Blue Ridge Country March/April 2022 - 10

FROM THE EDITOR
PLUS WATCHING THOSE ON THE WAY TO STARDOM
Spring Rite: Pretending
You'll be a Baseball Star
" Heinhammer and McGuire both had singles
for the Phils, who had three hits overall. "
By KURT RHEINHEIMER | Illustration by JOSEPH MACKERETH
T
hat quote, from the Radford (Virginia)
News Journal sometime in the mid1950s,
is the first newspaper clipping in
a series of notebooks of yellowed snips
kept over the decades since.
Among the significances to no one
but me are the pretty-close spelling of
a strange German name that was pronounced
" Ranhammer " on that red-dirt ballfield all those
decades ago, and that my maternal grandfather
was kind and connected enough to make sure
his first grandson got to play organized baseball
as a 10-year-old visiting from Baltimore over
the summer.
It is also a classic case of peaking early. Such a sad
thing when your highest athletic accolade in print occurred
not too long after you learned to read, though I
did get mention in a high school paper baseball-team
preview that, " Rheinheimer will add defense in the outfield. "
Pretty sophisticated damning with faint praise
from a high school baseball coach.
The broader significance of the Radford high
point-when put next to the arrival of the Orioles to
my hometown in 1954-is that putting me on a real
baseball field served to create and cement a lifetime
love of going outside every spring since with a ball and
glove, and going inside a stadium a few times a year
to watch a game played by men who give the game its
supreme manifestation.
Those two loves-playing baseball every day I could
and watching the fledgling Baltimore Orioles-created
a fantasy that I nurtured for decades: That one of these
springs, I would travel to Bluefield, West Virginia, for
the tryout camp the Orioles operated there for many of
the years the team fielded a rookie-league team there,
from 1958 to 2010.
The fact that I never got close to doing any such
thing-deep in my heart I knew the likelihood of success
was roughly equivalent to somehow becoming six
10 BLUERIDGECOUNTRY.COM
feet tall-didn't diminish
the every-spring fantasy
all that much, as
baseball perhaps more
than any sport is built on
such make-believe: You'll
find a way to keep your
front foot from stepping
toward third base at the
too-late recognition of a
right-hander's curveball;
and the home-town team
will win the pennant.
The new hope for baseball in our part of the country
emerges out of the fact that after Major League Baseball
gutted the low minors after the 2020 season-eliminating
more than 40 teams-the no-longer-affiliated 10team
Appalachian League underwent a rescue of sorts:
It would be reconstituted as a summertime, wood-bats
league for college freshmen and sophomores.
Yes, our region still has professional minor league
teams in our " big " cities-places like Chattanooga and
Knoxville in Tennessee, Roanoke (Salem) and Lynchburg
in Virginia, as well as in Asheville, North Carolina
and Greenville, South Carolina.
But just-into-college boys using wooden bats must
certainly open up a whole new world of fantasy, hope
and joy for a generation of mountain guys who made
the college team and now have the chance to go play
baseball all summer long.
Whether you're one of them or a boy just discovering
the game or an old man looking at another season of
hopelessness for the Orioles, it's time to get the glove,
go outside and throw with somebody. And if that somebody
is a young grandson, say, to savor every second of
your chance to do so and to enjoy his chance to hope
and pretend and dream with every pop of the mitt as
he perfects the American art of catching and throwing
a baseball.
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Blue Ridge Country March/April 2022

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