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It starts with Straight Talk, the Ma mortensen Company and Riviera Electric proudly providing construction and electrical services for Coors Field and by the Colorado Endowment for the Humanities.

Some were fathers, some were mothers passing time away.

When they came, they came to play some wore pinstripe, some wore farm clothes, some were janitor raised when they came to play.

From the farm fields to the ball yards and lush green grass From the sand lots to the cow pastuere.

Some drove tractors some drove pickup some drove miles away.

When they came,they came to play From all walks, races & lands far away They came to play.

They came to play.

They came to play from places like Illinois and Ohio.

They came to play from Pennsylvania and Missouri, each seeking to improve one's lot in life, whether on the land or beneath it, in a place far above and away from home.

Lots of people thought this was the land of opportunity.

And of course, the whole the whole country was growing in this period.

And so it was natural, I suppose, that at least a few people in Chicago, Saint Louis, would say, take the chance out there.

Theyd expect to find gold like hens eggs and all over the ground.

And they became quite disillusioned very rapidly, and prices were so high that they just really couldn't stay more than a few days, in some cases a few weeks for some.

And they turn around and just go back.

Those who stayed mined gold, built towns, broke the tough sod for farms, and also found time to play a new gentleman's game.

Laidies and Gentlemen.

Welcome today to this fine exhibition of the national game of baseball.

It's a fine, sunny day we have today, ladies and gentlemen, for this grand exhibition of sportsmanship and gentlemanly conduct.

The call for players of this new game came from William Byers, publisher of the Rocky Mountain News, on March 12th, 1862.

Baseball.

All those wishing to join a baseball club to play according to the rules of the modern or New York game, will please meet this evening at Whipple's Cabinet Shop, south side of Mcgaa St.

Bridge, to affect a permanent organization by order of committee.

And the original players were some of or were men who became pillars of the community.

Men like Henry M. Porter, for example, would become one of Denvers most prominent businessmen and the founder of the Porter Hospital in Southeast Denver, and he and any number of other men were listed as young gentlemen playing the game.

it was a gentleman's game.

It was, as most things were, rather rough and tumble.

It was a gentleman's game in theory, but the rules were done a lot here.

It was a very high scoring game, probably more so than it was in the East Coast.

Scores of like 52 to 39 were not uncommon in Colorado in the early years.

The people who had come to Colorado in the early days were a heartier group of people and more athletic just to begin with, just to get here and to and to survive life on the frontier.

After the Civil War, more people risked the trip west.

Thus, in 1870, the territory boasted nearly 40,000 people, 5000, In Denver.

the early Denver ballists could now play matches versus Mountain Town teams such as the Central City Stars and the Nevadaville Daisies, as well as against the Greeley Reds, Trinidad Vampires, and Pueblo Soap Weeds.

There was even a territorial tournament in 1871.

As was often the case of the day, they came to play for pride and money.

Gambling was a problem and became increasingly difficult to control.

And in fact, that, combined with drunkeness and rowdiness, eventually almost ruined the sport and drove it out of the public eye.

Of the newspaper editors here in Colorado and nationwide lost favor with the game around the early 1870s, and, in the case of Denver, completely stopped reporting on the game for about 5 or 6 years, until that had been rooted about The 1870s were Colorado's silver heyday, and whether the ore was silver or gold or even agricultural products from the farm towns, these goods had to be moved from place to place.

It was the cheapest, safest, fastest year round way to get from here to there.

And if you had a railroad, you had a future.

If you were town, if you didn't get the railroad, if it bypassed your town then you didn't have a future.

In 1876, the territory had enough population to be admitted as a state.

By 1880, nearly 200,000 people called it home.

Nowhere was the height of growth and prosperity more apparent than in the highest city in the nation, Leadville.

There's a statement that everybody came to came to Leadville.

And so you had a whole gamut of of activities that you had more or less high culture at the Tabor Opera Ho use, you had low dives, you had Oscar Wilde, the famous British playwright, came out to Leadville and gave them a lecture.

