Welcome to the Circus of Baseball by Ryan McGee

Author:Ryan McGee [McGee, Ryan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2023-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

SIXTH INNING

AT-BAT FOOD SERVICES

As we hammered through June and the season neared its halfway point, the Asheville Tourists were suddenly as hot as the air temps. The team had rallied from its terrible start and its stall at .500 to reach a record of twenty-six wins and twenty-three losses, sitting only four games out of first place in the Sally League’s North Division, trailing the Hickory Crawdads, Hagerstown Suns, and Greensboro Bats. Jason Smith, who had moved from catcher to first base, was crushing the ball with a league-leading thirteen homers. Jamey Wright was 4-2, giving up more runs than he wanted to, but quickly becoming known as a ground ball creator of the highest order.

For us, the real story about the arrival of summer was that school was out and business around the ballpark had moved into overdrive. No corner of McCormick Field felt that impact more than concessions, and it just so happened that as the season’s second stanza began, my job changed. We three interns rotated gigs, and I swapped out with Carlton, trading in my nipple-ripping golf shirts for a soft blue T-shirt featuring the screen-printed logo of At-Bat Food Services, the concessions division of the Asheville Tourists Baseball Club.

My hands spent the spring covered in paper cuts, copy machine toner, and infield dirt. I smelled like fresh-cut grass. Now those hands would be slathered in ketchup, grape flavoring, and nacho cheese. I was going to smell like hot dog water.

That reminds me. I promised I would tell you a better story about Babe Ruth in Asheville than the “Damned delightful place!” tale, and now is the time to share it.

It was Tuesday, April 7, 1925, and the Bambino was with his New York Yankees teammates as they barnstormed their way from spring training in Florida back to the Bronx, playing exhibition games versus the Brooklyn Dodgers all over the southeast, from Savannah to Atlanta to Chattanooga to Knoxville. Asheville was up next, where eight thousand fans were waiting, packed into still-new McCormick Field and in the streets and hillsides around it. As the train snaked its way through the Smoky Mountains from Tennessee into North Carolina, Ruth started feeling queasy. He’d complained about stomach pains in Knoxville, and the weaving of the locomotive was making it worse. He had turned thirty in February and by all accounts spent his entire off-season celebrating. He gained so much weight that winter that he voluntarily checked himself into a health spa in Hot Springs, Arkansas, to try to shed some of his nearly 270 pounds. To make matters worse, he’d battled the flu throughout his time in Florida and had bummed out his fans in Chattanooga and Knoxville when he chose to sit out batting practice, though he did jack in-game homers out of the ballparks at each stop.

When the train pulled into the station in downtown Asheville, Ruth was greeted by fans and news photographers, in front of whom he promptly fainted. The Asheville Citizen wrote

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