Outlaws in the outfield

Don Seibert was waiting with his 12-year-old son, and a baseball, on Elm Street, outside the glossy buses housing Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson and their bands.

Seibert, a high school history teacher, had come all the way from Lancaster, Pa., “to kill two birds with one stone,” hoping to complete the fatherly ritual of taking his boy to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and then catch Friday night’s opening of the barnstorming tour that will take Dylan and Nelson through 22 minor league ballparks in the next month.

An hour before the concert, Seibert was combining both missions by seeking autographs from the two grizzled music legends -- on the baseball.

The history teacher knew getting Dylan’s signature would be a longshot, but one of Dylan’s guitarists signed and summed up what the father and son were about to witness:

“It’s pure Americana,” the guitarist said.

That symbolism indeed is heavy in what storefront signs here dubbed the “WillieBob” tour: Kids under 14 get in free, and there’s no reserved seating -- you plunk yourself down in the outfield, or the bleachers -- during an itinerary that avoids the likes of New York, Los Angeles and Chicago in favor of Wappinger Falls, Altoona and Aberdeen.

For the kickoff concert here, the concession contract was turned over to Cooperstown’s volunteer fire department so the hot dogs and sodas could help pay for a new ambulance.

Of course, it’s often hard to separate myth from reality in baseball, or music, or small-town life, so the tour reflects that too, including the start here in Doubleday Field. The cozy ballpark up the street from the Hall of Fame persists in hanging a banner declaring itself the “Birthplace of Baseball” despite the recently unearthed evidence showing that Abner Doubleday was not father of the national pastime.

The organizers had hoped to end the WillieBob tour at Hollywood’s “Field of Dreams,” the diamond-in-a cornfield setting for Kevin Costner’s movie that declared Iowa to be heaven on earth. The families that owned the Iowa site wouldn’t agree, however, so the concluding concert will be in Kansas, “in the wheat fields instead of the cornfields,” shrugged Mike Veeck, the man whose promotional instincts -- and birthday wish -- gave birth to this tour.

And what could be more Americana than that, how the impulse came from the son of the man who once sent a midget up to bat in a major league game?

Mike Veeck’s father is in the Hall of Fame, though not for how he hit a ball. The late Bill Veeck owned three teams and won pennants but was best known as the “inveterate hustler and energetic maverick,” as the Hall puts it, behind such promotional innovations as postgame fireworks.

A modern-day blend of his old man and a radio DJ, son Mike, 53, made his own name by filling Chicago’s Comiskey Park with a Disco Demolition Night in 1979. While record burning in the outfield set off a riot and cost Mike Veeck his job, he did get a few more cracks at the majors and came up with Lawyer Appreciation Night, charging attorneys extra to get in.

But he’s found his niche in the more freewheeling minor leagues as part of a group that owns a handful of teams, including one in St. Paul, Minn., not far from Dylan’s hometown. Veeck says the singer-songwriter became one of his three idols -- along with his father and Cleveland Indian slugger Larry Doby -- the day, as a youngster, he traded two Beach Boys albums for a “Blonde on Blonde.”

So for his birthday in 1994, another executive of the St. Paul Saints took him to a Dylan concert in Rochester, Minn., and a fan of the team -- a childhood friend of Dylan’s -- arranged for them to get backstage.

“We had this strange exchange,” Veeck recalls. “[Dylan] looked at me and said, ‘You’re that guy who runs that ballpark with the trains,’ ” a reference to the tracks beyond left field.

It took three years, but Dylan did a show there in 1997, drawing a sellout crowd that included his mother and comedian Bill Murray, a part owner of the team. Veeck, being a Veeck, naturally thought then of taking the show on the road.

The organizing was done by Chicago-based Jam Productions, whose Jerry Michaelson uses a baseball metaphor to explain why Dylan signed on: “People wouldn’t think of Bob Dylan showing up at a minor league park to play. But he’s one artist who likes to ‘change up,’ ” Michaelson said, “to bring his music to different places [and] a whole new audience.”

Dylan served up baseball lingo himself in his one statement on the venture.

“What we aim to do with this tour,” he said, in announcing the shows, “is hit the ball out of the park, touch all the bases and get home safely.”

And everyone agreed it was fitting to “start in the home of baseball,” Michaelson said, even if Cooperstown isn’t quite as advertised any longer.

Myth and nostalgia

The Hall of Fame opened in 1939 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the invention of the game here by Doubleday, a claim based on the finding of a national commission and discovery of a very old baseball.

Skeptics questioned Doubleday’s role, however, and it recently was thrown a strikeout pitch when baseball historian John Thorn found a 1791 bylaw in Pittsfield, Mass., prohibiting any playing of “base ball” within 80 yards of a Congregational Church.