I think on art apreciation or something like that.

Leadville had opportunities for women, women merchants, women mine owners, for example, but women had opportunities that they did not get back east.

Men could come out and there were just numerous ways to make money.

And in fact, if you didn't make money at Leadville, you were either inept or very unlucky.

Lady luck seemed to run out on Leadville.

In 1880 labor strikes mine closures & investor fallout quickly removed the Cloud City from the headlines.

Local civic leaders were in a quandary is to how to put Leadville back on top again.

The remedy could be in the form of a championship baseball team, the Leadville Blues.

Among the early stars for the Leadville Blues was Dave Foutz, who would later play for and manage Brooklyn of the National League.

He was a tall man, very slender, weighed 161 pounds was six foot two, which was very tall at the time.

and was a great infielder as well as a pitcher.

He made his fame initially as a pitcher, and also played 1st base.

Colorado's town teams of the 1880s soon realized that they were no match for the mighty Leadville Blues.

They went out and they play teams bonanza with their little mining camp.

They beat them 47 to nothing.

They just cleaned up on everybody, and they came down to Denver and they played.

At that same time.

The Longmont Utes were a strong team and Denver had a couple of strong team, and they beat them and they became the champions of Colorado.

And so Leadville had achieved what they wanted.

They wanted the best, best baseball team in in the state.

But then they carried it a little bit too far, and they decided to go back to the Midwest, & they met their Waterloo back there.

The ball clubs in Denver and surrounding towns grew a bit jealous of Leadville success on the diamond.

These communities quickly began to import players of their own.

The idea of coming out to the west.

It was cooler, higher of course, less humidity.

The fans in the western cities tended to be a little bit newer to the game and perhaps less critical, and in many cases, players could make salaries that were equal to, or in a few cases, even superior to, the salaries they might make in the in the larger eastern cities.

Among the earliest known players to arrive in Denver were Brothers from St.

Louis Dave Row was really one of the founding fathers of professional baseball here.

He kept it going.

David came here the first time in 1883 and played, made Denver his home, and Dave owned the team, played for the team.

He was not only in an outstanding player, but he was an organization man as well.

Early professional ball in Colorado was anything but stable.

team nicknames players and managers often came and went.

Most received no salary, just occasional inducement.

That changed by 1885, as the Denvers became the first true professional franchise in the Queen city.

Their playing on opening day against the Pueblo Pastime was overshadowed by their manager, a Mr.

R.F.

Ross, He had agreed to distribute the money to the players.

at least a portion of the money to the players, and in fact he promised the players that he would meet with them later, I believe, the next day, and distribute to them their share of the proceeds.

Well, in fact, Ross returned to a room that he occupied a above a bar in Denver, cleaned out his few possessions, packed a suitcase, and caught a train out of town.

And it took.

It didn't take players very long to realize that they had basically been swindled by their by their own manager.

There were a number of characters in this ballclub, among them flamming Darby, O'Brien and Jack Ryan.

O'Brien and Ryan gained a certain degree of local notoriety, which they wisely used to their advantage.

Derby, O'Brien and Jack Ryan did something that you would think of more in the 1980s and 1990s than you would the 1880s.

They took advantage of their celebrity and they were celebrities.

They opened the bar on 17th Street and it was called The Ballpark.

And I love that there was reference made in the paper.

They had an open house and they invited all the fans out.

And the comment that was made by one of the sportswriters that he knew that they would be a success because neither Darby or Jack were drinkers themselves.

They thought they could handle running a bar.

history would prove, however, that the most important player in this club would be left fielder George “white wings” Tebeau, who played for the Denver's in 1885 and 86 before moving on to Cincinnati of the National League.

There is a popular song of the day that was called White Wings, and people would sing that around the boarding houses, in the evening.

White Wings was also a term that was used for someone who was pristine in their dress, which George Was his uniform was always pressed and it was always clean, which again, wasn't typical of the time.

