Baseball In The Badlands

Dave Gilbertson was drafted right out of high school. Not into the army, or as a professional athlete. Because of his wonderful creativity and imagination, he was drafted by his father and the other owners of a professional minor league baseball team as director of promotions for Bismarck’s newly formed Dakota Rattlers of the Prairie League in the spring of 1995. This was no glamorous undertaking. The league, its first year, had teams in Moose Jaw, Regina and Saskatoon, Saskatchewan; Brandon, Manitoba; Bismarck and Minot, North Dakota; Aberdeen, South Dakota; and Minneapolis, Minnesota. In the second (and next-to-last) season it added Grand Forks, North Dakota, Brainerd, Minnesota, and Green Bay, Wisconsin.

As Gilbertson explains in his delightfully written book, “Baseball in the Badlands: Stale Beers and Stale Careers,” there is much we don’t know when we sit down in the metal bleachers to watch a ballgame. The personal and often heartwarming stories of young men with a dream, the chaotic lives of those men off the ball field, and stories of general managers disappearing in the middle of the night with the gate receipts from the previous night’s game, leaving a 19-year-old college freshman to fend off bill collectors.

Something of a prodigy in his young years, Gilbertson, now a mergers and acquisitions expert on the east coast, wrote his book at the end of his second season with the Dakota Rattlers (also the Rattlers last season), before he was 21 years old. It tells the story of those two seasons of professional baseball in Bismarck in 1995 and 1996. You don’t have to be a baseball fan to enjoy this book. Dave hooks you right out of the chute, combining his love for, and knowledge of, baseball, and his love for, and understanding of, the place he grew up. Here, read the first three paragraphs of Chapter One, and see if you agree that, right from the beginning, this is one of the best books ever written in, or about, Bismarck.

"In late August of 1995, the Oakland Athletics sent outfielder Ruben Sierra to the New York Yankees in a trade that was, at the time, considered relatively routine. Sierra was a well-traveled player who came to the Yankees with a reputation for being outspoken, surly and pompous. Shortly after arrival in New York, Sierra was preparing for the coming game, his third in Yankee pinstripes. A friendly older gentleman walked over and decided to welcome the new player to the team. Hall of Famer Phil Rizzuto, affectionately called “Scooter” by the Yankee faithful, was a New York star during the second golden age of New York Yankee baseball. Between 1948-53, he was part of the only major league baseball team ever to win five world championships in a row. He would later be named Yankee Team Captain, a title that to this day has been held by a select fourteen great players. The Yankees had retired his number and he had become one of America’s favorite play-by-play men with his soothing “Holy Cow,” a fixture in the Big Apple. Sierra had won no championships, likely will not have his number retired by any team, and will likely not be selected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, yet was still being paid the ungodly sum of $5.1 million per season to play the game. Upon seeing the old man amble towards him, he immediately picked up his baseball belongings and brushed past, muttering only “I don’t sign autographs.” Rizzuto was stunned as he sat down, mouth drawn, ready to give his best regards to a new man on the squad. “Things have changed in this wonderful sport since I played,” he thought to himself.

"On July 16, 1996, Rob Halasy, right-handed pitcher for the Dakota Rattlers of the Prairie League, walked into United Printing on Front Street in Bismarck, North Dakota. As director of promotions, I oversaw the release of the 1996 edition of Dakota Rattler baseball cards. The rest of the team was in Austin, Minnesota playing the Southern Minny Stars. Halasy was injured and had stayed in Bismarck for treatment on his ailing right arm. He had been asking, without fail, every single day since he arrived in Bismarck for this, his second season with the Rattlers, when the baseball cards would be done. I kept assuring him that they would be coming out soon and not to worry. He decided that the usual allotment of fifty cards given to each player would not be nearly enough. He had family and friends at home in Brooklyn, New York, that would like to see his face on an actual baseball card, so he ordered an extra one thousand baseball cards of himself. Partly because he was injured and partly to assure him that the cards were, indeed, on the way, I invited him to United Printing to view the final proofs of the cards before they went to print. As he walked in, his eyes twinkled and a grin appeared on his face. He was a child on Christmas morn. I showed him the proof of his first professional baseball card. The picture was dominated by Halasy, grinning from ear to ear, assuming the usual pitcher’s pose in his pinstriped Dakota Rattlers uniform. It was at that point, as he was admiring his very own baseball card, that he said it. It caught me off guard, but renewed my confidence in professional baseball and its much-maligned athletes. What did he say? What was it? “Look at this part of the card, right across my uniform, it’ll be perfect for me to autograph.”

"It was at this point that I immediately wished I could speak to Mr. Phil Rizzuto to assure him there is a place where they still play baseball on real grass. There’s still a place where the players don’t bother with what their agents tell them, or how much money someone will pay for their signature. Mr. Rizzuto, that place is Bismarck, North Dakota. It could, however, be Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan; Austin, Minnesota; or Aberdeen, South Dakota. In none of these places do the professional ballplayers worry about catching their chartered airplane or how to spend seventy five dollars per diem on meals. The ballplayers in each of these cities wonder how the next month’s rent will be paid, what their batting average or earned run average has reached, and where the next meal will come from. Rob Halasy is one of these players, as is Boo Moore and Dan Halpern. These players play because they love the game of baseball. Their dreams are simple: to play major league baseball. Millions of children grow up with these very same dreams putting them to sleep at night, but these players have come tantalizingly close to fulfilling those dreams. This fact makes it much more cruel when each eventually realize the dream will stay just that: a dream. They want to know the smell of a major league locker room, the feel of major league dirt beneath their cleats, to see a major league stadium filled with 60,000 people, and to hear those 60,000 cheer wildly for them. They dream every waking minute what it feels to put on major league, New York Yankee pinstripes and hear the announcer say, just as he does for Ruben Sierra, 'Now starting in right field for your New York Yankees . . .'”

If you like baseball, or Bismarck, or North Dakota, I hope you’ll find a copy of Dave Gilbertson’s book and read it. It’s a hundred and sixty pages of a young man’s love of what was going on in his life, and the sadness when it ended, and I think you’ll enjoy it just as much as I did when I re-read it again this summer. I have to admit, I was a Rattlers fan. I’m also a fan of the Gilbertson family. Dave’s parents, Joel and Jan, live just down the street from me. Joel was an integral part of bringing the Rattlers to Bismarck, just as he was a key player in the boxing career of Virgil Hill (I was fan of Virgil’s too—I once drove to Las Vegas to watch him fight). Anyway, I spent a lot of nights, as Dave says at the end of his book, sitting on the uncomfortable metal bleachers. Here, read the last paragraph, as he mourns the departure of the Rattlers from the baseball scene after two seasons:

"Dreams were made and crushed, re-made and crushed again. Aberdeen first baseman Craig Dour summed the experience best in saying, “That was the most fun I’ve ever had in baseball. The fans in each park are what I will remember. The people were just so great.” In the end, it is these memories which will last. The kids who chased foul balls at every game will reminisce to their children about those two idyllic summers. Baseball was in town and they met their heroes, whether they be Boo Moore, Dan Halpern, Ray Moon or Brett Muche. For the players the dream has lived and is now dead. For the children, the dream still lives. The sport is certainly bigger than Bismarck, and it will go on. For the small town fans in an isolated part of the Upper Midwest United States, however, the national pastime will again be enjoyed only through television and the distant radio. The fans will no longer be able to sit on top of the uncomfortable metal bleachers of Bismarck Municipal Ballpark, taking in a professional baseball game, looking out on the horizon where a North Dakota sunset is in full bloom. For Bismarck baseball fans, the sun has set and darkness has covered the soul."