Table Of ContentOwning a Piece of the Minors Writing
title:
Baseball
author: Klinkowitz, Jerome.
publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
isbn10 | asin: 0809321947
print isbn13: 9780809321940
ebook isbn13: 9780585328843
language: English
Klinkowitz, Jerome, Baseball team owners--
subject United States--Biography, Waterloo
Diamonds (Baseball team)
publication date: 1999
lcc: GV865.K56A3 1999eb
ddc: 388.7/61796357/092
Klinkowitz, Jerome, Baseball team owners--
subject: United States--Biography, Waterloo
Diamonds (Baseball team)
Page i
Owning a Piece of the Minors
Page ii
Page v
Owning a Piece of the Minors
Jerry Klinkowitz
With a Foreword by Mike Veeck
Page vi
Copyright © 1999 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
02 01 00 99 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Klinkowitz, Jerome.
Owning a piece of the minors / Jerry Klinkowitz ;
foreword by Mike Veeck.
p. cm. (Writing baseball)
1. Klinkowitz, Jerome. 2. Baseball team ownersUnited StatesBiography.
3. Waterloo Diamonds (Baseball team) I. Title. II. Series.
GV865.K56A3 1999
388.7'61796357'092dc21[b] 98-21616
ISBN 0-8093-2194-7 (cloth : alk. paper) CIP
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Writing Baseball Series Editor: Richard Peterson
Page vii
Contents
Foreword by ix
Mike Veeck
Preface xiii
Acknowledgments xvii
I Would Have Saved Them If I Could: The Milwaukee 1
Braves, the Waterloo Diamonds, and Everyone Else's
Home Team
Structuring Short Season 18
Inside the World Series: An Outsider's Notes 37
On the Grass 50
Diamonds in the Rough: Three Tales of a Ball Club's 77
Death
Box 28 99
Mildred 129
Page ix
Foreword
Mike Veeck
There is an old adage that says, "You never forget your first girl, or
guy." Or as Steve Goodman, the late Chicago song-writer, put it so
eloquently, "You should have seen the one that got away." The same is
true with your first ball club. It's an affair that begins with star-crossed
love, very little logic, foolish dreams, and unrealistic expectations.
Your skepticism is overcome by the irrepressible joys of childhood.
You have become one of the inner sanctum, one of those select,
blessed few who is allowed to run a baseball team. It is like releasing
a horde of children in FAO Schwarz. You are the steward of your very
own board game, the king of Stratomatic. Like Coover's hero in The
Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh Prop., you
become your club. Baseball cards become animate, oral historians
who star in your personal movie. The biographical information on the
back becomes part of a chain that links you eternally with past and
future statistics of the greatest game in the world.
The beauty of Owning a Piece of the Minors is that it supports the
hypothesis that life is not a novel. Rather, it is a series of vignettes,
novellas if you will, strung together by the joys and the anguish, the
expectations and the harsh realities, and finally the bottom of the
ninth. You grow bit by bit in the life-sustaining
Page x
realization that there is always another game. That's probably your
only salvation. The one real question in baseball, as in life, is, How
long are you gonna play? Wayne Terwilliger, Lew Burdette, and Eddie
Mathews became common threads in the infinite tapestry that is
baseball. By virtue of stewardship of the Waterloo Diamonds, Jerry
Klinkowitz also joins this weave.
Another wonderful thing about baseball, like memories, is that soon
all traces of anger, resentment, and the hurt one experiences from your
team leaving, your team losing, and your favorite player striking out
with the bases loaded are filtered out, leaving only the constant
themes of birth, laughter, joy, hope, death, and then, blessedly, rebirth.
Nothing captures the joys of baseball better than Box 28. The gentle
descriptions of Lee and the extended family are my favorite part of the
book. If ever a narrative captured the feeling of a ball yard filled with
people, this is one. Baseball is made up of, and has always had time
for, the little dramas that exist behind the lines, the characters that
make up the backdrop, and the bit players and hustlers who provide
each ball yard with its own personality. Outside the yard, we may
have little or no knowledge of where our seat neighbors live, but in
the stands, we are believers, best friends, and witnesses to the truth . . .
to the resolution that life lacks. During the World Series, the crime
rate in the towns that are participating drops to virtually nothing. All
of the town's people are drawn together. People who would normally
have nothing in common suddenly find themselves bonded together in
the heat of battle, so Box 28 becomes a microcosm of all that's right
with the world.
Klinkowitz is at his best when he describes his trip out of the televised
Cub games and into the beautiful confines of Wrigley Field. Sandberg
to Moreland to Klinkowitz. But wait, Klinkowitz is a ghost, an
interloper. But isn't that the point? (Bill Veeck planted the ivy at
Wrigley Field, but other than that he used to say, "I have no business
on the field.") The manicured lawn is reserved for our heroes. We are
not worthy. Baseball is infallible. The business of baseball is not
infallible. It is subject to the foibles, idiosyncrasies, and bad decisions
made by its operators.
Page xi
Money rears its head, and when that happens, hearts are broken. Clubs
like Waterloo, that at one time were institutions, change logos like
socks and locales the way their major league brethren would like to be
allowed. As the enmity grows between the majors and the minors, we
are more tightly bound together. By the game? No. By the mystique?
Sadly, no. By greed. It is a perfect system in imperfect hands. A
microcosm? I would say so.
What is ultimately foisted upon the author and the reader is the
realization that after ninety years of baseball in Waterloo, it's an
illusory world. The confines of the ballpark keep out a world that is
neither sentimental nor overly compassionate, and the base paths
provide drama containing nuances and subtleties and complexities not
always of interest to the general public. Indeed, baseball belongs to a
legion of followers who share in the wonderful secret about the ebb
and flow of the game. It also belongs to a few business people who
don't have respect for the game. Baseball, business. Don't confuse the
two. Baseball is theatre. Business is proverbial. Runs: we all hope we
have a good one. Hits: an occasional brush with greatness. Errors: the
human condition.
Mildred is obviously the heroine of this book. She exemplifies all
that's good, not just in baseball but in the human condition. She has
the strength, the courage, and the willingness to take on Goliath with a
single sling and then walks away in stylish fashion. But perhaps the
most intriguing aspect of this book is that it cries out for a sequel five
years down the road. I believe, and I think you will too when you
finish, that there are a few more vignettes to be written, a number of
things still to be worked out in the author's mind. And when we find,
with passing years, the part of us that remains forever young, the part
of us that isn't cynical and that hasn't been hurt by the one who got
away, the rough edges will be rounded and, indeed, like a perfect
baseball, or a perfect world. This sphere, or the music therein, will be
Description:Owning a Piece of the Minors is by and about a man who lived his dream and acquired a baseball team. When Jerry Klinkowitz joined the group that ran the Waterloo, Iowa, Diamonds in the 1970s, ownership of a minor league baseball franchise conferred little mystique. Neglected for a half century, mino
