Take Two and Hit to Right: Golden Days on the Semi-Pro Diamond (review)

In Field of Dreams, when Kevin Costner picks up Moonlight Graham hitchhiking, the fuzzy-cheeked youth gushes about his chances of finding a mid western town that will provide a player a day job in exchange for playing nights for the local team. The Costner character knows something is amiss in time, for he realizes the boy refers to an era long gone. Hobe Hays's Take Two and Hit to Right: Golden Days on the Semi-Pro Diamond depicts life in exactly the kind of league the young Graham aspires to join: the semipro Nebraska Independent League. Hays, a hard-hitting second baseman for the McCook Cats, played in the NIL from 1948 to 1954, the league's golden years, finishing his career two years before its demise in 1956 when it lost its audience to television. In addition to offering a realistic piece of semipro history, the book is a personal memoir of Hays's coming of age, written from an affectionate but judicious perspective fifty years later.

From workhorse pitchers, loudmouth catchers, scrappy infielders, and crusty managers to boosterish owners, Hays rounds up the usual baseball suspects, illustrating the power of the game to create a mythology whatever the level of the play. From this taxonomy, he focuses in on a variety of individuals who populate the league united by their love of the game and their rare ability to play into adulthood. Al McElreath typifies what the locals and some of the league players themselves call "baseball bums."Usually former Minor Leaguers who went as far as their talents would take them, these men, like baseball sharecroppers, return to play year after year because they can earn four to five hundred dollars a month, a salary well beyond what their skills outside the game will garner. McElreath, a family man whose quick bat earned him a couple of years in the Pacific Coast League, is a genial team mate who always wears a smile but who decks the team owner when asked to turn in his uniform when his career wanes.

Counter pointing the "baseball bums" are the "college hot dogs," players like Hays himself, who use the summer league as a means to finance their educations and hone their skills at what, in those days, was a higher level of play. While the players enjoy the glory of the diamond, the book also chronicles many boring, lonely nights they spend moping around the streets of such Nebraska towns as Lexington, Superior, McCook, Kearny, and the league metropolis of North Platte. Hays evokes the excitement as well as the boredom of these towns at a time when wooden signs placed at intersections announced "Baseball Tonite" and brought people together in wooden ballparks to root on teams composed of a few locals and several hired guns, all wearing the town's name on their shirts. While the book suggests the bucolic quality inherent in historic treatments of small-town midwestern life, Hays does not exploit it, instead providing the straight dope on semipro ball in the NIL. The prefix semi- becomes a misnomer as towns compete to sign and retain the best players available, with even Billy Martin, on furlough from an army base in Colorado, donning the McCook flannels for a game! This competition for players, while ensuring a high level of play, contributes to the league's demise as higher costs demand larger crowds when television is not only cutting into the gate but transforming small-town life.

Hays himself, a University of Nebraska player, catches on as a "college hot dog" with McCook before closing out his baseball career with a year in North Platte. While his account of his own career provides an entry point to chronicle the league, the baseball story would be ordinary without the entwined maturation tale in which Hays realizes he cannot play second base forever. Aspiring to become an...