Appalachian Baseball

Nobody ever asks for their money back when Tim Landis gets to telling stories. He was an assault helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War. He is a professional fisherman who has guided a U.S. senator on the water. He is a recovering alcoholic who could once drink 48 bottles of beer in a day. Landis, 71, is an opera singer with a stone-cold bass voice who still performs at a local theater called the Paramount. He and his wife, Ann, are involved in racial equity initiatives deep in the heart of Trump country here in Bristol, which straddles Tennessee and Virginia. He married a millionaire coal baron’s daughter and endured his twin brother’s suicide.

And he loves baseball. Pair Tim and Ann with a 18-year-old rookie pitcher away from home for the first time, and you can flip a coin as to who this kid learns more from: the game or the Landises. For 23 years, Tim Landis would size up the rookie pitchers for the minor league Bristol White Sox, who became the Bristol Pirates. If the rookies were tall like him (he’s 6-foot-3) and liked to fish, Landis would outfit them and take them out on the South Holston River to school them on fly-fishing: Keep your elbow up, accelerate forward and hit the release point — much like throwing a pitch.

“I know what’s waiting for them,” Landis says. “They ought to be prepared. I would point a bony finger at them: ‘This is going to come at you fast. Women, drugs, gambling, liquor.’ I don’t have to impress them. I just tell them my story. You look down at the dugout at any time during the game, and those guys looked exactly like the guys I flew with in Vietnam.”

Professional baseball has existed in these hills since 1911. MLB will try to appease locals somehow, possibly with a wood-bat league for college players, or a Dreamers League of undrafted players. But it will no longer send prospects — the next Ripkens, Goodens, Altuves, Syndergaards, Molinas — to the Appalachian League.

Landis, who is from the Philadelphia suburbs, turned 21 in Vietnam. His nickname was “Slinky” because of his long, wiry frame, but it could have been Eagle-Eye because he had 20-10 vision. He was often in the lead of the 192nd Assault Helicopter Company because he could see the black smoke of the F-4 Phantoms 50 miles away. You don’t have to ask Landis how he acquired the poise necessary to stand in a cold river to fish, or in front of a crowd to sing, but you ask anyway. “You learn how to behave during a combat assault,” he says, noting how not to get too far out in front of the formation or lag and slow up the helicopters behind. And when hovering over a landing zone that might be covered in elephant grass or tree stumps? “You had to be rock-steady,” so as not to toss around the soldiers in the back of the aircraft. His first night out, sitting in a 12-by-14-foot hooch, his base was overrun by enemy forces. Five men died. Six helicopters were destroyed by satchel bombs 100 yards from where Landis was considering putting his head down to rest.

After the war, Landis worked as a carpenter and met Ann, a coal miner’s daughter. But not just any coal miner. George Judy owned two large bituminous coal veins. Ann, who is from Fairmont, West Virginia, was 15 when her mother walked into the room and told her, “Sit up straight, the next president of the United States is coming through.” A moment later, John F. Kennedy walked by. Ann turned down a blind date with future NBA legend Jerry West because, well, who was Jerry West? She was friends with Dave Thomas, the founder of Wendy’s. That was the circle she ran in, and it came with a price.

Tim sings at the Lee Street Baptist Church, which is actually on East Mary Street, the perfect juxtaposition for a white guy in a mostly Black choir. This isn’t any choir, though: They practice for two and a half months to sing on Martin Luther King Day. Grown men have cried listening to Landis sing spirituals, and he enthralls the crowds with his rendering of the National Anthem at Appalachian League games.

Back when Landis was drinking, he would see people go into the store to buy a six-pack of beer and he’d think: Why go for just six when you could buy a case? Ann was a rock during his binges. “Somewhere in there is the man I married,” she would tell herself. That man reappeared 23 years ago, and he’s been sober ever since. In rehab, Tim met a man with several Ph.D.s who showed up for treatment with a Samsonite suitcase full of Listerine bottles, citing severe halitosis. He was desperate enough to drink the mouthwash for its alcohol content, but the staff confiscated his stash.

