Baseball Festival & Film

From the Capital-Journal:

Fans of both sports and history will have the opportunity this weekend to learn about baseball when it was spelled base ball and played without gloves or fences.

Six teams, some with players from as far away as Colorado and Minnesota, will compete Saturday and Sunday at the Free State Base Ball Festival on the Felker Soccer Fields, S.W. 25th and Gage Boulevard, in a tournament using the 1860 rules for the game.

The weekend also will include the Topeka debut of “Town Teams: Bigger than Baseball,” a 40-minute documentary on the influence of baseball on small Kansas towns at the turn of 20th century. The movie includes the reenactment of a 1919 game played near El Dorado that was filmed last October at the Joe Campbell Stadium in Rossville.

Members of the Topeka Westerns, the host team of the festival, participated in the game reenactment.

In addition to the Westerns, the games from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sunday will include the Topeka Shawnees, the Hodgeman Nine from the western Kansas town of Jetmore, the Emporia White Stockings, the Colorado Territorial All-Stars and a Minnesota Union team that includes players from the Rochester (Minn.) Roosters, the Lincoln (Neb.) Olympics and two Wichita players. Spectators can watch the games at no cost.

“Town Teams: Bigger than Baseball” will have its free Topeka screening at 7 p.m. Saturday at the Jayhawk Theatre, 720 S.W. Jackson.

The documentary was written and directed by Kansas City filmmaker Mark Honer, who said the movie “explores the role of baseball in everything from assimilating immigrants, to labor relations, to its function as a powerful tool in the battle between towns for economic supremacy.”

Honer, in a Sept. 29 story in The Topeka Capital-Journal, said he intended to make a documentary about the El Dorado oil field and the 100-year anniversary of the economic boom it created. When he discovered someone else had done such a documentary, he shifted his attention to something he found in his research: the prevalence of small-town baseball teams and the stiff competition among them.

“When I started researching the film, I fell in love with the players,” Honer said. “Most of them put in 70 hours a week at their jobs. But when the weekend came, they put on these heavy, wool uniforms and played baseball in the scorching hot sun. Now that’s loving the game.”

The game recreated for “Town Teams” was one between two towns, Midian and Oil Hill, which no longer exist. Joe Campbell Stadium was selected because it is the region’s oldest wood stadium.

The movie also includes Bill Hesse, a former town team player from Rossville, as he watches film of himself playing ball some 70 years earlier.

Also in “Town Teams” is rarely seen footage of the “Silver Ball” trophy that was awarded to the first Kansas state baseball champion in 1867. The first recipient was the Kaw Valley team from Lawrence.

Cultural context is provided by an all-star cast of baseball authors and historians.

“The amateur baseball players reflect the real America,” said Dorothy Seymour Mills, who co-authored the first scholarly history of the game. Her three-volume history, “Baseball: The Early Years” (1960), “The Golden Age” (1971) and “The People’s Game” (1990), still stands as the benchmark against which other baseball history books are measured. Honer also interviews state and local baseball historians, like Steve Dodson, a history professor at Allen County Community College in Iola.

“Town Teams” is produced and distributed by Destination Hope, which does business as DHTV Digital, a film and video production company in Shawnee.