John F. Pardon: Why I Research

In the early 1950s, a youngster growing up in the suburbs of New York City had to pick a team to root for, the Dodgers, the Giants or the Yankees. It was a matter of survival at the local lot where you gathered to play.

Toward the end of the spring training schedule, the Yankees were working their way north 10 open the season. On this particular night, they were facing the Atlanta Crackers in Ponce de Leon Park. Fiddling around with the radio at the head of my bed, I happened to tune in the Cracker play-by-play announcer. It was hard to keep the station, but the weak signal seemed to strengthen at just the right moment: the Crackers were leading the mighty Yankee team. They held that lead, and Don Larsen was the losing pitcher, if memory serves.

To needle my father, a Yankee idolator, I bounded out to the kitchen the next morning and gleefully announced that the Atlanta Crackers had beaten New York. “Well, who’s Atlanta, what kind of team do they have?” If the Yankees had lost, there better be a good reason for it!

From a meager collection of three or four baseball guides that one day would be part of a formidable library, we soon determined that Atlanta belonged to something called the Southern Association. I reasoned—quite rightly—that if Atlanta had a team in the years for which I had guides, it probably had had teams in other years, too. And if Atlanta did, what about other cities not on the (then) major-league map?

Thus began a love affair—a love affair with minor-league baseball that has lasted thirty years. The most immediate benefit was to learn some geography. From Boston and New York City to San Francisco and Los Angeles, and in more than 1,300 other cities, towns, and villages, baseball has been played professionally at one time or another since the 1870s. I might not know a town’s prime industry, export, or history, but I soon learned if it had a baseball team.

Through high school and college, military service, and into the working world, my interest ebbed and flowed, but never disappeared. Sometimes I worked furiously to complete a research project; sometimes I did nothing concerning baseball at all. But the interest remained.

The eventual outcome of this interest was the development of a list of cities that ever had a professional baseball team. I began in the 1950s with a simple form that contained space for the following information: city, year(s), wins, losses, winning percentage, position in final standing, attendance, manager(s), and league(s). But as I collected more and more data, problems inevitably developed. For example:

• A team moves from one city to another. How should the season’s information be divided between these cities?
• A team has one or more managers during the playing season. What were their individual records? Why the change?
• What of team records? When final standings of a league were not in balance (all teams’ wins equaling all teams’ losses), then what?
• And, finally, there were the leagues that folded before their regular schedules were completed.

I never fail to stumble upon some new variable to contend with in this endless project. As a result, I’ve continued to expand the kinds of data, adding columns for league classifications, farm system affiliations, and team nicknames.

At first, individual players didn’t catch my fancy. With several hundred thousand to handle, I thought that such a list would be best left to a higher power. But the spirit moved, and players became a segment of the project, too—particularly if some friend or fellow researcher expressed an interest. Over the course of thirty years, many blanks have been filled, giving me a great sense of gratification; but many gaps remain.

So, my goal of amassing complete data on the teams and cities of professional baseball is not finished and I know now that it never will be. Still, I come ever closer—and therein lies the lure, the tease: that maybe, despite my rational assessment, I just might add more data to make the puzzle more nearly complete.

And there’s another kind of reward for a quarter-century of digging into musty newspaper files, reading dim microfilm, talking to baseball people, and clambering up and down ballparks new and old, big and small. I’ve collected memories galore, memories and experiences. The miles I’ve traveled in search of information, if plotted on a map, would look like the wanderings of a deranged ant: here, there, around, and back again.

I talked with Jim Mills, Phil Howser, Marv Lorenz, and Stan Wasiak—not the household names of baseball, but men who lived their whole lives for and through the game. The yarns they could spin made a hotel lobby seem the site of The Arabian Nights tales.

And it was baseball that allowed me to peer into the hearts of several cities and small towns—the people, architecture, industry, geography—each offering something new and different. There’s Greenville, South Carolina, which had a team in the Palmetto League in 1931. The league didn’t survive the season, but my research turned up the nicknames of the five cities it briefly represented. Greenville’s team was the “Spinners”—for the spinning mills located in town.

“Up the mountain,” in the Smokies, in Asheville, North Carolina, pro baseball goes back to 1909 and the Western Carolina League. Since its earliest days Asheville teams have been known mostly as the “Tourists” for the obvious reason that the Smoky Mountains are a popular tourist area. (In 1968 I covered the Tourists’ entry in the Class AA Southern League and watched Sparky Anderson’s final season in the minors before he headed for the big leagues.)

Big or small, wooden or concrete, the baseball parks across the country provide a common link—like schools, churches, post offices, and other basic institutions of American life. In the higher minor leagues, the parks sometimes are scaled-down versions of the big league parks: the Columbus, Ohio, park, for example, seats more than 15,000, has modern lights and a restaurant-plus an artificial infield. Johnson City, Tennessee, on the other hand, has a park with a stand of trees towering over the outfield fence. A picturesque scene.

Each park has (or had) a history of its own. Some still stand intact; others are overgrown and falling down. Many have been torn down to provide acres of asphalt for shopping centers.

One such parking lot can be found in Peekskill, New York, on the site of Peekskill Stadium, home of the Peekskill Highlanders of the North Atlantic League of1946. The Highlanders won the regular season pennant and playoffs that year-with the final game at home capturing the playoff title. And in that game, a pitcher by the name of Tony Napoles accomplished one of the rare feats in baseball. A starting pitcher, Napoles played the entire season without suffering a single defeat: he was 18-0 for the regular season and added another 4 victories in the playoffs.

Researching such men as Tony Napoles and the Highlanders, poring over box scores and reading the Peekskill Evening Star (and it could be any newspaper, in most any city, anywhere), I find myself moving back in time. I begin to get the feel of life in the year I’m working on. Baseball research is a little like having your own time machine—Peekskill in 1946, Asheville in 1917, Johnson City, 1910.

And from that time machine I emerge with an understanding of the essential relationship of America and baseball: not the baseball of Mon. day night television, but baseball as it is experienced by the many—in fact, the vast majority—who work at it without reaching the top. Jacques Barzun wrote, “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.” As far as I’m concerned, whoever wants to know the heart and mind of baseball had better look to the minor leagues.

JOHN F. PARDON is a founding member of SABR and chair of its Minor Leagues Committee.