Faye Ward was one of those hosts, and she went all out. Ward owns a 10,000-square foot house in Kingsport, Tenn., a 15-minute ride from the Bristol Pirates ballpark, and she would host 12, sometimes 14 ballplayers, a season. But it wasn’t just about providing beds. “I cooked a lot,” says Ward, who would feed the players a feast after games. “Whatever they wanted, I cooked. It was southern comfort food.”

The players, she said, were respectful. “Every now and then you had to pick up after them,” she admits, noting that “they’re boys” by way of explanation. The players would do their own laundry, but she would help with that too. She even wore out a washer-dryer set over the 10 summers she hosted the players. The moms of the players were more at ease knowing the players were in her home. “Oh, yes they were happy about that,” Ward says. “I still hear from the boys, the parents, the grandparents from all over the country. Several of the boys have made it to the Major Leagues.” Ward owns her own business, Total Look, a beauty salon, so she could make a schedule around the team. Her husband died 20 years ago, and she not only opened her home to ballplayers but also fostered children and people made homeless by Hurricane Katrina. She had complications from cataract surgery in 2019 and could not host players last year, but she still had coaches from the Appy League Kingsport Mets in an apartment in her basement.

But the benefit wasn’t just one-way. The players also enriched the lives of their host families. Luttrell says the players would cook Caribbean meals for his family. They wouldn’t hide in their rooms before going to the ballpark. They would come down and watch The Price Is Right with Delma, his wife. “The Latin [American] kids would always say, ‘I can’t believe how friendly people are,’” Luttrell says. “If the host families had an extra car, they would let the players use it as long as they had a license.”

Bristol’s downtown has been revitalized with shops and brew pubs. Luttrell says the Pirates were prepared to be part of the renaissance by building a $16.5 million ballpark to satisfy Major League Baseball’s wishes for better facilities in the rookie league. That plan was shelved when the “contraction” talk began; the relationship with MLB is now understandably frayed. Still, the personal relationships sewn together by Appalachian League baseball are stitched tight.

Bluefield, West Virginia, is nicknamed “Nature’s Air-Conditioned City” because its forested hills insulate it from harsh heat. The landmarks, like South Gap and Rocky Gap, are so named because they offer gaps in the Appalachian hills used for getting from here to there. One of those hills rises up behind the center field fence of Bowen Field at Peters Park in Bluefield, where the Toronto Blue Jays have had their rookie team since 2011. Longtime scout Melvin Didier says the mountainous backdrop is “the best scenery in all of baseball.” There is history to go with the landscape. Once upon a time, Bluefield was called Little New York because it bustled in the late 1880s courtesy of the coal boom. In the 1920s, it had a skyline that included a Montgomery Ward building and the West Virginia Hotel, said to be the tallest building east of the Mississippi that was not in New York. Coal barons built opulent mansions in nearby Bramwell, which was dubbed “Millionaires’ Town” because of local lore that more millionaires per capita lived there than anywhere else in the U.S.

Locals have included Nobel Prize winner John Nash, the mathematician portrayed by Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind. Another film, October Sky, told the childhood story of Homer Hickam and his rocket-launching friends from nearby Coalwood; Hickam grew up to become a key figure at NASA.

Her dad, Kyle Hurt, 55, says the idea of no longer hosting future major leaguers is a “blow” to the whole community. “It hurts everybody,” he says. “They understand why there are no games now because of COVID, but next summer when we can’t come to the ballpark for a game it will hit home.” Hurt, who grew up here, says MLB’s idea of a Dream League for undrafted players “might help,” but he doesn’t think it will draw the crowds that the future big leaguers do. The Appalachian League teams in Bluefield and Princeton, West Virginia, have an estimated economic impact of $12 million to $14 million when you consider each city’s 35 home games from June to August. “We’re taking hits all around,” Hurt says. “Some businesses might not reopen.”

