The Farmers' Game: Baseball in Rural America

Chapter 5. The Milroy Yankees and the Decline of Southwest Minnesota

c h a p t e r f i v e The Milroy Yankees and the Decline of Southwest Minnesota D on’t plan on buying a loaf of bread, a sack of flour, or a yard of percale in Milroy Monday afternoon,” warned the Redwood Gazette on September 11, 1947. “The village is closing shop and going to a ball game.” The Gazette reporter meant what he said. Just as they had the previous month for a game against archrival Wanda for the Redwood County League championship, members of the Milroy Commercial Club agreed to “lock up the town” for the game on Monday against Carlos in Mankato—a first-round matchup in the TwentyFourth Annual Minnesota State Amateur Tournament. The schools were also dismissed so the buses could be used to transfer fans to the game, ninety miles away to the east. More than 350 from the town and surrounding countryside (the population of the town itself was only 261) made the trip and saw their beloved Yankees edge Carlos, 7 to 6. Third baseman Joe Dolan had the key hit—a triple off the left-field wall in the bottom of the seventh inning—and the key play—a spectacular unassisted triple play in the top of that same inning. With runners on second and third, no outs, and the game hanging in the balance, Dolan snared a screaming line drive off the bat of the hitter, tagged the runner coming down from second, and stepped on third just in time to get the runner trying to get back. Though Milroy’s 7-to-1 loss to Rochester the following Thursday eliminated the Yankees from the tournament, players and fans alike cherished the memories of the Carlos game for years, indeed decades, to come.1 The excitement that baseball generated in Milroy exemplified the emergence, from the 1880s through the 1950s, of the small-town team as an institution in rural m i l r o y y a n k e e s , d e c l i n e o f s o u t h w e s t m i n n e s o ta 105 America every bit as much as the little red schoolhouse and the old-fashioned Fourth of July celebration. Diamonds dotted the countryside right alongside grain elevators, water towers, courthouse squares, and churches. “Everywhere in all this land the sunny spring afternoons resound to the well-known and eagerly-awaited ‘Play ball!’” wrote novelist Zane Grey in 1909. “There is no village, far from the maddening crowd, that does not boast of its nine.” The psychologist Hugo Münsterberg, trying to explain the magnitude of the game’s popularity in smalltown America to his German readers in 1914, estimated that on any given Sunday afternoon in the summer, “base-ball matches are played in more than thirty thousand places.” Both Grey and Münsterberg well understood that every small town in rural America that considered itself a “progressive, modern place” had its own baseball team.2 We do not normally think of small rural towns as progressive, modern places. After all, the great paradox of supply and demand in agriculture became even more pronounced in the twentieth century. Despite—and sometimes because of—unimaginable gains in production spurred by machines, chemicals, and improved plant and animal breeds, the twentieth century was not kind to farmers. One crisis followed another: economic crises, particularly in the 1920s, 1930s, 1950s, and 1980s, and resulting demographic crises. In 1900, more than 50 percent of the labor force in the United States still earned a living from the soil. That proportion shrank in each succeeding census until at present less than 2 percent of the labor force remains engaged in agriculture. Even in the 1920s and 1950s, decades normally associated with prosperity, good times on the farm were few and far between. The resulting exodus from the countryside made rural-to-urban migrations in the nineteenth century pale in comparison.3 How then to explain this fundamental restructuring of American agriculture juxtaposed against this progressive image of rural life? Literature does not provide much help. Two recurring themes have prevailed: doom and gloom, as in the works of Hamlin Garland, Sinclair Lewis, and Jane Smiley, and the deep nostalgia conveyed by novelists from Laura Ingalls Wilder to Garrison Keillor.4 History has locked itself into a similar dichotomy, from Richard Hofstadter’s culturally deprived and socially regressive farmers to Wendell Berry’s...