Hickory sticks

Sporting News, The, August 15, 1994 by Pat Jordan, Mark Newman

Just about the last thing Hickory fans talk about when referring to their Crawdads is baseball. In fact, the fans don't seem to know much about the game. "They come to the park to learn the game," says the Crawdads' manager, Fred Kendall. Even opposing team managers, such as Roy Matijka of the Spartanburg Phillies, agree.

"They'll even cheer a good play by the opposition," he says, in disbelief. "Some of the league's fans, like in Fayetteville, can be miserable. They're just frustrated people who are failures in everything they do." Matijka doesn't have any use for such old-fashioned fans who used to be the backbone of every small town's minor league team. They were so fiercely loyal, they wouldn't stop booing and cursing the opposition until after the last out was made. And sometimes, not even then. It was not uncommon for disgruntled minor league hometown fans to continue heckling the visiting team after it had defeated the locals. Sometimes, those fans even pursued the visitors in the ballpark's parking lot, trying to run them down with their pickup trucks as the visitors sprinted for their lives to the team bus. Those old-time fans didn't come to their dilapidated ballparks for clean restrooms or cappucino from Kathryn's, or "Flying Elvises Day" or to see a man cavorting around the field dressed like a Crawdad. They came for the baseball, because there was no television then, and they came out of pride for the town's only distinction. But mostly, they came to exorcise the private demons of their threadbare lives. Those baseball games were cathartic for them. It gave them a chance to release all of their frustrations against their enemy of the moment, the visiting team. But those old-time fans, and the even older stadiums in which their teams played, offer no nostalgia for young managers such as Matijka.

"Time has taken away the old stadiums," he says. "And it's a good thing. They had no showers. Players got hurt on lumpy fields. The only good thing about them was the players wanted to get out of them to a better league. But stadiums like the Crawdads' are our major leagues now."

John Quirk, a Crawdads pitcher from the Bronx, N.Y., agrees. "In other minor league towns, you're a nobody," he says. "In Hickory, you're somebody. If you need anything, they'll do it for you." Quirk talks about Hickory -- its fans and its stadium -- as if it were a comfort to him. He even says how disappointing it will be someday when he moves up the White Sox ladder to a team without the creature comforts offered by the Crawdads. Comfort means a lot to young minor leaguers today, in the same way that discomfort meant so much to minor leaguers of years ago. The minor leagues were supposed to be unpleasant in those days so as to inspire the players to escape them. It made them savor each step up the minor league ladder, with each new amenity, in a way today's players don't. They think such amenities are their right. Yesterday's players saw the lack of such amenities as their rite of passage to manhood. They wore as a badge every ramshackle ballpark they called home, every dusty, two-bit town in which they rented a room, and when, if, they ever did reach the big leagues, they appreciated every nuance of life there after all the obstacles they'd had to overcome in the low bush leagues.