His sports and outdoors business, Mefcor, which has two full-time and two part-time employees, is doing well. People can’t congregate indoors or at baseball games, so they’re fishing or kayaking. Around here, outdoors is everything. Hurt has had box seats right above the first-base dugout at the Jays games for 10 years. He pays $800 to $1,000 for a sign for his business on the outfield fence at Bowen. He has a marketing night at the ballpark with a Mefcor fishing team. Kayaks are set up in foul territory for fans to sit in. Businesses do this sort of thing at the ballpark all summer. MLB says the minor league ballparks it is ditching suffer from lack of maintenance. But that’s not true here. Bowen Field at Peters Baseball Park received close to $2 million for upgrades from local businessman Charles Peters. The seats are old but functional — they came out of Angel Stadium in Anaheim, California. The Bluefield club bought them when the Angels renovated.

And this region knows how to do sporting venues. Mitchell Stadium, a quarter-mile away, was voted the best high school football stadium in the country by USA Today last year. The big game there in late August is a spectacle. Graham (Virginia) vs. Bluefield usually draws 14,000 fans; last year it brought in $77,000. This year’s game was canceled because of the pandemic. “A kick in the gut,” says Bluefield College baseball coach Mike White, who is the groundskeeper at Bowen Field for the Blue Jays. “These people have been kicked in the gut with coal, opioids, the virus, losing the football game and now this with baseball. But you know they are not going to quit.”

Bowen Field at Peters Park is in Virginia, but it’s owned by adjacent Bluefield, West Virginia, which is not easy to explain to an outsider. Rocky Malamisura, 62, is general manager for the Blue Jays. His father collected tickets for the games for more than 50 years. He points to a distant hill. “I grew up over there,” he says. For 53 years, the city’s affiliation was with the Orioles. Rocky watched the great Cal Ripken Jr. struggle mightily. Malamisura says he has a hard time believing pro ball is finished here. He employs a game day staff of 32, at $9.50 an hour. “Major League Baseball has said there will be baseball in the communities. What that will look like, I don’t know,” Malamisura says. “I can’t imagine MLB would want to alienate that many people in 42 cities.”

White, who is from southwestern Virginia, has been coiffing the field for 15 years. The big league execs discovered they didn’t have to use kid gloves with him. “The grass is too high” or “The infield is too soft,” they’d gripe, and White would casually reply, “Let’s fix it. Tell me how you want it to play.” In other towns, the know-it-all big leaguers might have caused offense. In Bluefield, White and the big leaguers are partners. It’s 3 p.m. and there hasn’t been a game played on the field in weeks, and the specter of losing their team hangs over the ballpark, yet if the phone rang and somebody asked if the field was ready for a game that night, White would say, “What time?” It remains manicured, and sparkles emerald green when the morning sun hits. White shakes his head at the idea of losing the Bluefield Blue Jays. “I just can’t see it as a financial issue,” he says. White thinks MLB wants brand-new minor league stadiums rivaling “the cathedrals” at LSU, Texas and other major college baseball programs.

Bluefield College could lose significant revenue with the loss of the Blue Jays. The ballplayers stay in the dorms, which would otherwise sit mostly empty June through August, and the college food service provides meals. White doesn’t say how much he makes at his side hustle as groundskeeper for the Blue Jays, but the money is not insignificant. White looks through a rack of jerseys in his office. He pulls out a gray No. 34, the rookie jersey of Noah Syndergaard, now a pitcher for the New York Mets. Outside, he points to the bullpen behind third base. He and Malamisura watched the All-Star throw his first bullpen session as a professional pitcher. Downtown in Bluefield, West Virginia, the city is repaving the streets. There isn’t a scrap of trash in sight. Retail is filtering back. There are photos from the 1920s of people walking in the street because the sidewalks are so crowded. Will it ever be like that again? Probably not, but Jeff Disibbio, president and CEO of the Chamber of Commerce for the Two Virginias, says he is taking calls from people in other states who want to relocate now that COVID-19 has shown Americans the ease of working remotely. Why not the mountains?

Intuit, the tax prep business, is renovating a building on Federal Street downtown for an expected 500 employees. Disibbio says Intuit was drawn to Bluefield by its hospital and summer recreation, which included the minor league baseball team. That team, the one with rosters stuffed with future big leaguers, may have played its last game. And that’s Major League Baseball’s loss.

