Teaming With Atmosphere : In Iowa’s minor leagues, baseball is still a game of dreams.

Rotund but leathery, the old scout sat across the aisle from me in the box seats behind home plate at venerable Riverview Stadium. With a practiced eye he watched Kevin Walker, the Clinton Lumber Kings’ starting pitcher, as he warmed up, throwing curve balls that spun right at us before ducking with a thud into the commodious mitt of catcher Marcos Sanchez.

The scout clutched a rumpled roster sheet and a small loose-leaf notebook, its dogeared pages askew, in which he recorded his own arcane scoring. On his finger was a huge gold ring with what appeared to be a stylized “M” on the stone.

Chuck Gedge sat on my other side. His baseball credentials included a Rollie Fingers mustache--the twirled sort favored by turn-of-the-century ballplayers--and a White Sox cap with a built-in radio for listening to the play-by-play.

Chuck and I were in the midst of a Midwest League baseball safari--the 1996 chapter of what has become our annual trip to the minor leagues. We’d started about a decade ago with a sweep through the ballparks of upstate New York; subsequently we’ve traveled to the Carolinas, to the mountains of West Virginia, to western Pennsylvania and Ohio.

Initially, we chose the minors to escape artificial turf, huge and impersonal stadiums, scoreboards with instant replay and digital instructions to clap or cheer. We’d been drawn to baseball’s older, quieter ways, and to the minors’ elderly, idiosyncratic, intimate ballparks with their endearing quirks. We reveled in the ease of getting cheap seats close to the action. We fantasized about buying a team ourselves.

But since we began our minor league trips, a boom has transformed minor-league baseball and wildly enhanced its popularity. Now franchises at all levels are in demand, and the smaller, poorer cities that supported the minors through the lean years often lose their teams to richer communities with shiny new ballparks. In the last 10 years, 64 minor-league stadiums have been built around the country. Attendance has burgeoned to 30 million annually, a level not reached since the late 1940s, the heyday of the minors.

With national currents running fast in the direction of change and commercialism, we thought that hidebound, rural Iowa held special promise for an old-time baseball fix. In spite of empirical evidence to the contrary, baseball retains its aura as a country game, and Iowa is nothing if not country. We knew some older parks survived there. And the state is, after all, the setting for “Field of Dreams,” the mystical, heartstrings-plucking baseball movie starring Kevin Costner.

For all the changes, the minor leagues in general do still express much of the magic extolled in that movie: a camaraderie among fans, a game played for the love of it, a physical closeness to the field. On the practical side, ticket and concession prices, though rising, remain substantially lower than in the “bigs.”

“Go the distance” is the mysterious command that runs through “Field of Dreams.” A similar imperative sent us journeying halfway across the country to see games at four evocative Iowa ballparks, homes of teams in the Class A Midwest League, near the bottom rung in organized baseball.

*

One of the ballparks is Clinton’s Riverfront Stadium, built in 1937 as a Works Progress Administration (WPA) project. It’s a cozy ball yard, with Art Deco accents on its facade. We and the old scout were part of a sparse crowd of 632 assembled last summer on a hot July night for what proved to be an outstanding game between the Lansing (Mich.) Lug Nuts and the Lumber Kings.

As we filled out our scorecards, we cast discreet sidelong glances as deferential younger scouts came down and chatted with our neighbor--paying court, it seemed to us. That’s when we noticed the ring. Chuck nudged me.

“Ask him about it,” he hissed. I demurred.

The Lug Nuts--a brand-new team with a brand-new stadium (10,000-seat Oldsmobile Park) and a clever moniker designed to sell plenty of logo goods--is a Kansas City Royals affiliate; the Lumber Kings play under San Diego Padres auspices. The name of the game in the affiliated minors is player development, and the big-league teams pay player salaries and expenses in order to fill the funnel that eventually feeds the most talented to the parent clubs.