Thorn sees this lakeside community of 2,000 as “a charmingly artificial construct” built on “an event that did not exist,” with its shady lanes and still thriving “downtown” of baseball-themed shops, including several selling old-fashioned wooden bats that the flocks of tourists get engraved with their names for $60.

While some merchants may balk, officials of the Hall of Fame readily acknowledge the “new research,” confident that their role in American culture is secure after 65 years of hosting teary-eyed speeches by the baseball greats elected for induction. In fact, they embrace the way myth and nostalgia permeate the game, how it dredges up idealized memories of supposedly simpler times, whether of small-town life or of childhood, as in a film that begins with a mother calling her boy in from a ballgame he doesn’t want to leave.

Jeremy Jones, who manages the Hall’s film and music collection, notes how “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” is touted as the second-most-frequently sung song in the United States, after “Happy Birthday.”

“I’m not sure what the evidence is, but we’re sticking by it,” he jokes.

The day before the concert, Jones gave members of Dylan’s band -- all except Dylan himself -- a tour of the archives, which include the sheet music to that 1908 song, the lyrics for which were written by a man who had never seen baseball played but was inspired by an advertisement in the New York subway.

Jones was hoping to get a memento of Dylan’s own baseball song, 1975’s “Catfish,” which paid tribute to Hall of Fame pitcher Jim “Catfish” Hunter’s rebellion against baseball’s ownership system and to his crafty style. “Swing too early or too late / Got to eat what Catfish serve.”

The files also show that the Good Ole Boy pitcher was not impressed by being so immortalized. Hunter claimed not to know who Dylan was.

For those who find it hard to envision the famous bohemian as a baseball fan, there’s more evidence in the archives -- a news report that Dylan had been photographed in a convenience store reading Baseball Weekly. Dylan also has explained his youthful migration from Minnesota to New York in part by recalling, “I listened to the Yankee games on the radio....”

“In culture,” said Jeff Idelson, a vice president of the Hall, “it all ties back to baseball.”

A shortstop’s choice

Willie was “playing hurt.”

An hour before show time, in his trademark bus with the “Willie for President” license plate, he wasn’t sure how much guitar picking he’d be able to do in the wake of recent wrist surgery for carpel tunnel syndrome. He wasn’t sure what he’d play, either, other than that he’d start with “Whiskey River.” After a half-century on the road, a gig is a gig. At 71, Nelson is six years older than the Hall of Fame.

He played “a pretty good shortstop” in his hometown in Texas and got scholarship feelers from a local junior college. “I decided I wanted to play music instead,” he says.

Nelson met Dylan while visiting Kris Kristofferson in Mexico during the filming of 1973’s “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.” That night, they passed around a guitar.

Dylan called him “some months ago,” Nelson says, to see if he’d join the tour of minor league ballparks. But with a half-hour to go, he’s not sure whether they’ll sing together or simply do their separate sets. Then someone comes in with a note -- Dylan wants to talk about doing a couple of numbers together. “Whatever Bob wants,” Willie says.

A hit parade

The stage is in left-centerfield. The infield of Doubleday Field is roped off, so the sellout crowd of just under 12,000 sits in the grandstands or stands on picnic blankets in the outfield. Mayor Carol Bateman Waller, who runs a flower shop when she’s not running Cooperstown, stops to check on the fundraising concessions, which include a new local product, Doubleday bottled water, and no beer. She says the New Christy Minstrels performed here eons ago and didn’t go over well.

“This is our first concert in 30 years,” she says, “so this is a big deal.” She clutches a baseball signed by Willie Nelson but makes it clear it’s not personal booty. “It’s the village’s,” she says.

The white-bearded Texan goes on at 7:15 p.m. and does an hour of greatest hits, such as “On the Road Again” and “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.” Two of his own babies, his sons, are playing with him on the tour.

He wears a white cowboy hat and his red bandana. There’s no baseball cap and no “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” either, just Willie and his songs.

It’s the same when Dylan takes the stage in a black cowboy hat, though he mixes many new tunes with the ones familiar to the audience and generally does rock ‘n’ roll versions of those. The younger headliner on the tour, at 63, he’s never been one for nostalgia. He doesn’t touch his guitar this night, playing keyboard and harmonica while hunching down to a microphone on the left side of the stage.

He and Nelson never do sing together but will no doubt have that worked out by the time their buses reach Smokies Stadium in Sevierville, Tenn., or Lewis & Clark Stadium in Sioux City, Iowa.

There’s not much banter to the crowd with these troupers, and on Friday night not a word about baseball -- at least not until Dylan’s encores, when he shows them another side of himself, the prankster.

He does “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” a driving “Like a Rolling Stone,” which gets hundreds of people dancing in the outfield. Then it’s time to introduce the band to Cooperstown.

When he gets to one of his guitars, he says, “Speaking of baseball” -- which no one has -- “he just went down and got a bat for his wife.”

Dylan pauses with the timing of a Henny Youngman and adds:

“The worst trade he ever made.”