<p>Rich Wandschneider</p>

I cant remember a Wallowa County baseball season and if you count T-ball, I go back to 1981 with this much shorts and T-shirt weather. Oh, there was the game in Joseph a couple of weeks ago when the temperature was 34 and we played through two short blizzards a reminder of more typical Wallowa County baseball seasons but for most of this years Little League practices and games, Ive been comfortable in summer clothes.

Ive written before about the impact organized Little League has had on moving the countrys baseball season up in the calendar. How working towards a late summer World Series in Pennsylvania means playing baseball in April and May no matter how far north or what your altitude. You have to start in April in order to get required practices and league games, all-star picks and district, state, and regional tournaments on the way to Williamsport. So kids in Wallowa County and the whole northern tier of the country shiver through April and May baseball so that a few kids from Texas and Taiwan and wherever can play a World series before Pennsylvania winter sets in.

My first baseball memories are late 1940s Minnesota, warm summer nights under the lights, with town teams from Bagley and McIntosh, Eskine and Fertile playing our Fosston nine on a field surrounded by cars that honked at home runs and strikeouts. At six and eight and nine, we mimicked Fosstons Stan Otness pitching and hitting and followed catcher Wes Westrums NY Giants career. Westrum was from nearby Clearbrook, just a hop and a hit from our major league dreams.

Ive told local stories gleaned from the late Cliff Collinsworth about semi-pro teams playing weekly dual doubleheaders Saturdays and Sundays here in Wallowa County and in Baker and La Grande and Lewiston back in the 20s and 30s. As Cliff told it, each team was allowed three or four professionals, most often sent down from the Pacific Coast League for seasoning, but, according to Cliff, the local boys often outshone their talent.

That all happened in summer months, when you could cool off in the lake after Sunday games.

Times change. Kids no longer learn to hit and throw on vacant lots they mow when the weather warms, play 500 and three flies up until enough show up for workups, and then for choosing team captains and throwing a bat in the air and scaling hands up to the knobby end to see who gets first choice. When you were young you were often last pick and right field, but it was the start.

Now kids learn to hit off tees set up by adults on cold April eves, and then move on to minor league teams with pitching machines. My first time around, watching and then coaching the Little League Senators in Enterprise over a quarter century ago, there were no minor leagues, and the equivalent of that right field sandlot start was 9-year-old son Matt (and Lance Homan and Mark Keffer, to name a couple of his classmates still involved with county sports) standing in against what must have seemed to them a full-grown 12-year-old Randy Conrad pitching from a very high mound.

Some young kids did take a pitch in the back from those fast-throwing older boys, and some baseball careers ended right there some never could get away from stepping in the bucket in failed efforts to deal with inside pitches. Others did. Its just one of many mysteries of baseball.

Its always seemed to me that baseball is a game of dreams, mysteries, and small miracles. Try teaching a kid the intricacies of the infield fly rule or even when to tag and when to go half-way on a fly ball. And watch as some small 11-year-old blazes a fastball by one of those 12-year-old six-footers.

Watch too as a group of kids and parents craft the Blackburn Field in Joseph anew. A new grass infield, new red diamond dust on the basepaths, and stands and dugouts scrubbed and painted. There is something more interesting about the irregular lines of a baseball field how each one, from Little League to Major League, is unique and yet the same as every other baseball field than the standard rectangles of football and soccer. Something for builders to take pride in.

Duff Pace showed up for a LL game in Enterprise the other night. Id written about him coaching T-ball in a blizzard years ago, and suggested that he just couldnt stay away from the game. Cheap entertainment, he said, and on a warm May night watching 11- and 12-year-olds build their dreams on a green and clay-red field with Mount Joseph in the background, parents and grandparents in the stands remembering old dreams and miracles of playing and watching over decades, who could argue?

Main Street columnist Rich Wandschneider directs the Alvin M. and Betty Josephy Library of Western History and Culture housed at the Josephy Center for Arts and Culture, located in Joseph.