It’s Baseball Just the Way Father Knew It Long Ago

If you get to Little Rock, Ark., and you have any interest at all in baseball, make sure the Arkansas Travelers are playing at home at Ray Winder Field. Drive there immediately and treat yourself to a vision of baseball as it should be.

That doesn’t mean the pitching will be great and the hitting wonderful; it means you can understand why your father so loved the game.

Ray Winder Field was built in 1932. Modern stadiums are geometrically precise: 325 feet or so down the right-field and left-field lines; 375 feet in left-center and right-center; 410 feet to dead center. Not a lot of imagination there.

To someone who knows only modern parks, Ray Winder looks like it was designed by an architect with an astigmatism. Right field is 320 feet away and left field 349 feet. It’s 410 feet to left-center and 390 to center.

But the real monster is the fence they built 18 years ago when they put the interstate behind the field. From ground to top of the cyclone fence it’s 55 feet tall. You don’t see a lot of home runs in Little Rock, but when you do they’re things of beauty, soaring shots that look like the upward parabola of a rainbow.

What happens when it rains and the field gets wet? They thought of that in 1932. The builders sloped the outfield down. Visiting teams in the dugout look straight out past the first baseman to right field, where they see only a player’s cap. The right fielder is standing below the drop-off, out of sight.

Those of us who loved the Polo Grounds when the Giants played baseball there have to love Ray Winder. Memory tells me my father paid $1.50 per seat when we’d go to the Polo Grounds. It being New York, my father would slip the usher a buck or two and he’d move us down to more expensive seats.

No need to tip the ushers at Ray Winder. Even when I was there on June 1 to watch Fernando Valenzuela pitch and more than 12,000 fans overflowed a stadium that seats about 6,200, the ushers were so polite that it was clear they’d actually be offended by the thought of a little extra for their efforts.

On that night and the other three or four I watched games there, you could see the fans start to step more quickly as they entered the stadium, despite the 85-degree heat and 70% humidity.

As you enter, twilight is falling, the grass is a bright green from all the recent rain, and Elfreda Wilson is playing the organ. Once there were organs in most ballparks; these days they’ve been replaced by cassettes of rock music. Now, I was there when rock ‘n’ roll was born, and I love it still (Yes, as a matter of fact, I did go to the Rolling Stones “Steel Wheels” concert at the Coliseum two years ago). But I don’t need rock ‘n’ roll at eardrum-shattering levels outside the privacy of my living room, and certainly not in ballparks between innings. What’s wrong with silence as the players enter and leave the dugouts? But the next best thing to silence is Wilson on the organ.

The prices at Ray Winder are another plus.

The Angels charge $11 for their best seats at Anaheim Stadium. At Ray Winder the top price Aug. 5 will be $7--a couple bucks more than usual--but only because the San Diego chicken will be there. (OK, it’s a guy dressed up as a chicken; I mean, who’d pay $7 to see a piece of poultry roaming around?)

But there are even better buys. The night Valenzuela pitched for the visiting Midland Angels team, many of the tickets were free; you just had to pick them up at Wendy’s, Pizza Hut and Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets. On May 30, if you brought three labels from Heath Bars you got in free.

Once there, you can get a hot dog for $1 ($2 at Anaheim), but skip that and shell out $1.75 for the nicely spiced sausage on a bun. The bun is a bit on the soggy side, but hey, it’s probably the humidity.

Now, besides getting in maybe for free, and getting cheap eats, you can play bingo at the game. Pick up your score card for 75 cents ($2 at Anaheim), and you get numbers that may match the ones called out between innings. Winners get a variety of prizes, one of the top ones being a clock featuring the Clydesdale horses.

You also get with your score card a tribute to baseball that says in part: “In baseball democracy shines its clearest. The only race that matters is the race to the bag. The creed is the rule book. And color is merely something to distinguish one team’s uniform from another’s.” And you thought Little Rock meant only Orval Faubus!

The Travelers are a double-A farm team of the St. Louis Cardinals. That’s one reason for the Clydesdales on the clock--they represent Budweiser beer, and the owners of Bud also own the Cardinals.

The Travelers bill themselves as the “Greatest Show on Dirt,” and General Manager Bill Valentine prides himself on running “the cleanest stadium around.” Valentine is a former American League umpire who looks the same now as he did when he founded the umpires union a few decades ago.

A Little Rock native with a wonderful drawl, Valentine’s office is lined with photographs of the original Travelers team of 1901 and their successors from the century’s first decade. Turns out the Boys’ Club was getting rid of the pictures years ago and gave them to Valentine’s father, figuring that since young Bill was in the major leagues he’d be interested. The photos stayed neglected in his parents’ attic until a few years ago, Valentine said, when his mother asked him, “What are you going to do about those pictures?” And Valentine answered, “What pictures?”

The press box at Ray Winder is reached from a catwalk that takes you out to the front of the grandstand, assuming you get past the low beams without banging your head. I didn’t. It’s not glassed in, either, as a visitor quickly learns upon leaning forward to see what’s going on in the dugout.

But it’s a relaxed place, with one of the team broadcaster’s assistants collecting quarters for a pool on the night’s attendance. The official scorer, who decides if a player is to be awarded a hit on a play or a fielder is to be charged with an error, is a bankruptcy and divorce lawyer during the day, a baseball fan by night. And he’s not above asking his fellow occupants in the press box if they thought it was a hit or an error.

The attendance while I was there following Valenzuela’s progress back to Anaheim was around 2,000 fans per game.

Valentine says the team drew more than 250,000 fans in 1987; he delights in noting that “the Travs are the only professional sports team in the state of Arkansas.”

The stadium has been renovated in the past decade; it broke Valentine’s heart to tear out the wooden bleachers and replace them with metal seats, but it just got to be too expensive to sand down and refinish the wood after every season.

And yet . . . there’s enough wood left in the stadium to have the smell of small-town ball fields that I remember from 40 years ago. That wonderful smell that promised baseball would be played today, that the hot dogs would taste good and the orange soda would sparkle, that the next few hours would be a joy.

In the interest of full disclosure, I note that more than 1,200 stockholders have at least one $5 share in the team. You don’t get anything as an owner: Any profits go back into the stadium, the baseballs, the thousands of things needed to keep the franchise going. But you do get the chance to say, “I own a part of a professional baseball team.”

The shares don’t come up too often, and when they do there’s sometimes a waiting list. But Valentine says that every once in a while someone wants a little extra cash and will sell a block of 20 or 50 or 100. While I was there, a small block became available and there was no waiting list.

I sent my check in last week. Hey, I own part of a professional baseball team! How about that?