Baseball Documentary Premiere May 28

HISTORICAL DOCUMENTARY CELEBRATES TOWN TEAM BASEBALL

AND ITS IMPACT ON EARLY KANSAS

TOPEKA, KS – A new documentary film premiering in Topeka, KS May 28^th captures both the heart and the historical importance of town team baseball on early life in Kansas. “Town Teams: Bigger than Baseball” examines baseball at the turn of the 20^th century, when hundreds of small Kansas towns formed teams to play for pride and love of the game.

That passion, and the fierce competitiveness of the players and fans, became part of the culture that helped build Kansas. “Town Teams” explores the role baseball played in everything from assimilating immigrants, to labor relations, to its function as a powerful tool in the battle between towns for economic supremacy.

The documentary short (40 minutes) was written and directed by Kansas City filmmaker Mark Honer.

Honer portrays the heart of the game when cameras capture Bill Hesse, a former town team player from Rossville, as he watches film of himself playing ball from some 70 years earlier.

“When I started researching the film, I fell in love with the players,” said Honer. “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 film brings the drama of a long-forgotten era back to life, with photos that reach back over 100 years, and a reenactment of a 1919 baseball game played near El Dorado. It features footage of the Topeka Westerns vintage baseball team, and rarely seen film of the ‘Silver Ball’ trophy that was awarded to the first Kansas state baseball champion in 1867. It 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”, says 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: Bigger than Baseball is produced and distributed by Destination Hope LLC, d.b.a DHTV Digital, a film and video production company in Shawnee, KS. It premieres at 7 p.m., May 28 at the Jayhawk Theater in Topeka, KS. Admission is free with a panel discussion following the film. Additional screenings are scheduled in El Dorado, Shawnee, and Wichita.