'Baseball Bums' and the Graceville Oilers

The town of Graceville (Pop. 2,500) squats just inside the Florida line, in the company of Noma and Esto and Miller Crossroads, like a turtle broiling in the oppressive Florida Panhandle. The monotonous inland heat is broken only by occasional swirls of wind which lift the fine sand from the sidewalks and scatter it against the weathered frame buildings. Along Brown Street, the main drag, ragged white farmers and mute Negroes sprawl on benches propped against the buildings in the shade of awnings. There is not much for them to do except read the Dothan (Ala.) Eagle or dip snuff or watch the tractors or pray for rain. There is not even a movie house in Graceville anymore, which seems like a reasonable indicator of the imminence of death.

Outwardly, then, there were few changes in Graceville as I drove past the feed stores and the service stations and the modest homes on a morning in mid-April of this year. It had been 14 years since I had last seen Graceville, and nostalgia was bringing me back. I parked in front of the Circle Grill, where we had managed to eat on our $2.50-a-day meal money, went inside and ordered breakfast. It was when I began talking with the proprietress that I realized something indefinable, and bad, had happened to Graceville.

"The Oilers," she said, a hint of a smile coming to her tired face. "You remember the Oilers?"

"I played for them one time," I said.

"What's your name?"

"Hemphill. Paul Hemphill."

"Hemphill. Hemp-hill."

"I wasn't here but a week."

"What year?"

"Nineteen fifty-four. Spring training of '54."

"There were so many," she said, wiping her hands on her apron. "We used to serve all the boys. We sure miss the Oilers. Such nice boys."

"This was a great baseball town."

"I know. It meant a lot to us."

I said, "What's there to do here now?"

"Keep each other company," she said "Oh, we've got the Baptist Bible Institute and the world's largest peanut sheller. But there's nowhere to go, and nothing to do. If you want to see a picture show, you have to go over to Crestview or up to Dothan. The boys and girls don't stay here anymore after they grow up. It sure would be better if we still had the Oilers."

After that, I drove over the railroad tracks to see what was left of the ball park. It was still there, all right, in the shadow of The World's Largest Peanut Sheller, but now it lay like an abandoned farm. The light poles had been moved around for football lighting, and the sandy gray soil had been harrowed and was awaiting fresh sod for the high school football season. Letters saying "Graceville Oilers Booster Club" had almost faded away on the concrete-block centerfield fence. The portable bleachers in left field had begun to rot beyond salvation. Gone were the dugouts, rickety frame sheds resembling the busstop shelters put along rural roads for school children. When it was in use, the park was probably the very worst in organized baseball. But now it seemed even sadder, like a washed-up whore.

Taking On Identity

Stories about the demise of baseball's minor leagues have become as popular in recent years as profiles on Paul (Bear) Bryant. These stories always define the problem (in 20 years, the number of minor leagues has shrunk from 58 to 19), offer perfectly sound reasons (televising of major league games into minor league towns leads the list), then grandly conclude that nobody misses the minor leagues because even without them overall baseball attendance is higher than ever. To me, one of the thousands who hitchhiked into a Class D town as a teen-ager begging for a tryout, these stories are missing the point. They do not account for what a minor league ball club meant to towns like Graceville, Fla., and Valdosta, Ga., and Hornell, N.Y. and Thibodaux, La. Nor what it meant to the men who played it; men with names like Ernie Oravetz and Al Rivenbark and R.C. Otey and Country Brown, who would have spent their lives in coal mines or cotton mills had there not been a chance to make a living playing baseball.

It would be fair to say that nothing would have ever happened to Graceville if not for the seven summers of the Graceville Oilers. In 1952, a group of men in town came up with the money to field a team in the Class D Alabama-Florida League. They made a deal with a Ford dealer (free advertising for station wagons) to solve the transportation problem, wangled hand-me-down uniforms from the Cincinnati Reds, carved a baseball diamond out of the high school stadium, and spread the word in the town's weekly newspaper. The other league members like Dothan and Panama City, with populations around 30,000, held little hope that Graceville (then 1,800) could hold its own. It would take $30,000 a year for the Oilers to break even, meaning they would have to draw nearly 700 fans for each of 60 home games.

But Graceville, probably the smallest town ever represented in professional baseball, made it. On many sultry nights there were 3,000 people in the park for an Oilers game against hated Dothan, and one season Graceville actually led the Alabama-Florida League in attendance. The town took its Oilers to its bosom, inviting them to church suppers and baking pies for them and washing their clothes and giving them room-and-board (all very much appreciated, since a player earned from $150 to $300 a month in Class D). Artistically, the Oilers, a collection of pot-bellied baseball gypsies and frightened teen-agers, were not especially memorable, but the people did not care. In that little ball park next to the railroad tracks and the The World's Largest Peanut Sheller, the town took on an identity and became as big as New York City--especially on nights when the Oilers, say, had bombarded Onion Davis, the invincible lefthander of the Dothan Browns.

The crash came to Graceville in the late Fifties, like it did all over the country. The Oilers had tried to operate as an "independent," meaning they had no full-time affiliation with a major league club. They were not subsidized in any way, receiving no financial aid and no promising young players, which is as hopeless as a city of today trying to make it without federal funds. Graceville dropped out of the league halfway through the 1958 season. "We just couldn't afford it anymore," explained one of the club directors, Mike Tool of Cash Drugs on Brown Street. "These kids used to play for $150 a month, but pretty soon they started asking for $200, then $250, and then THREE-HUNDRED DOLLARS."

Conversation With Ernie

The greatest losers of all, in spite of the protests of Mike Tool, were the players. In 1948 there were roughly 7,500 jobs open for players in the minor leagues. Today there are only slightly more than 2,000, and most of these go to young chattels of major league clubs who are then replaced by other hopefuls if they do not make it to the big club in three or four years. No longer is there room for the player who does not have big-league possibilities but can do quite well in Class AA for 10 or even 15 years. I listened with incredulity during spring training of 1964 as a major league scout, wearing a Banlon and Bermuda shorts in the box seats of Al Lopez Field in Tampa, said the death of the minors was an act of mercy. "It got rid of the 'baseball bum,'" he said. "You know, these guys who spent their whole life in the minors, with no hope of making the big time, and were out in the cold when they were 35."

I couldn't help thinking back to a conversation of the previous August with a little guy named Ernie Oravetz. He had grown up in Johnstown, Pa., a stubby (5-4, 150) lefthanded hitter who, in spite of his size, was the best ballplayer in a fast amateur league there at the age of 16. When the scouts turned their heads on him, Ernie bummed a ride to Florida and fought for himself. He led the first three leagues he played in, in hitting, but he never quite made it with the Washington Senators. So he had settled in the high minor leagues and now, at 34, he sat on a stool in a hamburger joint in Augusta, Ga., and said the current season with the Charlotte Hornets (Class AA Sally League) was his last because his legs and his eyes were gone.

"It's these lights in the minors," he was saying.

"How many years does this make for you?"

"Sixteen. Something like that."

"Do you regret it?"

"Not when I think of the alternative."

"What?"

"The coal mines," Oravetz said. "My old man couldn't play ball, so he was a coal miner all his life. Now he's blind from working in those mines. That's why you don't catch me bitching too much about not making the big leagues. Hell, I'm lucky."