Baseball! That’s what I’m talking about!!
The romantic Americana game is great, a sport that thrives not only on new records, but things old and nostalgic.
To hit a homerun at my first at bat of the new 2012 baseball season, I have in my possession the “score book” of Murfreesboro’s Central High School baseball dating back to 1919.
The historic score book also includes games in 1920, that featured “Huddleston” at catcher, “J. Todd” at second base, Ridley in center field and McKnight at first base.
A more full disclosure of those fabled early CHS teams will come at next Monday night’s annual Rutherford County Old Timer’s Baseball Reunion (6 p.m. meal, Jaycee Building at Cannonsburg in Murfreesboro) when the likes of Smyrna’s Ken “Coon” Victory, former Yankee (Little League) fire-baller Truman Jones, Christiana’s Tommy Wheeler and Auburntown’s Jerry Gaither will defend their “claimed” batting averages, fielding agility and ERA’s of youth.
An in-depth feature story, featuring the names and games of CHS from the 1919-20 eras, is slated in the Murfreesboro Post on Sunday, March 4, at which time I’ll credit the longtime CHS loyalist who supplied the historic document. The source might surprise you. She’s a girl who has kept the keepsake document of local sports lore for nearly a century.
Our region’s baseball season was officially launched Friday when the nationally-recognized MTSU Blue Raiders took the field…getting bushwhacked by the Kansas Jayhawks, another highly-respected program.
For amateur baseball players (of old), the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and 1950s may have been Americana baseball’s most popular era when each community (ranging from Kittrell, to Short Mountain, To Walter Hill, to Bradyville and Rockvale) fielded if not professional-level players, proud players who took their “home team records” seriously.
Some of those “good ole days” will be relived Monday night, 6 p.m., at the Jaycee Building, in Cannonsburgh, for the annual Ole Timer’s Baseball Club when the public, especially former baseball players, are invited for sit-down meal and guest speakers.
“Dinner will be served at 7,” noted Ole Timer board member Truman Jones.
Auburntown’s “fighting nine” of the early 1930s may have been the most unique, in that all position players were named “Gaither.”
“All Gaithers loved baseball, included my father would let us take time away from farm chores for baseball games,” noted retired Cannon/Rutherford County educator Jerry Gaither. “And half the town turned out when the Auburntown ‘Town Team’ took the field. We may not have been pro-quality, but we played a pretty fair country-brand of hard-nosed baseball.”
Bell Buckle/Deason native Charles Gilbert “Chuck” Taylor took Middle Tennessee regional baseball to the highest level in the 1960s, when he advanced from striking out Christiana’s Wheeler five consecutive times in a twin-bill, according to legend, before Taylor went on to play at MTSU, and then, he orbited to the top, as a Major League baseball player with the St. Louis Cardinals, Montreal Expos and New York Mets.
“Wheeler never got a ‘foul ball’ off my curve,” verified Taylor.
The first I heard of Chuck Taylor was as a farm boy, cultivating soybeans in the 1960s at night back in the “Bootheel” of Missouri, when colorful radio broadcaster (the late) Jack Buck described the Cardinals’ starting pitcher.
“I don’t know about the rookies’ overall talent, but coming from Bell Buckle, Tenn., he’s got to be a ‘winner,’” Buck hailed over the Cardinals’ network to the legions of Cardinal fandom throughout the Midwest. |
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