asked his son, ‘may we return to this land of dreamy dreams?’
While his father remained a lifelong fan, Sandor Boatly dedicated his life to baseball. Instead of becoming a priest, as many of his boyhood friends did, Sandor Boatly became an evangelist of baseball, a Johnny Appleseed, who instead of flinging apple seeds in rainbow-like arcs as he walked the fields and backwoods of America, carried a strange and wondrous canvas sack across his shoulders so that at times he looked as though he was bearing a cross. The sack was filled with baseball bats, hand-carved from hickory, crafted with love to last forever, by men who knew and appreciated the feel of a smooth and sleek weapon, which like a gun, became an extension of the holder. The sack also contained baseballs, horsehide, handstitched with catgut, hand-wound by people who knew what they were building.
The day he turned fourteen, Sandor Boatly refused his father’s offer (it was more of a command) to become an apprentice glazer and contribute to the family finances. Sandor set out on his mission, which was to introduce the magic of baseball to those who did not know of it, or if they did know about baseball, to teach them to regard it with the reverence it deserved.
On foot, Sandor moved across Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, and eventually made his way to the plains of Iowa and Nebraska, where like a true evangelist he spread the word of baseball to the scattered multitudes.
Along the way he abandoned his name, for he found it took too much time to explain his ancestry, his recent history, his roots, for people were forever wondering if his family might have traveled to America with their family, plumbing the depths of their memories for common ground.
‘Call me whatever you like,’ Sandor said to his multitudes, which, on the prairies, consisted often of a single farm family, dirt farmers living in soddies, some living in virtual caves built into the sides of hills. Sandor would thump at the gunnysack-reinforced door of a soddy. The pale face that answered would shade its eyes from the sudden glare of the prairie. He was often mistaken for a preacher, for he dressed in black broadcloth, wore a wide-brimmed hat and, as soon as he was able, grew a bushy black beard.
After introducing himself, though not always his mission, for the tough pioneer women tended to frown on sport of any kind as frivolity, Sandor would find his way to where the men were working. He would pitch in and work side by side with the farmer and his sons, picking roots, or pulling stumps, perhaps carrying rocks to a homemade stoneboat, or walking behind an ox as it pulled a plow.
At the end of the day, by the fading rays of a low sun, or as the plains horizon flamed like prairie fire, Sandor would open his magical sack and toss a ball to a burly farm boy in work pants too short and clodhopper boots awkward as wood blocks. The three or four or five of them would lay out a rough diamond, perhaps using a barn wall as a backstop, if the homesteaders were fortunate enough to have built a barn. Sometimes there would be stumps for bases, with stringy trees in the outfield.
Often the only clear land would take in a slough, full of frog grass and cattails, where inches of water lay hidden under seemingly innocent greenery. But no matter the obstacles, Sandor’s enthusiasm would shine through, and the big, lumbering boys would get word to their neighbors, and by the second evening of his visit there would be almost enough players for a side of baseball.
Then Sandor would spring the trap. He would mention the last area that he had visited, five, or ten, or fifteen miles away, and he would mention how they had taken to the game, and how they had formed a team and were waiting only for a challenge.
When he moved on he would leave behind a precious ball, after painstakingly demonstrating to his converts how to re-cover it. He might also leave behind a bat, or he might simply show them how to hew a bat from a sturdy piece of timber. On rare occasions he would actually see the competition through, choosing a site, scheduling the contest, acting as umpire.
He learned early on that the main objections to his mission would be on religious grounds. Sandor was quick to realize that pioneers, facing unbelievable hardships, often clinging to life and sanity by the thinnest of threads, needed not only to believe in the supernatural, but to believe the supernatural was on their side. Sandor realized too, that these primitive peoples lacked the sophistication to realize that there were many and various manifestations of the supernatural, Sandor Boatly himself being one.
Since he was often mistaken, on first contact, for a circuit rider, Sandor took to carrying a heavy, leather-bound bible. He learned to quote the passages that urged the listeners to make a joyful noise and celebrate life. He never claimed to be a minister, but if his dress and demeanor intimated such, he found no reason to deny it.
If requested, he could conduct a brief nondenominational service of a Sunday morning, after which he would bring out his baseball equipment and retire to the nearest meadow with the men and boys. Even the most pinched and pious farm women could find no fault with a hard-working pastor who regarded baseball as a sinless pastime for a sunny summer Sunday afternoon.
Occasionally, Sandor stumbled into a situation where a minister was clearly needed. He was known to pray with vigor over the terminally ill, preparing them for passage to the next world, easing that passage. When called upon he conducted funerals, baptisms, even an occasional marriage, though he loathed the intolerance of most Christians. ‘Christianity is the only army that shoots its own wounded,’ he said in one of his last letters to his sister, Evita.
As a boy he had heard or read that it matters not what qualifications one possesses, but only that one look the part, words that would have a profound effect on the many lives of Sandor Boatly. For instead of planting trees as a legacy, he planted the joy of baseball in several thousand hearts, and, as a seed grew into a sapling, then a tree, and eventually into a forest, so his own efforts multiplied over the years until baseball was everywhere in America, like the trees and the rain.
Sandor worked his way as far west as Wyoming, before heading south, touring Colorado, New Mexico and Texas, crossing several Southern states before finding himself in Florida – Miami to be specific.
Though he had never lived in a truly warm climate he always sensed deep in his bones that the natural state of the universe was endless summer, though he had only heard rumors of its existence. He had heard of places where the grass was eternally green, where snow was spoken of with nostalgia by people who had not endured it for years. But Miami, and Florida, that tropical green finger with the angelic aura of white sand, was so perfect, so magical, the possibilities of baseball so endless, that its mere existence almost caused Sandor to acknowledge the possibility of a God.
What he discovered, something that disappointed him to no end, was that in Florida he was not a pioneer, for baseball was well known, played in every park, school yard and vacant lot. Only in the furthest backwaters of the Everglades could he practice his calling, and then with only limited success, due to the lack of arable land.
His journey to the island of Hispaniola came about after he became acquainted with a group of Pentecostal missionaries on the Miami docks. They mistook him for a man of the cloth.
‘We are off to spread the word of the Lord to the heathen,’ they confided in him.
‘I share your dedication,’ he said obliquely.
Over his shoulder was slung a lumpy sack that might have been full of a many-armed invention. ‘Where might you be bound?’ Sandor asked.
