Fifth Third Park, Toledo (MLB #23 - We'll Always Have Toledo)

 

Most people wouldn’t think that Toledo would be one of the stadiums we’d be looking forward to the most in our five-year quest, but it was. This was the 45^th stadium we’ve been to, and the first one where Kerry has gone out of her way to buy some team-branded merchandise (other than souvenir plastic margarita glasses). Note the Mud Hens logo on her new shirt. Moreover, in many ways, it more than lived up to our expectations of an enjoyable evening. In fact, if we have a more enjoyable evening just hanging out at a baseball game, particularly a minor league game, in this five-year project, I’ll be surprised.  

There are two things that make the Toledo Mud Hens special, particularly for Kerry.

The less important one is that some of Kerry’s earliest memories are from Toledo, although she hasn’t been here in over 60 years (yes, we’re that old). Her father got a Master’s degree in Math from Bowling Green State University (he went on to get a PhD, and become a college professor), and the nearest “big city,” 20 or 30 miles away, was Toledo.

The more important one relates to a character on a TV show that was a part of the start of our marriage. The first two years we were married, I worked an evening shift for a morning daily newspaper, and was supposed to be at work at 3 p.m. Re-runs of M*A*S*H were shown at 2:30 on weekdays, and our apartment was only 5-10 minutes away from the newspaper office, so we’d watch M*A*S*H, and I’d be ready to fly out the door after the end of the last scene. I usually got to work within a minute or two of when I was supposed to, and we didn’t have a time clock, per se, so it was fine. One of many memorable characters on M*A*S*H was Corporal Maxwell Klinger, who was a die-hard Mud Hens fan from Toledo. More about the show, the character and the actor later, but suffice it to say that for us, and I suspect for many who were watching television in the 1970s, the Toledo Mud Hens epitomized minor league baseball.

An evening at a minor league ballpark

Due to a set of mostly unrelated coincidences, we ended up interacting far more with the crowd around us, and the crowd as a whole, than usual.

It started when I walked up the steps in the middle of the game to go to the restroom and buy a canned margarita. I was wearing a Diamondbacks’ jersey, and a young woman on the aisle a few rows behind reached out for a high-five, and pointed out her Arizona State cap (I didn’t have the heart to tell her we’re from Tucson, University of Arizona territory).

In the 7^th inning, she was one of the people that the mascot and interns had convinced to hold up signs to try to rev up the crowd. It was only 3000 people, and the team didn’t play that well, so the crowd wasn’t much into being revved up, so it was generally a thankless job for the interns. But they got three people to hold up signs, one in the third base area saying “LET’S,” one behind home plate (our section) saying “GO,” and one in the first base area saying “HENS.” The ASU grad was right in front of us, so we participated, and seeing two old people participating, others did, too, and the whole thing worked better than I thought it would for the poor interns.

Then it was time for the 7^th inning stretch, so we sang lustily, and sang “root, root, root  for the D-BACKS,” which got a laugh, and somehow a cameraman had found us, so we were in the center of the shot on the Jumbotron when we did that. At the end of the singing of Take Me Out to the Ball Game, we always turn and kiss, even though the “KissCam” tradition seems to have died, and no cameraman, until Toledo, has ever noticed us. But we kissed, and it was on camera. As always happened during the KissCam days, when an old couple smooches, the crowd gets into it. We got a compliment on the kiss on the concourse after the game.

Teams try various things to get the crowd to move around, dance, act silly, etc. One of the things that’s popular is to play “YMCA,” and everyone dances along. But the Mud Hens played the Chicken Dance, which is not as big a part of popular culture as it was a few years ago. So Kerry got up and did the Chicken Dance, and ended up in the center of the shot in the Jumbotron again. Turns out it was a contest for the row that was most enthusiastic, and a bunch of the kids from the high school band that had played the national anthem won. Others in our row griped that we should have won, even though Kerry was the only one dancing.

