Baseball's Johnny Appleseed

On April 23, 1849 Cartwright wrote in the diary: "During the past week we have passed the time in fixing the waggon-covers, stowing away property etc. varied by hunting and fishing, swimming and playing 'Base-ball.' I have the ball and book of rules with me that we used back home.

"Tonight we held a council and decided to strike out for California along the Santa Fe Trail until we reach the Oregon Trail, then follow that to the South Pass and then North of the Great Salt Lake in the land of the Utes, through the Sierra Nevada Mountains to Calfornia...."

KANSAS CITY, MO. The most prominent visible evidence of Alexander Cartwright's game is a gaunt steel-and-concrete structure, set close by the Negro slums that were put to the torch in last April's riots. This is Municipal Stadium. Looking at the whole milieu, one feels stirrings of an unexpected emotion: sympathy for Charles O. Finley. But new Owner Ewing Kauffman starts with one big advantage: convenient new rubble-paved parking lots.

Symbolically, Kauffman, who had to sell off 19,100 shares of stock in his pharmaceutical company to buy the expansion-team Royals, attended West-port High School within a couple hundred yards of Cartwright's games with trappers and Indians. "I had the normal youth's interest in baseball," Kauffman says. "I played in grade school and high school. Since I was small and underweight, I had to pick a position others didn't want, so I claimed to be a rightfielder. My parents couldn't give me a lot of material possessions—I played with a cheap dime-store glove—and I never dreamed I'd ever be able to own a team. No, I never had a desire to be a major-leaguer, and at 51 I don't think I want to get in condition to work out with the team like Gussie Busch. Anyway, I'd rather play golf."

ST. JOSEPH, Mo. St. Joe, another former outfitting point for the trails west, is north of Independence, now a seedy urban void, and Westport, a small section of which is reconstructed as a Western-motif shopping center. Cartwright never got up this far but the NAIA National Baseball Tournament is being played here.

"I wisht I could go," a motel owner in nearby Wathena says. "That'll be good entertainment." Right. How dull is this? In the ninth inning of the first game, two out, 3 and 2 count, 2-2 score, the pitcher for Pfeiffer College (of Misenheimer, N.C.) is detected going to his mouth. The Central Washington batter trots to first. Rhubarb. After an arm-waving consultation, the Pfeiffer manager establishes that the pitcher was off the mound. Central Washington rhubarb. Batter returns to plate and fouls off two strikes. Pitcher bears down and strikes him out.

Or, in the first half of the first inning, Eastern Michigan's Jay Schwalm walks the first man, then stops a smash and throws to second. The infielder drops the ball. Next batter Steve Gerke beats out a perfect bunt. Bases loaded, none out. Crack. Hop, hop, thung, thung. Eastern turns over one of the most difficult double plays, shortstop to home to first. Then, a dribbler through the infield sprawling fielders cannot quite reach: score one. Gerke tries to steal home and is thrown out.

The showmanship is all first-rate from warmups on. Helium lights come on. An iridescent cloud of insecticide drifts in from right field. A good organist plays. William Jewell College of Liberty, Mo. executes well-choreographed pepper and fungo in left field, Eastern Michigan in right. The lower minors are dead. But at this small-college championship the lights are brighter and the infield smoother than they ever were in the bush leagues. The outfield walls are green and devoid of advertisement, the clumps of juniper grow on a grassy bank outside the third-base line.

Baseball may be too slow for the man who has driven to a big-city game, risking his life and fenders in 20 miles of heavy traffic, fought his way into a remote parking lot and shouldered through a hot, beery, pushing crowd. It may be perishing tedious when the season is 162 games and the seats are $3.50 and the league is 12 teams of often-shuffled faces and owners move franchises with the alacrity of boomtown madams. Or, it maybe, baseball is dead—as paying business—in all but the biggest cities with television markets and mass audiences, the partly captive audiences trapped in the ghettos of urban congestion. But in the small cities and country towns, as an amateur sport as Cartwright knew it, baseball survives—and has class the majors could imitate.

"The college game may be beginning to replace the old minor leagues," says Fred Flook after his Jewell team had won 4-3. "The coaching is better, and so is the play."