There is No Space in Iowa
By Justin Klugh
There are certain thing’s everybody’s jawing about in baseball right now. Bert Blyleven and the prejudice of letting players with weird names into the Hall of Fame. What mustachioed fate awaits Carl Pavano. Something about Nelson Cruz.
Well, I don’t fly that way. I fly backwards, or around in circles, or sometimes not at all, like a chicken–staring up at the other, smarter birds, sailing off into the sunset while I squawk and hop about furiously on the ground in a fit of jealous rage. So I will be writing today about something that’s escaped the headlines.
I had some idea about demanding the Hall of Fame allow in mascots, and then coming up with a list of my favorite mascots and some of their all-time best goof-arounds, but it turns out they already allow mascots into the Hall of Fame, so now I can’t even make a big stupid deal out of it.
So follow me, why don’t you, as we tilt the lid off of baseball and take a peak at all of the writhing, squirming, larval stories underneath.
Now, with the ambiguous manner in which this column opened, you’re probably wondering just what exactly constitutes a “baseball story.” Ha, ha, ha. Great question. Here’s your response: Not quite everything. For instance, let’s try to stay away from this kind of alarming thing, in which violence happens involving baseball equipment, but there is no real attachment to the game itself. That we know of.
We begin, as most wildly interesting stories do, in West Des Moines, Iowa.
Des Moines is in that howling vast in the middle of the country, where people most often do not travel, unless they are unfortunate enough to have relatives or a plane crash there. Have I ever been? No. In fact, I was a teenager before I could even pronounce the name correctly. But I feel the stereotypes I’ve heard, combined with the pictures I’ve seen, give me the right to say whatever I want, so just shut up, and let’s do this.
People, children are everywhere. I’m not crazy about it either. But Iowa, namely Des Moines, is not immune to the viral outbreak of small, irresponsible people slowly engulfing our planet. One redeeming factor of kids is that they are easily distracted, sometimes with sports. Sometimes that sport is baseball. In Des Moines, that sport is often baseball; so often, in fact, that they’re running out of it.
They follow a peculiar baseball league model in the community of Holiday Park: They allow everyone to play. When I was growing up, that was what many of the coaches referred to as “total bullshit.” Sure, we would all show up on the first day of tryouts, recognizing each other from school or the luscious suburbs from which we came, creating bonds to last a life time and laughing from the sheer pleasure derived from America’s past time–until it was all shattered by the apparent need for middle-aged men to corral us into skill-based groups, like coordinated and less coordinated herds of goats.
However, in Holiday Park, like I said, they just let everyone play. It’s called “Open League” ball, and some people writing this probably wish it was around in their communities when they were children. They have a Competitive League, too, for all of those who aren’t satisfied by just playing baseball, and feel a need to, like, win it all the time. But what’s important is that Holiday Park saw the Little League Model for playing baseball, read it over carefully, and then wordlessly set it aflame because they hated it.
There are 100 Open League teams, and 123 Competitive League teams, and only 62 acres of Holiday Park, uh, parks–which is like trying to cram a rapidly multiplying school of gold fish into a single bowl. It can’t be done. Those horny gold fish just won’t stop doing it.
Sure, I know what you’re thinking. “Why don’t they just go to other places in West Des Moines?!” Well why don’t you just go to hell.
Sorry. It’s just that, they totally have tried that, so when you say things like that, I feel like you’re not even listening to me. The truth is, the community has gone to other communities in search of space for their children to play baseball, and there just is not any.
They’ve been all up and down (or side to side, it’s impossible to tell, unless you use a map) Iowan regions like Raccoon River and other ones you’ve never heard of, in search of a system or space where these teams can play and practice. But it’s getting old fast, sort of like this article.
“We don’t really care what sort of solution the city agrees to as long as it gets us more space,” said president of the Holiday Park Baseball Club Dan Brown, probably pounding both fists on a desk.
There’s a lot of baseball and softball being played in Iowa, whether its kids, or teens, or pre-teens, or 40-year-old men in the throes of a humiliating mid-life crisis. The scheduling and space allotment involved boggles the mind, and you can’t take away from one group just to give to another, no matter how many times you compare yourself to Robin Hood.
If there’s one way they’re playing baseball in Iowa, it’s “nicely.” So many hopefuls leave the demoralizing fields of tryouts with tears welling up in their eyes; can this small, corn-flooded community really be punished for a spike in interest, just because they want everyone to play?
Absolutely. This is America, where you can be punished for anything. It’s probably going to suck.
As MLB players are exchanged like currency and legends are welcomed into or burned entirely from the Hall of Fame, just remember this off season–out there, somewhere, the little guy (or community) is probably very quietly, and very politely, being screwed.
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