On Oct. 1, Major League Baseball is expected to wipe out Landis’ mentoring, along with much-loved baseball teams in a number of American communities. It’s set to strip at least 42 towns of their affiliated minor league teams in a financial humbling of small-town America by a $10 billion industry. The inelegant term for MLB trying to save a buck is “contraction,” and it will shutter nine of the 10 Appalachian League teams, including the Bristol Pirates, and remove people like Tim and Ann Landis from the lives of the rookies.

Ann’s parents were alcoholics who frequently entertained. They took a suitcase of liquor to the beach each summer. Until, that is, the doctor told Ann’s mother her liver was so corroded that the next time she had a drink it would kill her. When Elizabeth Hardesty Judy decided it was time to go at age 79, she started drinking again. “It was suicide,” Ann says.

The family drama equipped Ann and Tim with the empathy needed for dealing with ballplayers who face the long odds of making the big leagues. And when it comes to MLB, they share a passion for the Philadelphia Phillies — they make a handful of trips each season to Citizens Bank Park to watch them play. But their favorite team is the Bristol Pirates. Ann finds out the birthdays of the players and gets them gift cards to go inside their birthday cards. A player from the Dominican Republic, away from home for the first time, cried when Ann gave him his present.

When Appalachia Loses Baseball

By Ray Glier Photographs and Videos by Andrew Mangum for OZY

Bowen Field at Peters Baseball Park received close to $2 million for upgrades from local businessman Charles Peters.

The fans will mourn the loss of their teams, but they don’t need your pity. They have endured worse: the collapse of the coal industry, the opioid epidemic and the ruination of their economy by COVID-19. They suck it up and keep grinding. Pity the players and the baseball industry instead. In 2021, the rookies drafted by MLB will unpack for the grind of trying to make the big leagues in the Gulf Coast League, among other antiseptic places. The GCL teams will play afternoon games in the 97-degree swelter of Florida — “hotter than Satan’s front door,” as they say in Appalachia. They’d probably prefer the mountains of Bluefield, Virginia, which is known as Nature’s Air-Conditioned City. In Florida, the rookies might find remarkable people like Tim and Ann Landis, or the dozens of other caretakers of the Appalachian League, sitting in the stands. Or they might not.

The Landises are part of the baseball faithful led by Mahlon Luttrell, the mayor of Bristol, Tennessee (the city is chopped in two by the Virginia-Tennessee line), president of Bristol Baseball Club, Inc. and general manager of the Bristol Pirates. It is Luttrell who put out calls for families to host players. If the players were among the many who were not “bonus babies” with fat signing checks, the host families made it possible for them to get by on meager salaries.

It's been quiet in Bowen Field. There hasn’t been a game played on the field in weeks.

Rocky Malamisura

Bowen Field baseball stadium in Bluefield, West Virginia.

The Appalachian League teams in Bluefield and Princeton, West Virginia, have an estimated economic impact of $12 million to $14 million when you consider each city’s 35 home games from June to August.

Kyle Hurt

Downtown Bluefield, West Virginia.

Ann Landis

Landis with his Huey in Cambodia in 1970.

Tim Landis

She isn’t a scientist, but Kristen Hurt is the kind of high achiever who comes out of Bluefield. Just 27, she ran a housekeeping staff of 50 at a Marriott in Minneapolis. Then COVID-19 hit and she was out of a job because no one was traveling. Her father came to Minneapolis to help pack her up the day the George Floyd protests started. There are no jobs for Kristen in Bluefield either, even with a degree from the College of Charleston, a top hospitality school. It’s frustrating, but she says she’s going to nursing school to restart her career.

Bowen Field baseball stadium in Bluefield, Virginia.

WHY YOU SHOULD CARE

COVID-19 took an economic toll, and then it took baseball. What more will these American towns have to endure?

Bowen Field at Peters Baseball Park received close to $2 million for upgrades from local businessman Charles Peters.

A scenic overlook of both Bluefield, West Virginia and Bluefield, Virginia.