Introduction

In the spring of 2001 my son Michael, 12 years old at the time, was about to enter his final year of Little League baseball at Deep Run Valley Sports Association in Hilltown Pennsylvania. Deep Run is an all volunteer run organization and when I signed him up for his first year I also had to sign up for a volunteer activity to help support the club. As I passed the table containing the various sign-up sheets I saw things like trash collection, field days, snack stand duty, and coaching (God forbid).  I finally came across one without any names on it… none... zero…nada.  It said UMPIRES, in bold letters across the top. Being a rules oriented type-A personality I’d always wondered what umpiring games would be like. I looked at Arnie Horoff, the League Commissioner, who was manning the table, and said, “Sign me up for Umpiring.” He looked at me like I had three heads and asked if I was sure because NOBODY EVER volunteers to umpire. Later that week he called and asked me if I was still interested and what nights could I commit to. I said he could put me down for every Tuesday and whatever he needed on the weekends.

Bill Dameron was one of the major’s division coaches at the time. His teams were always among the best in the league and he had a reputation for being pretty fiery. Outside the lines, his players, parents, and other coaches referred to him as “Wild Bill”. Of course, as luck would have it Bill’s team played every Tuesday night. My first game was a baptism of sorts. The bug bit me. I was hooked. I’ve loved umpiring from that day forward. I must have done alright too because “Wild Bill” shook my hand after that first game and said “Nice job. What’s your name again?” He forgot and for the next two seasons he only knew me by my new nickname; “Tuesday Night Ump”.

“Hi Coach”, I’d say whenever I saw him around the complex.

“Hey Tuesday” was his standard reply.

After those first few seasons, my passion grew and wanting to improve I signed up for the Little League Umpire School, a week long course in Williamsport, the site of the annual Little League World Series. It was a wonderful experience and upon coming back to my home league I knew I was a better umpire. I got an idea that the league would benefit from a formal umpire program and I approached the Deep Run Board. They elected me Umpire in Chief! I guess they thought they’d hooked a sucker. Over the next few years I convinced the new friends I’d made in Williamsport to come to Deep Run and put on an umpire clinic. I begged people, mostly other dads, to come learn how to umpire. I appealed to their guilt complexes. Being a good (ok not so good) Catholic I knew a little about guilt. “Don’t you want your kids to be able to play baseball?” I’d say. “You can’t have a game without umpires and we really need people to step up.” I was convinced the reason nobody ever volunteered was that they were scared of making a bad call and didn’t know where they belonged on the field. If only they could get some proper training it wouldn’t be so scary and we’d suddenly have more umpires than we knew what to do with. It didn’t quite work out as well as all that, but in the nine years I served as UIC we never had an uncovered game and the roster of volunteers grew to over 40.

Michael was a pretty good player growing up. He had natural athletic ability and a passion for the game so he worked hard at making himself better. I never had to push him. I never wanted to be one of “those” parents.  He worked out on his own and I think his love for the game developed because he wasn’t pushed. (As of this writing Mike is entering his senior year at Division II Chestnut Hill College in the wood bat Central Atlantic Collegiate Conference where he’s a 3-year team captain and a power hitting 1^st baseman with great speed. He still loves the game and plays with passion.)  He tried out for and made the tournament team starting in his ten year old season and the travel coach was none other than “Wild” Bill Dameron. Bill and I had become good friends by then. He knew my name although he still called me “Tuesday” now and then just for a laugh. That last year, when Michael was 12 and Bill’s son Patrick was 12, Bill approached the parent group with an idea. He’d heard about this place in Cooperstown called “Cooperstown Dreams Park” where teams could go for a week in the summer and play in a tournament against teams from all over the country. It would be expensive but if we started early enough with our fundraising efforts we could make it work. Everyone was on board. We raised over $12,000 and put in our application. All our plans were dashed when a month later we got word that all the slots had been filled. We were all pretty bummed. We had really come together as a team and all the fund raising had brought the parent group together with the idea of sending our kids away from their Little League years with this one lasting memory. Two weeks before we would have been leaving on our journey Bill got a phone call. There was a cancellation. If we could make it work we could go to Cooperstown after all. What a scramble that was. Travel arrangements needed to be made. Hotel arrangements for the parents were complicated by the fact that it just so happened to be induction weekend at the Hall of Fame. Everything was booked. Pins needed to be ordered. (Pin trading among the teams is one of the highlights of the kid’s week. More on Pin trading later).  Practices needed to be scheduled for the team to work on playing the game the Cooperstown Dreams Park way.  At the Dreams Park, they play with 70 foot bases and a 50 foot mound. They play Major League Baseball Rules with only a few safety modifications. Our kids had always played on the smaller Little League field and had never played with leads or balks or dropped third strike rules. Bill prepared us. He told the kids we were going up there to have fun and learn how to play at the next level. If we won even a single game all the better but it wasn’t going to be about winning. We would be playing teams from all over who’ve played together a lot longer and would in all likelihood be a lot better than we were.  It all worked out. Parents found places to stay and made the trip. The boys had a terrific week and actually won five out of eight games and finished in the top half of the standings for the week.