So we ended up walking out and saying farewell to a bunch of people whose names we didn’t know, but who had smiles on their faces. Not at all a bad way to spend an evening.

The game: Memphis Redbirds 11, Toledo Mud Hens 4

Memphis has the best record in AAA, and it looked like it tonight. I didn’t think the Mud Hens played badly, but the Redbirds had four home runs, all with at least one runner on base, pitched well, and played solid defense. The most impressive home run was the first one, when Nelson Velázquez hit the ball over the Jumbotron in left field. The most crucial came in the 7^th inning, when Jimmy Crooks hit a three-run homer after the Mud Hens had snuck into a 3-2 lead.

After watching two different players botch critical plays as the third baseman in Tiger games the last two nights, I realized near the end of the game that I’d circled two plays by the Mud Hens’ third baseman as very good defensive plays. Gabe Workman is also hitting over .300. Given that the Mud Hens are the Tigers’ top minor league team, maybe they should call him up.

M*A*S*H, Max Klinger, and Jamie Farr

 M*A*S*H was groundbreaking TV. It was a grim comedy, set in a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (hence the initials) during the Korean War. While it was set in Korea, it was unmistakably a commentary on the Vietnam War, which was not yet over when the show debuted in 1972. It could be hilarious, it could break your heart, and it was addictive. A documentary about the show made 50 years after its start called it “The Comedy that Changed Televison”

Although the star was definitely Alan Alda, playing surgeon Hawkeye Pierce, the supporting cast was spectacularly good, many of them in the roles of their lifetime. One of those was Jamie Farr, playing a Klinger, a Lebanese-American from Toledo (which he was, one of several cast members who were portrayed as being from their actual home towns). When Klinger first appeared on the show, he was cross-dressing, sporting over-the-top 1951 women’s fashion to try to convince the psychiatrists that he deserved a Section 8 discharge for mental illness. But since it was clear that not wanting to be in a war zone was not at all a reason to be declared mentally ill, the tactic never worked, and he ended up becoming a long-running part of the support staff.

One of Klinger’s passions was the Toledo Mud Hens. Besides being a part of Klinger’s character, I would argue that “Mud Hens” was memorable because it was the first of the minor league team names that are distinctively weird and local (“mud hen” is local slang for a type of coot, a duck-like bird). Now, there are teams named the Lansing Lug Nuts (playing not far from here) and the Amarillo Sod Poodles (a sod poodle is a local nickname for prairie dogs). And while minor league teams come and go and change names and change affiliations, there has been a team playing as the Toledo Mud Hens most of the time since 1896, and they have been affiliated with the Detroit Tigers since 1987, the third-longest partnership in AAA. So when we think of the quintessential minor league baseball, we think of the Toledo Mud Hens.

Appropriately, the Mud Hens do pay homage to Farr at the stadium. Multiple times.

There’s a bar called “Klinger’s Corner.” There’s a stand that sells “Farr Our Funnel Cakes.” And, most importantly, there’s an area where they honor a few players whose numbers are retired, a couple of announcers, and Klinger.

Mike Hessman

One of the three retired numbers, #27, is Mike Hessman, and there’s a sign in left field that says “Mike Hessman Home Run Alley.” I hadn’t heard of him before we got to Toledo, so I had to look him up. He played a large chunk of his professional career in Toledo, and holds the minor league record with 433 home runs, a notable, but dubious, achievement. If you aren’t a fan of baseball movies, you may not have bumped into it, but the classic movie Bull Durham is about a fictional character who sets that record. Hessman also hit 14 home runs, playing for three different teams, in the majors, so he had some chances, but could never stick. Having Hessman’s jersey retired is a great move, and somehow emblematic of the best of the minors.

Although I’d never heard of him before, Hessman was announced as the manager the Mud Hens in the game we saw. It turns out he’d taken over as interim manager this week after the incumbent, Gabe Alvarez, was fired for sending an inappropriate text message to a female colleague.

Holy Toledo.