A Search For History
If you’re here looking for Cardinal writing, today there isn’t any here. However, I have a new post up over at Baseball Digest that I would appreciate you checking out. It talks all about Tony making players work for their playing time, and I had some fun writing it! In the meantime, I have a story for you, if you will indulge me for a few minutes…
I received a challenge from a friend when talking about ‘A League of Their Own’ one evening. Every time I watch that movie I remember that I live in the town where one of the teams from the AAGPBL was located, and I wonder where they played and what still exists to showcase the historic area. I made the mistake of mentioning my curiosity to said friend, who challenged me to go out and find it. I couldn’t say no, so I started researching. Unfortunately, what I found has left me frustrated.
The Racine Belles played at Horlick Field, which made me happy since I’d actually been there to watch a high school football game, not knowing that there was a baseball field on the other side of the bleachers I was sitting on. I’ve been searching for baseball in this goofy town for a year and didn’t know I already had found the field! What started to deflate my sails was when I found out that the championship game had not been filmed in Racine, but in Indiana, at a minor league ballpark that hadn’t even been in existence when the AAGPBL was playing. More confusion came when I learned that the championship game was actually played between the Belles and the Kenosha Comets that year, not the Belles and the Rockford Peaches. I don’t know why the movie changed those details, but that’s how it goes.
At this point all of my research had been online, and I had been coming up fairly empty as to what history might still exist that I could go and physically see. I finally decided that if there was something to see, I would find it at Horlick Field, so I made the five minute trek to the field to explore.