The park itself is nestled into the beautiful rolling green hills of central New York on Route 28 between Milford and Cooperstown.  Cooperstown is nothing more than a small village not unlike the tens of thousands of small villages that dot the landscape from coast to coast. It’s the namesake of celebrated author James Fennimore Cooper. It’s got a lovely picturesque lake, (Otsego), a grand old hotel (The Otesaga), and is home to the National Farmer’s Museum, final resting place of the famed Cardiff Giant. (Google that one, it’s a great story).  What puts Cooperstown “on the map”, however, is that it’s the mythical birthplace of our national pastime, and home to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Mythical, you say. Why, mythical? Because it’s highly probable, that Abner Doubleday didn’t invent baseball in Cooperstown New York. He probably never even visited the place. The creation myth started in 1907 when A.G. Spaulding, one of the games first great pitchers and later one of the nation’s richest tycoons by virtue of his still operating sporting goods empire, set up a blue ribbon committee to investigate and resolve the origins of the game. They couldn’t come up with anything credible and so when a “letter” from Abner Graves, a mining engineer from Denver showed up (submitted by Spaulding himself) saying that in 1839 Abner Doubleday interrupted a marbles game behind the tailor’s shop in Cooperstown New York to draw a diagram of a baseball field and sketch out the rules, the “evidence” was simply accepted. It served Spaulding’s purpose to show that baseball was an American game, invented by Americans. The truth is baseball evolved. It evolved over many years from many sources. Stick and ball games date back centuries and come in many forms. Cricket, Rounders, and Town Ball and something called Base Ball (two words) were all in vogue long before the Doubleday myth emerged. There is a reference in Jane Austen’s book Northanger Abbey written in 1798 (40 years prior to Doubleday's suppossed invention) where she remarks: “It was not very wonderful that Catherine…should prefer cricket, base ball, riding on horseback, and running about…”  In the Hall Museum, Doubleday’s exhibit has a caption that reads: “In the hearts of those who love baseball, he is remembered as the lad in the pasture where the game was invented. Only cynics would need to know more.” (Wink, wink!)

The Hall stands in the most unlikely of locations. Cooperstown is inconvenient to travel to and is near nothing else. During induction week and the 13 weeks of Cooperstown Dreams Park baseball, the town is crowded and parking is difficult if not impossible. Despite the myth, I can think of no place better. There is magic there.

The idea for Cooperstown Dreams Park was born in Cooperstown at the Hall of Fame. Louis Presutti, the park’s founder, recalls standing in the Baseball Hall of Fame with his father and grandfather. His grandfather is said to have remarked: "Every kid in America should have the opportunity to play baseball in Cooperstown!" Thus began the journey to turn that dream into a reality. Construction began in 1996 and the rest is history.

In 2001, the year Michael played there, the park hosted 48 teams every week for 12 weeks. Games were played on any one of 10 total fields. It’s grown since then. Today, Cooperstown Dreams Park hosts 104 teams every week. They added a 13^th week to the schedule. There are 22 fields on site. A little math is called for here. The average team has 12 players and 3 coaches so that means over 20,000 participants flock to Cooperstown Dreams Park every summer to play youth baseball. (15 x 104 x 13= 20,280). And that’s just the teams. Parents and grandparents and siblings in attendance at least double if not triple that number. That's over 4000 people per week, more than double Cooperstown's normal resident population. Each team is housed on site in a barracks. No parents are permitted to enter this restricted part of the park during the week much to the delight of the coaches and probably the kids. If you want to visit your child you must wait at a security checkpoint and these are manned 24 hours a day. Umpires are housed similarly in a section adjacent to the team quarters. Color coded wristbands are issued at check in. If you want access to the housing section of the park you need to have your wristband on, no exceptions. There’s a full service Infirmary right on site with medical staff and an ambulance. The dining tent is a massive structure where all the meals are served (if you choose to eat your meals there) that can seat at least a thousand.

The fields are set up in quads with a concession stand in the center. Lines at the concession stands are always long. The food fare rivals any major league park and is at least an order of magnitude better than what they serve us non-paying customers in the dining tent. The stadiums are made of wood painted forest green, fully enclosed with separate dugout entrances on each side and a fan section that extends from just beyond first and third bases down to the outfield corners 200 feet from home plate. The grass is always green and perfectly mowed. The dirt is red Alabama clay that drains exceedingly well but sticks to everything, especially shoes, which we umpires are quite particular about. Shined shoes are matter of pride among our kind. It’s Disneyland and Eden all rolled into one, at least the first time you’re there. 

Wandering through the park one afternoon between games that first year I walked past Field 4. I looked in and saw someone I recognized. It was Colin Ewing. Colin was umpiring the game at second base. Colin is Mr. Baseball at the Upper Perkiomen Youth League. Our team played in one of his summer tournaments earlier in the year and I had met him there. It turns out Colin had been going to the Dreams Park to umpire since the very beginning and his home team, the “Upper Perk Chiefs” has been going back the same week every year. Once your organization gets “in” you have the opportunity to grandfather your team a slot for the same week in future years. This is one of the reasons it is so difficult to get in. Many organizations have been sending their 12 year old team to CDP for over a decade.  I waited around until the game ended and approached Colin. He knew of my umpiring passion and experience from our earlier acquaintance.

He said “Bruce, you gotta come up here with me next year to ump. You’ll love it”

I went and Colin’s never been more right about anything in his life.