The Baseball Boys of Onionville: A Personal Reflection on the Rise and Fall of Small-Town Ball in a New York Village

Abstract

The Baseball Boys of OnionvilleA Personal Reflection on the Rise and Fall of Small-Town Ball in a New York Village Jay Kimiecik (bio) All go to one place; all come from dust, and all return to dust. —Ecclesiastes 3:20 (Berean Study Bible) I’m seven years old and playing left field for the great Florida, New York, Legion Post 1250 team in the Orange-Ulster County Baseball League, an adult league. My team is in the midst of a long winning streak spanning a couple of summers and several championships. It’s 1965, and our opponent on a hot Sunday ball field is the Monroe Eagles. Standing in outfield grass tall enough to hide my cleatless sneakers, I’m flanked by young men (including my father, the manager) who are my heroes. In the bottom of the third inning, a fly ball finally comes my way . . . Once upon a time, small-town baseball played in the rural backdrop of America vanished without even a whimper. The vast majority of people couldn’t care less about small towns like mine that lost their baseball teams about a half century ago; they’ve moved on, and so have their children and their children’s children. For reasons I cannot fully fathom, ghosts of my town’s team haunt me. I hope that telling the story of the rise and fall of baseball in my hometown will help me exorcise these ghosts and, like most others, move on. [End Page 8] the rise of black gold onions and baseball in my hometown There is some question as to whether American baseball in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries originated with rural farmers or city folk.1 The answer, of course, is both. John Thorn, official historian for Major League Baseball, writes, “In fact, baseball appears to have sprung up everywhere, like dandelions, and we cannot now expect to identify with certainty which of these hardy flowers was truly the first.”2 However, my impression of the writing on early American baseball is that it tends to highlight the development of the urban-professional game, leading to the misconception that rural or small-town baseball served as a by-product, rather than a cocreator, of the game’s evolution into the national pastime. In doing some research, I found that academic historians, such as David Vaught and Steven Gelber, present reasonable arguments that baseball was played on ball fields of rural towns from New York to California well before, and after, the game became “a city game for city men” in the 1840s and 1850s.3 Vaught goes as far as to write that the predilection of baseball as a city game was grounded in “urban bias” and “folly.”4 All I will say is that their stories ring true for my Village of Florida, New York, which is part of the thousands of acres that make up Orange County’s fertile Black Dirt Region that also includes other towns or hamlets such as Pine Island, Little York, Goshen, Chester, and Wawayanda. Baseball in Florida seemingly grew out of the “black gold” along with the onions that were the staple produce in the beginning. That beginning is a long story and may go as far back as 1608, when, according to some historical banter, a small group of Polish workers imported to Jamestown for their skills introduced their version of baseball, called palant, to the English colonists.5 But that’s a whole other story. Fast-forward to Florida (approximate population 2,800), situated sixty miles northwest of New York City with two stoplights and the “drowned lands” on the outskirts of town. Florida is the birthplace of William Henry Seward and home to the polka king Jimmy Sturr as well as a high school (named after Seward’s father, Samuel) that won the 1999 New York State Baseball Class D Championship. Florida (est. 1760) grew with mostly Polish immigrants (along with Irish, Germans, and Italians). Those arriving, poor and desperate for work, knew that the wet muck formed from melting glaciers centuries ago, when drained, would be rich farmland. Much of the drainage work—achieved through blood, sweat, and tears...