Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, October 8, 1994 TAG: 9410100003
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: RALPH BERRIER JR. STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Scott was supposed to watch the Baltimore Orioles play the Boston Red Sox, but there would be no game that night in Oriole Park at Camden Yards. It was Aug. 12, the first day of the Major League Baseball players strike.
"It's hard for me to understand," he said. "They make millions."
Scott, a 71-year-old former minor leaguer, never made millions playing baseball. In 1946, Scott earned $175 a month playing for the Radford Rockets, a minor-league club that played from 1946 to 1950.
In August, Scott and a few of his former Rockets teammates were in Baltimore at the behest of Johnny Via, another former Rocket who invited a few of his old playing buddies to spend the weekend at his posh hotel, go to a banquet, catch a game.
Only there was no game. The day the millionaires walked off the job, the Radford Rockets were locked out of the ballpark.
So they whiled away the would-be innings reliving their own glory days.
Scott remembered getting the game-winning hit to clinch a four-game sweep of the Appalachian League's Pulaski Counts in the annual season-ending series. Scott, a third baseman from McCoy who left baseball after the 1946 season to open a successful radio and television business, even remembered his batting average from that year - .332.
"It's like soldiers remembering their old rifle numbers," Scott said. "You don't forget your batting average."
Scott and his wife, Ruby, were part of a group of 20 people - players, club officers and their wives and companions - invited by Via, a hard-slugging catcher from Covington who has become a successful businessman.
One of the former players who made the trip was Cam Church, a native Canadian who resides in Radford. Church is an artist and his works have hung in Canada's Baseball Hall of Fame. He painted a portrait of Via and presented it to him at the reunion, a gesture that nearly moved the stocky former catcher to tears.
Others from the Radford area included Dan DeVilbiss, a former president of the Radford Baseball Club and his wife, Lois, Charles and Evelene Fretwell, Pete Bakatis, Ann Giesen and Church.
All were there to remember a simpler time and a simpler game.
Or was it really that different? The Rockets had their own financial difficulties and labor battles. They even had a players strike in 1949 that lasted an entire afternoon.
Radford was a "small-market" town long before small-market towns became the crux of baseball's alleged economic difficulties.
The Rockets played in the long-defunct Blue Ridge League at the Class D level, which was then the lowest level of the minor leagues. Other small Southwest Virginia towns like Salem, Galax, Wytheville, and North Carolina hamlets Mount Airy, Elkin and Lenoir comprised the Blue Ridge League.
Small crowds turned out to the old Radford ball field, which was located behind the high school near the current field's location (the old ballpark was an inverse of the current field - today, home plate rests where centerfield used to be). The club barely scraped by year after year.
"We were enthused about baseball," said Fretwell, a former club vice president, "but there was never enough money."
Back in those days, before the minors were absorbed as farm systems for the Major Leagues, most minor league teams like Radford were independently operated and self-supporting.
The most trivial expenditures could send the team into economic peril. One year, the team bought three dozen baseballs to start the season, enough to last the team several weeks it was believed.
"We played Galax the first game of the season and their leadoff man fouled seven balls over the fence," said Fretwell. "Little kids would grab the [foul] balls and run off with them. ... we were already in trouble and this was just the first batter of the season."
One night before an important game with Galax, club officials learned the taxman was coming to attach the evening's gate receipts for payment of back taxes. The team was nearly broke and couldn't afford to lose the money from the game, which attracted a huge crowd.
So, one of the more stealthy ticket-takers surreptitiously began stuffing the ticket money into the trunk of a car. When the taxman arrived to take the gate receipts, he was handed a box of nickels and dimes.
"What's this?" he asked. He wondered how a game that attracted such a large crowd could result in mere coinage in the cash box.
"Advanced sale," explained a ticket-taker.
The taxman chuckled, then left. The Rockets lived to play another day.
The worst of times had to be August 1949, when 13 of the team's 16 home games were rained out and the coffers ran dry. By late August, the club was out of money and could not meet the payroll. The players said they would not play until they were paid.
DeVilbiss recalled that then-team president E.V. Crockett said, "if they don't play, don't pay 'em."
The player revolt threatened to wipe out that evening's game with Galax until Church stood before the team and said, "There are very few of us here who would be able to play baseball if it wasn't for the Radford Rockets. I say we play."
The others concurred. The game drew one of the biggest crowds of the year. The payroll was met.
Their days were numbered, though. The era of the independent minor leagues was nearing a close by 1951, the year the Blue Ridge League folded. Professional baseball has never returned to Radford.
Most of the players ended their playing careers in Radford. A couple of them, like "Blazin''' Bob Porterfield from McCoy, made it all the way to the big leagues.
None of the guys who made the trip to Baltimore played in the majors.
"We played because, well, we had a ball," Scott said.
by CNB