Do men still gather to tell old baseball stories?
I wondered about this during a rain delay while covering a baseball game at Arvest Ballpark in Springdale. In the old days, writers, broadcasters, scorekeepers and just about anyone in the press box would swap baseball stories to pass the time during a delay.
I looked around the press box at Arvest Ballpark and saw three people who appeared to be in their 20s, maybe early 30s. Two were typing on their cellphones and the other was leaned back in a chair watching an NBA playoff game on TV.
So, I’ll tell a baseball story here. Just for old time’s sake.
Like thousands of small communities, my hometown of Caraway is a water tower town. The water tower still stands just feet behind the left-field wall that encircles the baseball park that was built in the 1930s as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s back-to-work project during the Depression. Semi-pro teams still played at Caraway in the late 1970s, although I doubt anyone ever got paid.
But money definitely changed hands one day when a team from Paragould came to challenge the Caraway Redbirds, whose uniforms featured the birds and bats on the front just like the St. Louis Cardinals. Harry Caray broad-casted a game from the wooden bleachers in Caraway one time, but he was long gone when this big fella on the Paragould team bragged that his little buddy on the team could throw a baseball over the water tower that stands 150 feet.
A handful of businessmen and farmers in Caraway, my uncle included, had never heard of anyone even trying such a thing and they sure didn’t believe this little fella from Paragould could do it.
So, bets were made.
My friends and I learned about the bet a day or two ahead of the game and four or five of us went to the ball park to test our arms. We were all in our 20s back then, including my brother, Gary, a quarterback in high school who also played college baseball at Grand Valley State (Mich.) for coach Phil Reagan, a former Major-League pitcher who was nicknamed “The Vulture.”
We took turns throwing baseballs up at the water tower, but even Gary could only skim the bottom of the structure with his strong right arm. So, we were convinced the men from Caraway would win their bets against the guys from out of town.
The challenge was to take place after the game that day and we got a look at the two players who were involved with the bet. The big fella was Ricky Poe, who stood 6-foot-4 and later played in the minor leagues with the New York Mets. The little fella was Randy Rogers, who stood 5-foot-10 and weighed, maybe, 160 pounds. Both played at Arkansas State and Rogers later spent a couple of years in the minors with the Atlanta Braves.
Although small in stature, Rogers was a left-hander with a powerful arm. We saw that first hand during the game against the Caraway team, which wasn’t as good as the Redbird teams from the 1960s.
The outcome was secondary to what was about to take place with Rogers’ attempt at the water tower toss. Fans inched closer in their seats as Rogers emerged from behind the wire fence that served as a dugout. But something happened right away that confused most of us who were watching.
Instead of standing close to the water tower like we had, Rogers strolled toward center field and stopped just behind second base.
What’s this, we wondered? What’s he doing?
Rogers knew exactly what he was doing.
Instead of throwing straight up, Rogers backed away and threw on a long trajectory that made the path flight of the baseball easier than what we had attempted. Rogers cleared the water tower on his second or third try and he and Poe walked away with about $85 from the men from Caraway, mostly in $10s and $20s.
I talked to Rogers a few years after his water tower toss and we had a few laughs about it over the phone. Rogers said he knew he could win the bet because he had tossed a baseball over a water tower in Missouri that was just as tall or even taller than the one at Caraway.
He didn’t say, or maybe I didn’t ask, how many bets he and Poe won that summer before people caught on. The folks at the ball park in Caraway, especially the ones who lost money, certainly learned something none of us had much thought about in those days.
Science and physics can be applied to about anything, even in baseball.
Rick Fires can be reached at rfires@ nwadg.com or on Twitter @NWARick.