Players would let their uniforms get a little grungy until the ownership would make them clean it.

Because they were responsible for doing that themselves.

Tebeau could have been a major league pitcher from the 4th of July 1886, during a snowstorm in Leadville, he blew out his arm and was never the same on the mound.

His legacy would be as a team owner and league entrepreneur who kept professional baseball alive in Denver, and who co-founded the American League with Dan Johnson and Charles Comiskey.

The three men were well known as investors in the offseason, they would play the commodity market together and spend a lot of time in the off season together, but they formed that league jointly.

And today, if you look in baseball history, you see that it was Dan Johnson's leauge and he was certainly a key player, but Comiskey and George Tebeau were well involved as Dan Johnson was.

While George Tebeau played with Cincinnati in 1887, his older brother, Patsy, had spent time in a Denver uniform, a future star with the Cleveland Spiders of the National League, Oliver Patsy Tebeau quickly became a local hero of sorts for the Denver fans.

Tebeau hit a long home run, and the Denver fans apparently put Denver in the lead for the first time in the ballgame against the first place team.

And the Denver fans got so excited that they showered the field with coins, which is a fairly frequent occurrence in the old days when the player for the home team did something very exciting Some of Tebeau's teammates might not really have been that enamored of the whole proceedings, because later in the game, three of Tebow's teammates also hit home runs.

And when the fans did shower the field with some coins But they weren't nearly as generous because the three other players only collected a total of about $40.

Wheras Tebeau had gotten $56.

There were as many ballparks as there were teams in the early days of baseball in Denver.

The early ballists played next to the old Arapahoe County Courthouse, just off Colfax and Broadway.

A few years later, a ballpark was built at 32nd and Larimer Street, just a short trolley ride from downtown Denver.

How ironic that this ballpark would be very close to the new Coors Field, and would have a similar configuration as many of our fields here is kind of odd That home plate was looking west northwest, and when you were running from home to first base you ran due north on on Larimer.

But the 32nd & Larimer was a true ballpark.

They built grandstands and it was fenced in, which was kind of unique for the time it was sodded.

There was a house just outside the left field fence, and if you could hit the ball from if you hit the roof of that house, they would pay you $12.50, which was no small sum.

In 1882, Many of the buildings around the ballpark had been built with materials supplied by the McPhee Lumber Company of lower downtown Denver.

When he wasn't working for his father, Charles, John Bid McPhee played ball, and would later headline the infield with Cincinnati of the National League.

He stole 94 bases one season.

He was a consummate second baseman.

Aldis was one of the top two or three leading fielders, and although they wore gloves in the major leagues in the infield most of his career, he resisted that until his last three years.

He was the lone wolf, if you will.

Kind of like the football player without a mask, but he only used the glove his last three seasons.

But was still a remarkable fielder even without the baseball glove.

pitcher Bert Jones of Golden was another local player who went on to success in the big league as the second man in the pitching rotation for the famed Cy Young.

He once won 13 games in a season.

He played all along the Front Range as both an amateur and professional, before moving on to a new career and made a name for himself in politics.

He was mayor of Golden for 12 years.

He was with the Sheriff's department there.

I saw an article & photograph of him in 1948.

Still very slender, very athletic looking, meeting dizzy Dean and the two old Cardinal pitchers meeting.

And he was quite a character in the West.

Baseball became a Sunday game.

The self-reliant hearty westerners who brought the game from back east did not pass Sunday Blue Laws prohibiting play on the Sabbath, what was imported from the East was a severe economic depression The panic of 1893.

1000s of unemployed workers crowded into Denver.

The city gave them lumber to make boats.

They hoped they'd float away down the South Platte, and naturally, under those kinds of circumstances, it was very difficult for professional sport to to flourish.

And it was it was just a very upset time.

In the mid 1890s.

Ironically, a new discovery would be made on the south side of Pike's Peak, which would change the face of Colorado.

Here we were suffering the silver decline in just about exactly that same moment.

very great gold discoveries at Cripple Creek are made.

