Marion Mets Newsletter – Issue 32
Today is Opening Day of the Major League Baseball season!
If I had my way, today would be a national holiday. Work and school would be closed, and we all could spend the day eating hot dogs and slurping sodas at the ballpark or just lounging on the couch in front of the TV. Or computer screen. Or phone… however you like to watch the game.
Today, I wanted to quickly tell you about a new feature on the Marion Mets website:
A blog.
Now, I know what you might be thinking. Why is there a newsletter, Chad, AND a blog?
The blog’s purpose is to share short stories that may not be full newsletter articles. (I don’t want to fill up your email inbox every day, ya know.) Or, I may post on the blog small bits of research I’ve found and can’t wait to write a few words about.
These information nuggets may later turn into larger newsletter stories. Who knows!
I’m always – well, when I have time – digging and looking for more answers to my research questions. It reminds me of my favorite line from Field of Dreams, where Moonlight Graham asks Ray, “What’s so interesting about a half inning [of baseball] that would make you come all the way from Iowa to talk to me about it 50 years after it happened?”
I think about that line a lot as I’m researching the Marion Mets or any other baseball story. I’m not likely driving across the country to chat with a ballplayer who cracked the lineup for a half inning in 1967, but I do like to talk to folks on the phone. And, I sort through a lot – A LOT – of old newspapers.
I find inspiration for many of my Mets stories in those archived black and white pages. One tiny paragraph in The Sporting News resulted in my most recent blog post about three Marion infielders who turned four double plays in a game on a mid-August night in Tennessee.
Tinker, Evers and Chance had nothing on Pappageorgas, Chapman and Fisher.
You can read about them below.
There also are stories on the blog about a night at the ballpark in Marion, where the team gave away 500 bats to youngsters before a game that produced 36 runs and lasted until midnight.
Spoiler Alert: The Mets won!
I’ve also written on the blog about a voicemail I received a few weeks ago from a player who was part of Marion’s 1966 Appalachian League championship team. The message began with “Chad, it’s Carl Gentile of the old Marion Mets… where the stars of tomorrow shine tonight.” If you grew up attending Marion Mets games, you likely remember those words as part of PA announcer Bob Garnett’s warm welcome to the ballpark.
That’s all for now. You can find these stories and more on the blog, located on the header of the Marion Mets website.
Happy Opening Day, everyone!
Five happy words
Pappageorgas to Chapman to Fisher.
For the Elizabethton Twins on a mid-August night in 1976, those were the “saddest of possible words.”
OK, it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue like Tinker to Evers to Chance, but Marion’s infield trio – Bob Pappageorgas, Kelvin Chapman and Curtis Fisher – were just as dynamic of a double-play-turnin’ machine for one night as the “bear cubs” Franklin Pierce Adams wrote about more than a decade ago in his 1910 poem “Baseball’s Saddest Lexicon.”
Were Pappageorgas, Chapman and Fisher a trio of Mets fleeter than birds?
Ummmm, maybe. We don’t know.
But, we do know the Marion’s Mets turned four double plays that Aug. 13 night in a tense contest at Elizabethton’s ballpark down by the river.
Ruthlessly pricking the Twins’ gonfalon bubble, I guess.*
Each double play began with Pappageorgas, the slick-fielding 18-year-old shortstop from Pebble Beach, California, gobbling groundballs, tossing them over to Chapman at second base, who zipped the ball to Fisher at first.
Making a Twin “hit into a double,” Adams might write.
Perhaps the most crucial Twin-killing happened in the bottom of the eighth inning when Elizabethton loaded the bases as the Mets clung to a slim advantage.
The Pappageorgas to Chapman to Fisher infield combination quickly silenced the threat – and the 500-plus fans there witnessing the action – and Marion went on to win 3-0.
In all, the fleet-footed Pappageorgas recorded 10 assists with no errors that night. The rare feat was reported in local media – but nowhere in a poem that I’m aware of – and it got the attention of The Sporting News, which was a big deal in 1976.
Pappageorgas to Chapman to Fisher.
“Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble.”
* To be accurate, there was no gonfalon bubble to be pricked between these two teams. Both were cellar-dwellers in their respective Appalachian League divisions, Marion in the North and Elizabethton in the South.
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