As the game unfolded, Padres management could feel especially sanguine as their young players jumped out to a 2-0 lead in the first inning on a pair of singles and a double by first baseman Nathan Dunn. The Lumber Kings added a run in the fifth, while Kevin Walker pitched shutout ball through the seventh.

Our elder statesman neighbor was sans radar gun, the weapon used by the now generation of scouts to clock the speed of pitchers. Often we’d see a battery of them, aimed at a pitcher deemed a genuine prospect.

“Hey, Steve, what kind of time you getting on this guy?” the old scout called over his shoulder when Tod Bussa came in to pitch for the Lumber Kings.

“Ninety.”

“Ninety,” he repeated. “Thanks. I can’t tell at night--can’t follow it that well anymore.”

*

Afterward, filing out into the humid night with the rest of the faithful, we bumped into the old scout on the stadium concourse.

“I couldn’t help noticing your beautiful ring,” Chuck said. “Is it a World Series ring by any chance?”

“Yup,” he replied. “I have two. The Minnesota Twins gave them to me for signing Kirby Puckett.” He said his name was Brown, and we shook hands. “I’ll be back tomorrow night,” he said. “See you then.”

But we wouldn’t be back; nor would Kirby Puckett, who days earlier had announced his untimely retirement from baseball because of incurable eye problems. We’d be at Cedar Rapids, the last stop on our circuit of Iowa ballparks.

The first had been Davenport, where our trip seemed off to an inauspicious start. We arrived about half an hour before game time at John O’Donnell Stadium, and the rain was falling in sheets.

“This may not turn out to be one of our better trips,” Chuck said dourly. But before long it let up, and we scampered through a sprinkle to the ticket window.

Then it stopped completely, and in short order this wonderful old brick stadium (it dates from 1931 and is named for a former sports editor of the Quad Cities Times) was bathed in evening sunlight. Our baseball odyssey would have a fine beginning after all.

John O’Donnell, recently refurbished, is a classic park with a fully covered grandstand and a rounded brick facade with repeating arches. Behind first base, elegant Centennial Bridge soars off across the Mississippi from Davenport to Rock Island, Ill., which, along with Moline, Ill., and Bettendorf, Iowa, make up the community called the Quad Cities. Crowds at O’Donnell are generally big: 5,516 at the game we saw.

The rain stopping was the last bit of luck for the Quad Cities River Bandits and their fans that night, as the home team lost 8-3 to the Cedar Rapids Kernels. Nevertheless, the fans didn’t lack for entertainment, as games, stunts and promotions filled each of the between-innings warmups. Most of these have become staples at minor-leagues stadiums around the country--and, in truth, wear a little thin when you see them repeated at game after game. Among them is the inevitable “dizzy-bat race,” where contestants stand bats on the ground, place their foreheads on the bats, twirl around 10 times, then stagger off toward an elusive finish line.

Along with this and other diversions, the Quad Cities people had laid on a rather good act: “Skydog U.S.A.,” a group of acrobatic canines who did airborne tricks with Frisbees for their trainer, Rockin’ Ray. But even better entertainment, I thought, was provided by the sunset’s afterglow backlighting the bridge and the towboats gliding by just beyond the outfield fence, belching smoke and pushing barges.

At Burlington the next night, in a roofless, very ordinary little ballpark, amid a very ordinary, little crowd of 411, we watched the Michigan Battle Cats beat the hometown Bees 7-6 in 10 innings.

At 6:45, 15 minutes before game time, with only a few dozen fans scattered through the stands, the grounds crew had finished wetting down the infield to a lovely dark brown, smooth as calfskin. In the stillness of a hot, bright evening, both teams drifted out on the field to throw, swing bats or run a few easygoing sprints. It was so quiet that each slap of ball in glove sounded distinctly, and the murmur of voices on the field carried up to the seats.

*

Cedar Rapids’ Veterans Municipal Stadium, built in 1949, offered the best food (including pork chop sandwiches, a Midwest League staple), best beer (Millstone, a local microbrew, on tap) and a barnburner on the field.

