Marion Mets: Get your programs here!
The Tootsie Pop edition
Last Saturday, I walked to the end of my driveway, eager to check the mail.
I had a small delivery coming my way.
As I walked, I realized it may be a little early for the mailman. I checked the time.
12:13 p.m.
I don’t normally keep precise tabs on the mail, but that seemed early.
But, just a millisecond later – literally – I looked to my left and saw the little white truck motoring my way. I met it before it could stop at the box.
“Here you go; have a nice day,” the mailman said.
In my hands were the usual small, white envelopes – bills, ya know. But, standing out among those was a thin manila envelope addressed to “Mr. Chad Osborne.”
This was what I was waiting for.
The sender’s name at the top left read: L. Pacchioli with his Pennsylvania address written underneath.
That’s Lou, the former Marion Mets center fielder I profiled last week in this newsletter. I texted him a couple of days before the story published, just to make sure I had my facts straight in his story. He texted back a couple of photos and then asked for my mailing address. He wanted to send me a 1965 Marion Mets program he had lying around his house.
I opened the envelope, and at first glance, it was what I expected, a basic black and white program with a huge New York Mets grayscale logo printed on the front. At the top, it read:
MARION METS
NEW YORK METS FARM CLUB
Member of Appalachian League
Text at the bottom let game-goers know this program, and the team, were sponsored by Marion Baseball, Inc. of Marion, Va. At the bottom right was the year, 1965, and the cost of the program, 10 cents.
I had seen photos of similar programs online, so I knew the basic contents. There was a small letter to fans on page 1, signed, “Sincerely,” by team president “Robert S. Garnett.”
“The young men on the roster of the Marion Mets will be citizens of Marion during the season,” the letter read, “let’s help make their stay a pleasant one.”
The remaining pages were mostly advertisements. There was a full-page ad for the Bank of Marion – “Good luck to the Mets,” it read – and smaller ads for Lemmon Transport, Evans Distributing, Holston River Paving – “We Back the METS,” they proclaimed, and Appalachian Manufacturing Corporation, which in ’65 was “manufacturers of Radio, Television and Hi-Fi Cabinets.”
One of my favorite ads said “All baseball fans eat at DAIRYLAND.” There, according to the advertisement, you could eat chicken, shrimp – ummmm shrimp! – pizza, burgers and enjoy a milkshake.
In this gameday program, the big surprise– like a Tootsie Roll Tootsie Pop – was the goodies in the middle.
There was the scoresheet for fans to write in both teams’ lineups and keep score as the game progressed.
The treat was someone had actually kept track of the game!
The visiting team’s lineup was written out on top of the scoresheet and the Mets on the bottom, just like the home team is placed at the bottom of a ballpark scoreboard.
The person who kept score wrote players’ names in cursive, and in blue ink. They also wrote the names of the umpires – Tod Houston and Joe Rohen – on the top right, just above the Pepsi logo. Marion Motor Company sponsored the bottom – or home team half – of the page.
The scorekeeper, however, failed to write the name of Marion’s opponent and the final score. But, it was easy to crossmatch the names on the scoresheet with those filling out Appy League rosters in 1965. The surnames of Ragland, Weigle and Odom and Hense quickly reveal the Mets were hosting the Wytheville Senators.
Tallying the scoresheet tells us Marion won the contest 6-4.
Also, there is no date on the program. Through compiling scores and newspaper game stories for the Mets, I could see Marion had only one 6-4 victory over Wytheville that season, so it was easy to pinpoint the game was played on July 20, 1965.
Neither team hit much in the contest. (A day earlier Bluefield Orioles pitcher John Rawls tossed a no-hitter against the Mets in Marion, but I’ll get to that in a later newsletter.)
Marion had its best inning in the seventh, batting around to score four runs on five hits. To read Howard Imboden’s game story in the Smyth County News, it must have been a snoozer of a contest.
It was “a listless game played in the high school dell before only 572 chilled spectators,” Imboden wrote.
Chilled?
In July?
According to historical weather data, temperatures were in the mid- to low 70s throughout the game that night.
The highlight of the scoresheet for me was finding Jim Bibby had pitched for Marion. I first fell in love with baseball in the late 70s and early 80s, watching the “We Are Family” Pittsburgh Pirates. Those teams won the World Series in ’79 with players like Willie Stargell, Dave “Cobra” Parker, Tim Foli – he played for the ’68 Marion Mets – Dale Berra – the son of Yogi and brother of Larry Jr., who played in Marion in 1971 – and Jim Bibby, who pitched mostly in relief for the Mets in ’65 and later went on to play 12 seasons in the big leagues for St. Louis, Texas, Cleveland and Pittsburgh.
I loved those Pittsburgh teams. I bought a Pirates pillbox cap that I found lying around on a shelf at Magic Mart in Abingdon. I bought gold foil stars to stick on the cap, just like Willie Stargell did. My stars didn’t stick though. I wrote “Pirates” with black magic marker, outlined with yellow, across the chest of a plain white T-shirt. My mom loved that when she saw it.
I wanted so bad to be a big-league Pirate, and I latched on to Jim Bibby in ’81 when I saw on the TV news one mid-May morning that he tossed a one-hitter the night before, and nearly a perfect game, against Atlanta in Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium. If my memory serves me correctly, that’s also the first time, at age 10, I heard about the Marion Mets.
My grandpa, Earnest DeBord, introduced me to baseball and helped foster my love for the game. We used to watch games together, and he’d turn on the radio at night for us to listen to games on those mega-watt AM stations blasting their signals off the ionosphere out of St. Louis, Cleveland, Detroit, and Cincinnati.
When I was still elated over Bibby’s one-hitter, my grandpa said, “You know, Jim Bibby pitched in Marion.” And, so did Nolan Ryan, and … I don’t remember any other names he mentioned. That was 41 years ago.
I had no idea what he was talking about. How in the world did this superstar I idolized pitch in Marion? That afternoon became my introduction to the minor league baseball teams that kicked up dust and roamed the green fields of ballparks in our neck of the woods. There were semi-pro teams, too, he told me, that played in Marion and Saltville – yep, the Alkalies played in our hometown – and Bristol and Damascus and other small towns up and down the road.
That’s why my jaw dropped – no kidding – when I saw the name “Bibby” written in as Marion’s pitcher on the program scoresheet. All those memories came rushing back. The Topps, Donruss and Fleer baseball cards I collected of the 80s Pirates. The conversations and the games I watched with my grandpa. The catcher’s mitt he bought me – I wanted to be Tony Pena – and the game of catch we had in my front yard one summer day.
It's funny how a small black and white booklet printed 57 years ago that sold for 10 cents at a local ballpark can elicit so many fond memories.
Thanks for that gift, Lou!
Last week, I promised a story about a 1967 photo of a woman in a Covington, Virginia ballpark concession stand taking a 30-cheeseburger order from Marion Mets manager Birdie Tebbetts. That was before I received the gameday program from Lou. That story just couldn’t wait, so I’ll write about Birdie and his cheeseburgers in a couple of weeks.
I’m taking next week off to concentrate on not burning the Thanksgiving bird. This newsletter will be back December 1 – let’s move it to Thursdays – with a Q&A with former Marion Mets’ catcher Jim McGregor, the grand marshal for this year’s Marion Christmas parade on December 2, 2022.
See ya soon!