And people that lost jobs in Leadville I suppose a fair number of them wind up getting jobs in Cripple Creek, cripple Creek, money from Mr.

Gold himself, Winfield Scott Stratton, helped forge growth in Colorado Springs.

Stratton was part of a conglomerate of owners of the city's first professional team, appropriately named The Millionaires, that played at Boulevard Park.

The Millinaires in the in the early stages got really great support and they their advertising was interesting because they had ladies days back then as well.

Grandstand seats went for $0.65 and bleachers were only $0.40.

As quickly as the millionaires became popular, their fortunes plummeted and by 1904 the millionaires were gone forever.

There was baseball at nearby Colorado College and campuses in Boulder and Fort Collins.

Many college players played town and semi-pro baseball during the summer before returning to their alma maters in the fall.

In Denver, George Tebeau, now retired as a player, had put together a mix of young talent and old veterans, performed the first Grizzlies team in 1900.

Some called them the bears.

Among the players Tebeau acquired was a 19 year old backup second baseman named Joe Tinker.

He played some shortstop some second base, a little bit of third.

They cut him in June, and again, it wasn't because he didn't know his value in his future, but when he cut him, he just didn't cut him loose he sent him to Butte, Montana.

He had a friend running the team there, sent him up there and said, nurture this young man, bring him along 3 years later he was with the Cubs and it's all history from there.

the Tinker to Ivers to chance double play combination is now in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.

It underscores George Tebeau's ability to select and cultivate young baseball talent.

Among the mix of experienced players.

In the 1900 bears third baseman Princeton Charlie Riley, Santa Fe rancher Jack the elephant, Tine Holland, and first baseman, outfielder and relief pitcher T acky Tom Peron.

Tom is an interesting character.

He was quite the Prankster.

Tebeau in an exhibition game, and George was just kind of playing out the string he'd play if somebody was injured, but 1900, he wasn't very much into playing himself, but in an exhibition game they had an interest squad game.

He got a home run inside the park homerun & he was and hes huffing and puffing, had a little extra weight on him by this time in his life.

And he comes in and and tacky Tom Peron was congratulating him on such a great hit, calling him captain, he said that was a great hit.

And Tebeau looks at and he says that hit was an accident & Tacky Tom said all base hits are accidents, coach.

To compete effectively in the Western League, George Tebeau knew his club needed a new ballpark.

Thus, in 1900, Broadway Park at sixth and Broadway became Denver's newest yard, unique to this ballpark, where the dressing rooms in center field.

Turn of the century Colorado saw an end to the hard economic times and the renewal of local town baseball.

A huge gold find in the Camp Byrd Mine.

Put Ouray on the map.

This small village in the Uncompahgre Valley would become best known as the boyhood home of Smokey Joe Wood, who won 34 games and lost five for the Boston Red Sox in 1912.

I was lucky to write to him and he told me about what happened up in Ouray He started out sort of as a mascot of the baseball team.

Then he became the substitute player for the team, and then by the time it was, his father ran a newspaper.

And by the time his father left, Smoky Joe wood was playing on the night as as one of the starters.

Even just in his mid-teens, the flumes in town would treat the players after especially notable victory if they beat Grand Junction or Telluride or something, or even just a good victory.

Free drinks.

Smoky Joe Wood was so young he couldn't do it.

Smokey Joe Wood also won three games in the World Series of 1912, as Boston defeated the New York Giants.

Once before a game with the senators, a fan asked the great Walter Johnson, who was warming up, if he was faster than Smokey Joe Wood.

No Son said Johnson, there's not a man alive faster than Smoking Joe Wood.

Southwest Colorado also saw a fierce town baseball rivalry between Durango and Silverton.

Silverton was sponsored by John H. Jack Slattery, a local saloon owner, politician and mining investor.

in good years thet were referred to as Slattery's Invincibles and among informal company Slattery's Slobs.

