BANKS POSTER II

And here is the second Banks poster.

Banks Poster

Some of the statue photos just seemed to beg for a quote.  Here is one of two I chose.

SUNDAY POSTER

After Dark

I mentioned in a previous post that I visited the Cub statues twice one recent evening.  I shared some shots of Ernie Banks taken before 5:00 PM on the way in to see the game; here are some shots of the statue after 9:00 PM and into the dark.  A different look, especially in the closeup.

Those Drumming Fingers

At the age of perhaps 11, I began to understand that great batters do not crush the bat handle in their fists.  Tight muscles are slow muscles.  Loose muscles are limber and quick.  I learned this by watching grainy black and white television baseball games.  Ernie Banks, who would be NL MVP in back-to-back seasons when I was 11 and 12, held that bat in his fingers and literally flexed them, drumming on the bat handle, as he waited for the pitch.  The fingers were the first details I looked at and there they were . . . those drumming fingers!

Wrigley Statues

I had attended the unveiling of the Ernie Banks statue at Wrigley Field, on Opening Day, 2008.  I have some photos I like of that beautiful monument to Chicago baseball.  But as I had no photos of the Billy Williams and Ron Santo statues, a recent ballpark trip included two visits to the statuary.  Here is Ernie in the soft light of early evening.

SUNDAY POSTER

Now a young and spry 80, Ernie Banks has been my athletic hero since 1956 and he has never once let me down. He knows a lot about baseball and he knows a lot about positive attitude. But this quote from his early 1970s autobiography MR. CUB shows he knows a lot about friendship, teamwork, and . . . well, balance.

Retired Numbers

The Cubs have honored six players by retiring the five numbers they wore during their Cub tenure. First of course was Mr. Cub, Ernie Banks, with his #14. He was not in Mesa during my visit, but I saw all five of the other honorees. Fergie Jenkins wore #31 and Billy Williams #26 in the Fergie & Friends game and Ryne Sandberg was suited up in #23 for the Cub games before he heads off to manage the Iowa Cubs. And on the final morning, with Billy Williams in uniform working with the batters, I saw the other #31, Greg Maddux, working with the pitchers.
All I needed was Ernie to have had a full house!

Statue On Guard

Several years ago my Father's Day gift was a statue of a baseball player, proudly on duty guarding Dad's Garden. He stands on a home plate we used in practice when I coached the Lisle Lions, and he has some stones near his base. One reads DEDICATION and the other has the number 14 painted on it. I shared that number for the past 20 years with Ernie Banks of the Chicago Cubs, certainly the finest all-around player and gentleman the Cubs have ever had.

A great garden has the mark of its gardeners on it, and my statue helps with that. In addition, I placed under my player some dirt collected at the two fields I played and coached on, at the state tournament field my team played on, at the Field of Dreams movie site in Dyer, Iowa, and at Wrigley Field. A kind member of the groundskeeping crew helped me with that last item in 1995.

Remember Color Slides?

For a period of many years, all my photography was in the form of color slides. When I shot my first magazine cover for Illinois Park and Recreation Association in the 1970s, that was the industry standard for color publications and I always appreciated the rich, highly-saturated color.

Of course, if you remember color slides, you remember needing a projector (featuring bright expensive bulbs that had a tendency to go out at the wrong time) and a screen or a plain white wall. Lots of effort to set up and see. In many homes, people went several years without a working projector or any way to look at those slides. My house included. For the past two years, I have been digitizing my old slides, a few hundred at a time, adding the images to my digital archives. When I digitize, I dispose of the old cardboard-mounted slide.

But as a memento to that time, I often make up a digital photo in the form of a color slide. They make nice title slides when viewing the images as a slide show, and for me they are a nod to the past that I really enjoy. Here are the title slides for three days in Arizona: a vanity license plate noted shortly after arrival, a major league pitcher firing a fastball, and the Ernie Banks memento on the walkway outside HoHoKam Park in Mesa. Enjoy the slide show!

Mesa Historical Museum

With my All Baseball All-the-Time Spring Training trip on its last day, I had a stop scheduled at the Mesa Historical Museum. Any museum that allows photography is likely to be worth a visit, but one that has an exhibit devoted to spring training baseball -- the so-called Cactus League -- had to be on my itinerary. It was well worth the visit, which was sandwiched between minor league practice and a Subway lunch and before the minor league games.

The baseball exhibit was not large but informative and had several photographs of Ernie Banks along with other stars. A nice collection showed several stages of turning a slab of hardwood into a baseball bat and they selected Banks for that display as well, a nice touch for me. The other rooms showed various items of interest to Mesa history, and wrapped around the outside of the museum is a collection of various farm implements that helped develop a city in the midst of a desert. Interesting and eye-catching.

Only a week ago I was headed for the museum and now I have processed my pictures and published my poems. A real whirlwind of a spring vacation. Some poems from Mesa:

SURPRISE ARIZONA

One of the suburbs of Phoenix on the Cactus League map is Surprise,
But I found my surprise in Mesa rather than in Surprise.
The air was hot even though just about eighty, no surprise;
The lack of humidity meant you would not sweat, no surprise;
Night falls quickly and turns quite cool, also no surprise.
I pulled out of the stadium lot today, drove along the Mesa Cemetery,
And noticed that dozens if not hundreds of gravesites are flooded,
Hidden under several inches of standing water. Surprise!

ALL BASEBALL

A lone poet on a baseball vacation, just three days but filled with action,
All baseball, all the time, no exception, be it three big league games,
Be it two minor league practices or two minor league games,
Be it an old-timers game with pictures and autographs,
Be it a visit to a softball field dressed as Yankee Stadium,
Or be it a trip through a local museum on Cactus League Baseball.
All baseball, all the time, extends even to lunch away from the park
Spent reading Shoeless Joe; extends even to the writing of this poem.

FARM IMPLEMENTS

Visiting Mesa for Chicago Cub Spring Training, I included the Museum
Which features a school-room sized exhibit of baseball pictures,
Enjoying the fact that Ernie Banks and the Cubs are features of the show.
After a turn through the rooms one should look at the outside collection,
Threshers and tractors and seeders and cultivators and sowers
All corroding in silence under the relentless Arizona sun.
Once I got home I looked at the photos and wondered
How tough were the settlers who took on the desert,
Defeating the sand and the sun and the drought to carve out a home,
And as I thought about the tools in the museum yard, I thought
Congratulations and Rust in Peace.