Boys of Spring return for a game

Movie on March baseball in Spa City films at LR field

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/MELISSA SUE GERRITS - 03/21/2015 - Hodge Kirby, laughing, reacts to a play from the dugout with fellow stand ins dressed in 1912's baseball uniforms as the Pirates team March 21, 2015 at Lamar Porter Athletic Field.The men performed as ball players for Larry Foley's upcoming film called the First Boys of Spring about the beginning of teams' now traditional Spring training.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/MELISSA SUE GERRITS - 03/21/2015 - Hodge Kirby, laughing, reacts to a play from the dugout with fellow stand ins dressed in 1912's baseball uniforms as the Pirates team March 21, 2015 at Lamar Porter Athletic Field.The men performed as ball players for Larry Foley's upcoming film called the First Boys of Spring about the beginning of teams' now traditional Spring training.

"Pretend like Honus Wagner just hit a home run."

On the count of three from a camera crew, a crowd of about 100 people dressed like it was 1912 stood up and roared, clapping their hands and waving their arms. One man, in a long black coat and gray driver's cap, stood in silence and watched the baseball's invisible trajectory over the left-field fence. After a few seconds, he leaned back and clapped, impressed.

OK, next scene.

"Pretend like Smoky Joe Wood just beaned Bobby Byrne in the head."

The crowd gasped, winced and "oohed" for a few takes.

The spectators were volunteers, filling the stands behind home plate at historic Lamar Porter Field on Saturday afternoon to be a part of a documentary -- The First Boys of Spring -- about the days when March baseball wasn't so unusual in Arkansas.

Starting in 1886, Hot Springs was the place for major leaguers to play spring ball, said director, writer and producer Larry Foley. Foley is a journalism professor at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.

The first team to come was the Chicago White Stockings, Foley said, and they would return for many years.

"They not only had a championship team," he said, but they also had a drinking problem.

"Hot Springs was full of vice, gambling, brothels," Foley said.

Cy Young, the legendary pitcher and namesake of the annual award for best hurler, trained in Hot Springs, believing the mineral baths to be therapeutic. Satchel Paige, another legendary pitcher, thought the same.

But the city's reputation for vice -- part of its history of gangsters and gambling -- drew players as big as Babe Ruth.

"Babe kind of got involved in all of it," Foley said.

In 1915, Ruth arrived as a Boston Red Sox player in his second professional season.

"Babe became this epic character in baseball," Foley said. "He became the game of baseball -- by far, the most popular player."

But much like the long-standing "Curse of the Bambino" for the Red Sox, Ruth getting traded to the New York Yankees in 1919 was the beginning of the end of an era for Hot Springs as a spring training destination, Foley said.

The Yankees didn't allow Ruth to go to Hot Springs, home of the vice that contributed to the Red Sox's decision to trade him.

Widespread use of DDT started in the 1940s, killing mosquitoes that once plagued warm, sunny Florida.

Hot Springs was often frozen and wet in March, Foley said. Florida was more conducive for training.

Teams from the Negro Leagues maintained spring training in Hot Springs but eventually left not long after Major League Baseball integrated in 1947.

After filming across the country since 2012, Foley said Saturday's shoot was one of the last before editing starts this summer. Foley's documentary will premiere at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival in the fall.

Saturday's game re-created a 1912 matchup between the Boston Red Sox and Wagner's Pittsburgh Pirates.

The Red Sox won and went on to win the World Series, but Saturday's four-inning game was "a whole lot to a little bit" in favor of the Pirates.

Indeed, 2015 looks a lot different than 1912.

The audience members dressed as if they were at a high-class social event: in neutral colors, sleek pinstriped suits, full-length dresses, long jewelry and large floppy hats with intricate flower displays.

Umpires wore suits.

In 1912, uniforms didn't have numbers or lettering. They sagged on players, who wore tight, knee-high socks below cropped pants.

The bats were heavier; the gloves were thinner. Players didn't wear batting helmets, hence the horror imagined by the crowd when Byrne was struck in the head with a pitch, knocking him out cold, during that 1912 game.

"It really makes you appreciate the guys back then who had to play with that," Michael Ricardo, 46, said. Ricardo played left-fielder Max Carey, a Pittsburgh Pirate who was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1961.

Ricardo, a history major in college, was drawn to Saturday's game as a baseball player who played a season with an adult baseball league in Little Rock.

Most players Saturday were from that league, although Ethan D. Bryan heard about the game through his family's connections in Arkansas and drove from Springfield, Mo., to play.

Bryan, 40, played Larry Gardner, third baseman for the Red Sox and an inductee in the Vermont Athletic Hall of Fame.

"I am having a blast," he said during the "ninth" inning Saturday. "I'm pretty sure we're losing, but I'm having a blast."

Bryan is an author who has written several books that have incorporated baseball, his lifelong love.

"Baseball is just the lens through which I see the world," he said. "If you succeed three times out of 10, you're one of the best players. So you have to learn to deal with failure on a regular basis, and you have to get over it."

When the game ended after a big play, Bryan and his teammates ran out onto the field as the crowd cheered, excited by Saturday's action even though many didn't have a dog in the fight.

If teams still played in Hot Springs, 15-year-old Henry Allen said, he and his dad, Scott, would "definitely" go.

The Allens were dressed in slacks with matching vests over white dress shirts and bow ties, topped off with driver's caps.

"It's really cool to think these players used to play in Hot Springs," Scott Allen said.

Metro on 03/22/2015

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