A good year always meant beating Durango Durango got very upset One time Silverton beat them, beat them pretty badly.

It's like 22 to 7 or eight.

And it turned out that Silverton had imported a battery of pitchers & catchers The Durango paper said, well, we didn't have to stoop that level to beat Silverton.

It was just a game.

But Durango had brought in some players, but they weren't as good as Silverton.

There were similar rivalries among the coal camps of Walsenburg, Trinidad and Tobasco.

The coal mines offered many Eastern Europeans new opportunity, and by 1890 many had come to work the mine.

By 1900, the farming area would increase production, and laborers were needed from Japan and Mexico to work the field.

Colorado's population surged.

lots of places that were simply hamlets, almost almost villages.

In 1900, places like oh, Loveland and La Junta and Greeley and Fort Collins will double and triple their population in the in in that that period.

Baseball has played a significant role in the Mexican American community of Colorado.

One of the early Hispanic teams was the Peralta's of Greeley in 1910.

Rudy Peralta was an interesting character.

in Greeley.

You might imagine Hispanics weren't prominent in business in that era, but he was the general manager of a great western sugar plant in Greeley & had his own shop.

He had his own grocery store.

And so he sponsored a team The Peraltas, and he had a lot of Hispanic kids on the team, young men as well as others from the community.

It wasn't all Hispanic, but it was the Peralta team.

And I think that speaks well to the Colorado community.

Other Hispanic baseball teams came from Alamosa in 1886.

This club also included Billy Adams, who would later become governor of Colorado.

Hey, how are you?

Good luck.

I brought my uniform down.

I'm the only one with a uniform hanging up first.

But by far the most extensive Hispanic baseball was played in Northern Colorado.

Where Mexican Americans first came to play in the 1920s By the mid 1940s, a full fledged Pan American League included three teams in Fort Collins and clubs from up and down the North Platte Valley from Brighton all the way to Cheyenne.

It was a cheapest recreation and it gave them something to do on Sunday.

They worked hard all week to get here Sunday.

Now they walked.

They rode buggy, rode cars.

They just got here every Sunday.

Once we formed, the legionaries and the merchants formed a team this was heaven for them because they had a game to watch all summer.

Every Sunday we'd be out of town.

Theyd be in or vice versa Fort Collins has been a very prejudice town.

And when we would get together on Sundays, you never felt the prejudice, you know, because we were all there and we all went as a family to watch, you know, the ballplayers, you know, before people brought all this ethnic trash into the picture, we didn't even realize we were different.

And we aren't.

You know, we just had city teams, our good buddies.

We just got together with teams every summer and got them.

Whoever , could play the position, we'd put them together and have a good ball club.

We want to minimize the Hispanic thing.

We we were basically athletes and that's what we wanted.

And that didn't become, although there were more Hispanics primarily in earlier years and as it got better, the better competition We invited anyone who was athlete.

I'm remeber going as a child to Brighton.

At that time, they used to play right off of the Onion Hut.

They had an onion storage shed there, and there was a Japanese school there, and they had a ballpark there, and a lot of the teams would go to play.

And there was teams both from Brighton and Fort Lupton, a couple teams from Denver and the whole Japanese community would assemble around Sunday afternoons and watch the games.

They came to play Japanese American baseball in Colorado as early as 1915.

First generation people used to come out and Root for us and that was their enjoyment.

And most of the this or the first generation people, they never knew baseball.

Lot of them did not.

And every Sunday used to come out and watch baseball.

And they all started learning baseball.

And it was one of the games.

Every Sunday was taken up with baseball.

And the fans The Nisei grew up with baseball now because we didn't know how to bowl at that time.

Golf.

Bowling was out of the way, and baseball was the only thing.

The Nisei had their own league, which played weekly and featured tournaments in the 4th of July and Labor Day.

Often parents of players had to be persuaded to allow their sons to play On Sundays.

The farm work had to be done, and sometimes the parents had to be coerced into letting the son play.

