KARL LINDHOLM HOLDS a wooden replica of a baseball that has a special meaning to him,

Any baseball is beautiful. No other small package comes as close to the ideal design and utility. . . . Pick it up and it instantly suggests its purpose; it is meant to be thrown a considerable distance — thrown hard and with precision.

— Roger Angell, “Extra Innings: A Baseball Companion”

Local artist Kate Gridley described an exercise she employs with her art students: “I ask them to bring to class an object, an artifact, anything that has special meaning to them. I ask them to talk about that meaning. Then I ask them to spend some time drawing it, something they love.”

While not one of her students, I nonetheless have given this idea considerable thought. What would I bring to her class, were I her student?

I would bring a baseball to Kate’s class.

Not any old baseball, not one of the scuffed balls hanging around the house here and there, nor one of the faded autographed balls that have come my way over a lifetime, nor one of the shiny new ones, not yet (and perhaps never to be) scuffed and grass stained.

I would bring a wooden baseball that I treasure, a sculpture of a baseball really. It’s a little smaller than a real ball, which is standardized (5 to 5 1/2 ounces in weight, 9 to 9 1/2 inches in circumference). On one side of this ball is etched “JMC,” on the other “2010.” It’s glazed, shiny and beautiful.

It has a thin gold tassel which allows it, if we chose, to be hung somewhere. It will not be hung in my house on a tree, displayed for a few weeks once a year: it has a permanent spot on the mantel in the high traffic area between the living room and the dining area.

It is an idealization of the baseball, it’s art, a talisman of sorts. I procured it at my first Jerry Malloy Negro Leagues SABR Conference (Society of American Baseball Research) in Birmingham in 2010, which explains the “JMC” and the “2010.”

I asked my friend Gary Starr, the brilliant bird carver, for his help with the provenance of this facsimile baseball. He speculated that it was carved from the Tupelo tree, which often grows in a swamp and is “prized by top carvers in the world.” It was varnished to a satin spray finish. The stitches were made by a burning tool. Gary showed me one he uses with his birds and it would do the job.

In 2010, the columnist attended his first Jerry Malloy Negro Leagues Conference in Birmingham, Ala., and visited Rickwood Field, the oldest ballpark in continuous use in America.
Photo by Karl Lindholm

By 2010, I had been studying baseball, and the Negro Leagues in particular, for some time, and teaching a course about baseball in the American Studies Program at Middlebury College: “Segregation in America: Baseball and Race.” This conference in Birmingham in 2010 was a powerful confirmation of my keen interests and life experience.

We toured Rickwood Field, built a hundred years earlier in 1910, the oldest extant ballpark in North America, renovated into a beautiful museum-like representation of Black baseball in Birmingham — and still eminently playable. Willie Mays, the greatest player ever, was from Birmingham and started out at Rickwood.

We also visited the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church (bombed by white terrorists in 1963, killing four young girls), and the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame (in addition to Willie Mays, Hall of Famers from Alabama were Hank Aaron, Satchel Paige, Mule Suttles, Willie McCovey, Ozzie Smith and Billy Williams).

“Not any old baseball, not one of the scuffed balls hanging around the house here and there, or one of the faded autographed balls that have come my way over a lifetime, or one of the shiny new ones, not yet (and perhaps never to be) scuffed and grass-stained.”

I grew up in Maine, a baseball obsessed kid in the 1950s, a great era for baseball. Though the racially recalcitrant Red Sox was my home team, I was absorbed and thrilled by the integration drama of Jackie Robinson and other Black trailblazers. The Civil Rights Movement of the ’60s was the dramatic background of my high school and college years. In 1971, I came across the book, “Only the Ball was White” by Robert Peterson, and a lifetime fascination with the “Atlantis” of Black baseball was  ignited.

Privileged in time to offer a course at Middlebury on the Negro Leagues and Black baseball generally, I have been able to live the words of Robert Frost in his poem “Two Tramps in Mud Time” and “unite my avocation and my vocation.”

This shiny wooden baseball represents my love of the game of baseball itself. When I was a kid, baseballs were precious. We played with the same ball over and over again until the cover came off — and then we taped over its innards with black electrical tape and carried on.

The baseball, this magical orb, the actual baseball, Angell’s small miracle of design and utility, has not essentially changed in nearly a century. It’s made of a cork core surrounded by two narrow bands of rubber and 379 yards of woolen yarn. The cover is comprised of two figure-eight pieces of horse or cowhide, hand-stitched in Costa Rica with red thread. Each baseball has exactly 108 double stitches. It has been so since 1934.

The genius is in those 108 stitches. They allow the fingers of the hand to have purchase on the ball so when it is delivered with enough force it can dip and dart through the air and be very difficult to strike with a wooden cudgel. The great Satchel Paige, when asked what his best pitch was, answered “a bat dodger.” It’s all in the grip of the ball and its release.

As I consider my life from this distance as a fan, a player (of modest accomplishment as a young man), a writer and teacher, I am reminded of the words of Yankee pitcher Jim Bouton, author of the seminal baseball memoir, “Ball Four”:

“You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”

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Karl Lindholm Ph.D. is the Emeritus Dean of Advising and Assistant Professor of American Literature at Middlebury College (retired). He can be contacted at [email protected].