Use it, build it, and, yes, they’ll come
“Fenway Park,” John Updike begins his famous 1960 piece on Ted Williams, “is a lyric little band box of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curious sharp focus….”
Goodness, that’s not what the ball yard in Rowes Run resembles. Like Fenway Park in Boston, Rowes Run field occupies space that might otherwise go to housing or the random business establishment. Other than it being “curious” that’s where the resemblance ends.
Back when Rowes Run was a coal “patch” town, the powers that be placed the baseball diamond at the very center of the community. Both the Rowes Run school building and company store must have been thought of as auxiliaries; neither is centered; both were adjacent to the field, as they are today, relics of a past now long past — a past so far past it may be coming around to meet itself.
One late afternoon in June, I unexpectedly wondered into Rowes Run from the direction of Smock. And wouldn’t know you it, a ballgame had broken out. Two nines of young men were playing on a field that their great-great grandfathers might have laid out, if these ancients had worked for the Pittsburgh Coal Company in the early years of the 20th century.
(The Mellon-owned enterprise of Pittsburgh built Rowes Run before selling it to Henry Clay Frick in 1911. The Scottdale-based Frick Company was in charge during the lethal coal strike of 1933, for instance.)
It turned out to be an American Legion game between the Uniontown Legion team and the “Colonial” team, whose name is another nod to history: Rowes Run was home to Frick’s so-called Colonial 3 mine. (Grindstone claimed Colonial 4, Smock was Colonial 1. Both are nearby.)
The whole thing was charming – from the fans seated in their brought-from-home folding chairs and those standing along the foul lines and the outfield fence and the several fans perched in a flat bed truck parked near third base to the game itself, which was punctuated by two home runs by the Colonial’s elegant centerfielder, a whip-armed, slender young man by the name of Derrick Tarpley Jr., late of Brownsville High School and now of the Oakland A’s farm system.
One of Tarpley’s home runs cracked off the roof of a jerry-built structure that intrudes on right field just inches from the foul pole.
It’s not that far down the right field line, but it is uphill. Uphill? You got that right. Most of center and right field tilt up. And what goes up must come down. An outfielder running for a ball could fall flat on his face, if he weren’t careful.
None did during the game I saw. These were good outfielders, good ballplayers. They caught the ball, they threw the ball, they hit the ball.
For me, however, the star of the game, besides Tarpley, was this strange contraption of a field, hemmed in on three sides by the two-door, two-story patch houses built in the long-ago by the company for its hard-working miners and their families.
I went back twice more, just to see the field in action. Here’s hoping the Colonials play there next year and the year after and the year after that. They should play there forever, as far as I’m concerned.
As rambunctious as the field in Rowes Run is, the ball fields of the Bullskin Township Little League are trim, neat little nuggets of sod and artificial turf, green and brown, with bright white bases and foul lines accentuating the symmetry of the whole.
Across Pleasant Valley Road from the township grade school, the diamonds are exactly that: diamonds any town would proud of. The fact that the good people of Bullskin Township have pulled off this magic is more than noteworthy. It should be shouted, proclaimed!
I was there mid-afternoon, a Saturday or Sunday, I forget which. The locals were playing a team from Mount Pleasant, and the ballpark sparkled with fandom: moms, dads, granddads and grandmas, small-fry brothers and sisters, and some bigger kids.
There were well over a hundred people in attendance. It was more like 150 or even 200, standing and sitting and milling about from one foul pole to the other. A skimpier but contented group was assembled on the shady bank that runs along the first base line.
There’s a hopeful lesson here, maybe, that goes beyond the game itself, as wonderful as that is for the players: Might fine ball fields build fine communities? Might they nurture community-spirit and community pride? One thing seems clear enough: They sure bring people together. And isn’t that a blessing in this age of division and vitriol?
Richard Robbins lives Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.