I think, you know, harvest at harvest time, especially in the season of winding down already, in that their best players were busy sometimes on the farm.

Younger Japanese Americans learned the style of baseball played in the States.

Most, after all, were native Coloradans.

Others knew the older, more polite version of Japanese baseball, which emphasized pitching, defense and manufactured runs.

Well, the kind of baseball we played would be, as I said, because of our size and so forth, was hit & run.

and stealing pretty fast bunch of fellows.

The squeeze play.

And I remember vividly we had a game with the grocers the the independent grocer had a picnic every year lakeside.

And so the big thing was the baseball game between us & the grocers.

The prize was a bushel basket full of groceries for each of us.

That was a great prize.

During World War Two, the Japanese Americans not born in Colorado were shipped of to what were called relocation camps throughout the West.

There was even one in Colorado called Amaechi, near Granada.

Despite their internment, Baseball soon occupied much of their time.

We were sent to camp, and when we got there, the Mess Hall, we had to line up just like the Army line up to get the food.

And then I guess somebody happened to bring baseballs and gloves and everything in.

And that's how we picked up the baseball again.

And there was about six different baseball team in camp.

So we got into a league, we organized a league, and then we started playing ball I remember visiting that with my parents and I was appalled.

And I've never seen so many Japanese people in all my life.

And they were in this camp.

And I remember seeing a baseball game down there, a really good caliber baseball being played.

Baseball was also popular among Native Americans, particularly in the Four Corners region.

Players from the Ute, Navajo and Apache nations played for Fort Lewis in Durango.

It was an Indian school then between 1891 and 1910 before becoming a college.

The other boarding school for Native Americans was the Teller Institute of Grand Junction.

Both were part of a U.S.

government's attempt to teach the Indian the ways of the white man.

Women came to play as early as 1892, and the Boston Bloomer Gals made one of several stops in Denver.

Women, after all, have won the right to vote in 1893 and soon played ball on campus at the University of Colorado in Boulder and a few years later in the Japanese American community in Fort Lupton.

One account even had a women's team beating a men's club in Lamar in 1905.

Women also played in the industrial leagues of Denver.

In 1910, we had a team here called the Bayly Underhills and Bayly Underhills was a company that made overalls, they were an overall manufacturer.

and they sponsored a boys team and a girls team.

Young men and teenagers were in either case on the on the boys it was a bloomers girl team.

What you would find on bloomer teams, however, is if they would have 1 or 2 men dressed in bloomer outfits.

They wore the wigs.

And and typically it would be one of the pitchers.

And typically the second person would be a third baseman, somebody with a little bit more physical strength to make that long, throw to first base.

Baseball and industry in Colorado had benefited from a long partnership.

The early smelters and factories which served the Mines and Mills sponsored teams as early as 1880.

Players came to play for the pride of the company, but were often given easy jobs and special dispensation.

You werent an 8 hour or 10 or 12 hour day worker, you might have had a nice cushy job.

But with the company.

But you're a good baseball player so youre on the team.

Most workers were not so privileged and had to work as common laborers whose work was difficult and dangerous, particularly in the mine.

As a result, the labor strike was commonplace throughout Colorado, and baseball suffered as a result, for example, Telluride and Silverton, their baseball season sometimes was shortened very much because of labor.

I mean, if the strikers were driven out of the district, which we were in 1904, they werent allowed players.

But we had a continual strike in Colorado in the late 19th and early 20th century between workers and and capitalists.

Generally speaking, the capitalist won the famous Ludlow Massacre, in which a number of women and children are killed.

In 19 1914 was a was a good example of that.

I remember when the militia had this battle with the strikers and militia got blamed for burning the tent colony and there were 13 people suffocated in a dungeon that people lived in down there with a tent covered over the top of it.

And I did know one of the families that suffocated in that.

In that fire.

In Starkville outside Trinidad Willie Robinson was too good for the kids team and by age 15 began to play baseball with the men.

His talents were quickly spotted, and he became an outstanding semi-pro player in the 1920s.

