Amateur baseball: What is its future?

NEW ULM -- Amateur baseball.

In the 1940's and 50's, it was king in this area, with crowds in the thousands attending local games.

It seemed to fade a little bit in the 60's, 70's and 80's, with some town teams having trouble fielding squads.

In the 1990's two area towns, Courtland and Madelia, dropped their amateur teams for several reasons. A lack of players, lack of support in those cities and not enough people in the city interested in those programs.

With the first state amateur baseball tournament of the new millennium being held this year in Fairfax and Sleepy Eye, and New Ulm adding a second baseball park adjacent to Johnson Park, what is the future of amateur baseball in this area -- an area that long has been looked at as where baseball is king?

Does it still have a strong a heart beat as it did in that hey-day? If it doesn't, why doesn't it? And what does it take to run a successful baseball program from the ground up and keep it strong?

"I think that you have two real hotbeds of amateur baseball left (in Minnesota)," said long-time Essig baseball player Terry Helget. "One is right here in this area, and the other is up in the New Prague-Northfield general area where you have teams like Dundas. I am not sure if amateur baseball in northern Minnesota has ever been that strong."

But while the Tomahawk East League has one of the strongest foundations in the state, that foundation is starting to show come cracks ... cracks that may grow unless they are fixed.

"In the Tomahawk East League, I know that we are having trouble keeping players," said Helget. "I don't know if is because of the length of games. With the aluminum bats that they are using now, a lot of the games have softball scores."

And that,the aluminum bat, was on the lips off all the players that I talked to.

ALUMINUM BATS ... GOOD OR BAD?: Back in the late 70's, it was christened as a cost-saver for teams. Wooden bats had jumped in costs and the price of one aluminum bat back then was cheaper than buying seven or eight wooden bats. But what some people may call the "necessary evil" is now openly being talked about. The danger that they bring to an infielder or pitcher.

Off all the players and managers that I talked to, they were united in one way; "Get rid of the aluminum bat."

"When we (Essig) played the New Ulm Kaiserhoff last year, I was pitching and I was scared," commented Helget. "Because of the aluminum bat. As a pitcher, you do not have the time to react to some of the balls of those bats."

"We need to get rid of the aluminum bat," said Winthrop manager Dana Melius. "The three-hour, 20-20 slugfests need to be a thing of the past. The teams should go to either a compost bat or go back to wooden bats. I think that it is getting to a point where it is just too dangerous."

As any baseball fan knows, the strength of a pitcher is his ability to pitch inside. But with the aluminum bat that advantage, along with a lowered pitching mound, have given hitters a decided edge.

"They are too dangerous. You cannot pitch inside. I think back to when we played the (New Ulm) Brewers. Chris Peters is so strong that he can sit on the plate and fist an inside pitch out over our short right field fence. We need to take a look at whether aluminum bats remain a part of the game."'

While a pitcher faces the inability to "jam" a hitter because of the bats, there is also that danger of being seriously hurt.

"Get rid of them (aluminum bats)," said Springfield manager Dale "Lumber" Lindmeier. "I don't like them one bit. A couple of years ago we had two consecutive ballgames where one of our pitchers took a line shot off his shoulder; just inches away from his face. The next game, a pitcher (from Redwood Falls) was hit in the face by a line drive from an aluminum bat."

Lindmeier said that returning to wooden bat means more money, "but I think that the better pure hitters will still hit. Right now, you have guys in the Tomahawk are hitting balls that they should not have ... hitting the ball 380, 400 feet. For injury sake, get rid of them.

"They are going back to a deader aluminum bat next year, which will help. But if I had my way, I'd get rid of them entirely."

TOWN SUPPORT: If you travel around the league, you notice that all of the teams in the Tomahawk East League have a concession stand that is open each game.

These stands are manned by volunteers who are usually members of that team's baseball association.

But now, finding volunteers is getting harder to do in certain areas.

"'We are coming into a critical years," said Melius about the support that a team receives from their people. "You are seeing a die-off of support in some medium size towns like Winthrop. Attendance is way down with other things to do. It gets tough to get the people to volunteer. You will always see that support from towns like New Ulm and Sleepy Eye and Essig where the baseball tradition is stronger, but I worry about the mid-size towns where you don't have that support. For the Tomahawk to remain strong, you need to shore up that support."

"For the Tomahawk to remain strong, you have to keep the small towns like Searles and Essig going and get Courtland going again," said Drexler. "Keep those teams with players so all teams have support."

"It starts with the baseball board and we are lucky in Springfield to have them," Lindmeier said. "At Springfield (concession stand) you cannot watch the game when it is going on. So we have hired a lady to work in the stand and she is there every game for us"

Lindmeier said that support in Springfield, "is hard to get early in the season. It seems like every year that some teams struggle. Each year, Redwood Falls struggles to keep his program going, and Bob VanHee does a great job."

But as VanHee is finding out, one person cannot do it alone.

TRADITION FADING?: Helget fondly recalls when in the early 1980's the New Ulm Kaiserhoff tangled with Stark for the right to go on to the state tournament.

That was a time when Helget feels, "the game was played the way it should be played.

"Those games in 1980 and 1981 was amateur baseball at its best and you can ask anyone who was there," he said. "That was hard-nosed baseball, serious but fun because winning was at a premium.

"Now, you get (younger) players who do not have the same work ethic," said Helget. "And if they don't get to play, they do not go out for the team at all."

UMPIRES: Like them or not, umpires are a big part of the game.

But nowadays, umpires are a dying breed.

Very few men want to be an umpire, and if you have ever been to an amateur game you can understand why.

"It is clear-cut to me that, especially in amateur baseball, that they get too much grief," said Lindmeier. "And I have been guilty of that myself (as a manager). They can make some good money, but in my six years as manager they get way too much grief. I have a brother who umpires amateur ball and he does not do a lot of games because of that reason. The abuse that they take is not worth it."

I know for a fact the numbers of umpires is falling. Abuse is one big reason and when you have a state board that does not back an umpire, that makes the matters even worse.

So what are some answers to keeping amateur baseball going strong?

The possible solutions next Sunday.

Column by Jim Bastian, Journal sports writer