Crushers. No, they don't report for work in bare feet. They had a contest to pick that name. Some of the other suggestions were Idols [ Lodi backward], Lodi Stars and The Stompers."

After the game, the grape Crushers adjourn to a caf�. The topic is the usual one for ballplayers. "Don't call her so often," one player is saying to a teammate. "Pretty soon she'll get used to the idea."