Though Cedar Rapids was our last Midwest League game in Iowa, we had one more stop, which we made the next morning. Driving out of Dyersville on a narrow country road that undulated gently, we spotted it across the cornfields: a white farmhouse, a red barn, a brown infield in a broad swath of grass that was pale against the darker green of surrounding corn. There were small bleachers, a backstop and modest light towers with a handful of bulbs. This little ball yard, recognizable to millions, was the “Field of Dreams” movie set, now maintained as a tourist attraction by the two farm families who own the cornfields that were leased to Universal Studios to build the field--a project that took just five days.

“If you build it,” according to the movie, “they will come,” and plenty do, about 55,000 annually. Visitors stroll the field, gravitating to the corn in left field, where the “ghost players” emerged in the movie. Many pose for pictures. Fathers play catch with sons and daughters.

“I have a very emotional reaction to all this,” Chuck said. “I feel guilty that the kids aren’t here.”

There are not one but two chances to buy caps, T-shirts, mugs, postcards and other trinkets from the Field of Dreams Movie Site or from R&A; Souvenirs, the more modest operation. (Unfortunately, the two owning families have been unable to agree on philosophies and policies, preventing their collaboration.)

Near R&A;’s store was a small sign. “Welcome to the Left and Center Field of Dreams,” it read. “We the Ameskamps are owners of all the property this side of the power lines including third base.” Inside R&A;’s shop, gloves, balls and bats fill a cardboard carton under the counter, free for the borrowing. The “Field of Dreams” souvenir stand across the way belongs to the Lansings, who own most of the infield, along with the barn and now-famous farmhouse.

We threw pop-ups to each other. We walked in and out of the shoulder-high corn that defined the outfield, emulating the “ghost players” who materialized that way. We pitched off the mound. We ran the bases. Finally, for a few serene moments before heading for home, we sat in the first-base bleachers, baking in the blazing Iowa sun and grateful for the cooling breeze that rustled the corn.

“Now we can say we’ve gone the distance,” Chuck said. He grinned, and the ends of his Rollie Fingers mustache twitched.

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GUIDEBOOK: Take Me Out to the Ballpark

Getting there: Cedar Rapids is the most convenient city from which to tour the minor league ballparks in this Iowa region; there are no nonstop flights from LAX, but most major airlines offer connecting service involving a change of planes. Round trip fares begin at $443.

Managing the minors: In 1997, about 240 minor-league teams are playing ball in 26 leagues in all the contiguous 48 states except Wyoming and New Hampshire, and in five Canadian provinces. Two excellent directories are invaluable when planning baseball travel.

The newer is “Minor Trips: A Traveler’s Guide to Minor-League Baseball” ($6; write to P.O. Box 360105, Strongsville, OH 44136). This book is organized by state, all information (including schedules) is located in a single entry, and it lists anecdotal tidbits about the ballparks, teams and area attractions.

The traditional bible is Baseball America’s Directory ($12.95 plus $5 postage/handling; telephone [800] 845-2726 to order). Organized by leagues, it covers the majors as well as the minors and has some useful additional information, including visiting team hotels (close to the ballparks and good quality). Both books list directions to the parks.

The Field of Dreams is open from 9 a.m. to sunset, April through November, though the infield closes at 6 p.m.; no admission fee, but donations appreciated. The field is located 3.3 miles from Dyersville in northeastern Iowa, near Dubuque.

For more information: The National Assn. of Professional Baseball Leagues, tel. (813) 822-6937, can provide general information on the minors, and their Web Site (https:/www.minorleaguebaseball.com) has links to individual teams in Iowa and throughout the country. For tourism information, contact the Iowa Division of Tourism, 200 E. Grand Ave., Des Moines, IA 50309; tel. (800) 345-4692 or (515) 242-4705.

--K.Z.