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BRING BACK FORGOTTEN SPORT OF 'BATTING CORNCOBS'
I can't get too excited about the baseball stadium controversy. Most arguments always seem to stop short of actually contemplating what we'd do with our lives if Carl moves the team to Charlotte.
Have you thought deeply about the quality of your life without the Twins?
I have.
It would give us an opportunity to evaluate some forgotten sports that thrived in these parts prior to ESPN and before Calvin Griffith moved the Senators to town from Washington, D.C.
One sport we might consider bringing back is batting corncobs. For a brief period during the fifties, the game flourished by offering plenty of spectacular pitches and electrifying hits. I know, because I was there, playing the role of designated hitter long before the DH became the American League rule.
The game was played most summer days as time allowed between more urgent jobs on our southern Carver County dairy and turkey farm. On National League game days, the Cincinnati Reds (Jim's team) played the Pittsburgh Pirates (Larry's team). On American League days, it was Jim's Detroit Tigers vs. Larry's Cleveland Indians.
Batting corncobs was an ingenious blend of sport, science and art. The game was just gaining momentum, and might have given Calvin a run for his money, when a development occurred in U.S. agriculture that relegated batting corncobs to a fate not unlike that of kerosene lamps and home canning.
What happened was that we lost our supply of cobs.
Forty years ago, most farmyards had at least one pile of corncobs. Today you may have to drive across half a county just to find a pile.
The corncob's demise was brought on by the introduction of the corn-head attachment to the grain combine. These machines automatically shelled corn in the field and dropped the lowly corncob back to the earth to decompose. Initially two-row contraptions, the machines quickly grew to 3-row, 4-row, 6-row, 8-row and - I suspect somewhere in the Midwest - 12-row behemoths.
Prior to the combine, the entire ear of corn was hauled from the field and stored in wooden or wire corn cribs for later use.
On our farm, ear corn was stored in cribs in the fall and then ground in winter for dairy cows or stored until summer and fed to turkeys.
Like most farmers, we did not own a corn sheller. The task was farmed out to a custom sheller who arrived at the farm with his Rube Goldberg contraption that sent shelled corn one way, corn husks another and cobs out the back onto a giant pile.
The rules of batting corncobs were similar to the rules of baseball except that nobody actually ran bases; rather, carefully measured stakes in the ground indicated whether a hit was a single, double, triple or homerun. All runners had to be forced to advance.
The thing that made this game such a thriller was the pitch. A correctly pitched corncob was true art. Held crossways in the palm of the hand against a folded thumb, a hurled corncob could leave the pitcher's hand on a trajectory 4 or 5 feet behind a right-handed batter, then "break" (curve) left suddenly a few feet in front of the batter and cross the plate for a strike.
The pitcher (i.e., brothers Jim and Larry) could also deliver cobs that broke just as suddenly up, down or right. Now and then a "fastball" was mixed in to keep the batter guessing.
A cob that broke apart on contact with the bat didn't count. Jim recalls that lighter colored cobs stayed intact better than red cobs.
More blending of science and art went into bat construction. After one of us experienced a batting slump, we'd retreat into the workshop, then proudly emerge several hours later with a new bat sawn and sanded out of elm or ash that measured precisely 3 ft. x 1-1/2 in. x 1 in.
Since the game was never played before an audience, I have no way of knowing whether batting corncobs would have the crowd appeal of baseball. Judging by attendance at recent Minnesota pro sports events, batting corncobs might be just the boost that's needed on the local sports scene.
One obstacle to bringing back the game of batting corncobs would be finding a source of cobs. Farmers would have to give up their combines. My guess, however, is that, at a price of, say, $10 per bushel, we wouldn't have any trouble finding reliable corncob suppliers.
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PUTTING DOWN ROOTS:
A Delightful Blend of
Gardening Wisdom, Wit
and Whimsy
$10 + $2 for shipping
by Cliff Johnson |
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