I broke up the game in the in the 10th inning by hitting the.

I can remember and remember hitting that ball, and thats about the hardest ball I ever hit it went on a lin drive to the center field fence, and that broke up the game.

We won the game.

That's that's the only game that I can that was outstanding in my mind.

In those early days of semi-pro ball, the better players were often given opportunities to play at higher levels, which, while not the majors but at least professional.

Minor league baseball.

Middle of February for part of February, my mother called and said she had a letter for me and I said, well, okay, what does it say?

Well, I just looked at the address.

The return address says New York Yankees ballclub.

And I said, well, oh my gosh, lets see what it says.

And she said, well, there's some sort of contract thing here, and there's a letter to fill it out and mail it in and reports the spring training on whatever the date was.

And I said, mom Im having a good time here.

Now just throw it away.

They'll want me next year.

But I never heard from ‘em again During the late 20s and well into the depression, semi-pro players in Colorado could make some decent money, whether primary or secondary.

income.

You got paid a percentage of the gate and no matter where we went to play, if we went to Wasenburg, or Trinidad, Or Colorado Springs, they took the expenses out for operating the field, and then the winning team got 60% of what was left, and the losing team got 40%.

It might mean that that if you had a good crowd, each one of us might get 15, $18.

And I was making $15 a week working as a registered pharmacist, and the guys on WPA were making the same thing $65 a month.

So really, it's similar to pro ball.

If you had a good ballclub and played regularly, you could make this as much as we could make.

working.

The early clubs like the Pueblo Pastimes played at Centennial and later Eiler Field until Runyon Field, named after sportswriter Damon Runyon, was built during the depression.

Within a decade, Puebloans would see minor league baseball at Runyon Field.

They'd already seen the best of the major leagues Babe Ruth, who barnstormed through Pueblo in 1922.

Ruth came back again in 1927 to Denver, this time with teammate Lou Gehrig.

Dad took this baseball down to the hotel where the players were staying, and he got ahold of Ruth and Gehrig in the lobby and gave a ball to Ruth and said, I'd like you to autograph this ball for my son.

And babe said, sure, be glad to.

And he turned around and he says, where's the kid?

And my dad said, well, he's he's bedridden.

He couldn't he couldn't come down.

He's been in bed for about three years.

And so he said, I thought maybe you'd be good enough to autograph this ball for him.

And Ruth looked at Gehrig and he said, Lou, he says, we haven't got anything to do.

Why don't we go out there to the kid's house and autograph a ball at bedside?

So my dad was overjoyed, and he put him in the car and drove them out there.

And they autographed the ball right there at my bedside.

And that was a prized possession.

And a couple of years later, I was in the wheelchair playing ball, and I was always trying to play whether I was physically able or not.

And I was pitching this day.

It was a ninth inning, had two outs in the ninth inning, and I, I needed to get one more out there and close out the game, and the cover came off of our ball.

All the kids knew I had this Ruth, Gerig ball, and one of them said, well, why don't we go out to your house and get that Ruth, Gerig Ball and we can finish the game?

It won't hurt it any.

Well, that sounded logical to me, and I figured it was the stuff I had.

I could get this last hitter out and do nothing to it.

Well, the first ball I threw, the batter, fouled it off, and it rolled along the the gutter and disappeared into a storm sewer and was gone forever at the corner of 19th and Forrest, if you want to go down in that storm sewer there, you can probably find it be worth 5000 bucks to you.

The 1920s saw new ownership and a new home for baseball in Denver, Merchants Park along South Broadway.

I always referred to it as the termite capital of the United States.

The termites, just almost grieved to death when they tore that down because they had a great place to feed, and the Park had no grass in the outfield and was just dirt supposedly, but there was rocks mixed with it and it got to be as hard as concrete.

And sometimes you could get a line drive over the shortstops head and it would bounce between the outfield.

It would go so fast.

It would be like hitting it down a concrete driveway.

The park's biggest attraction, however, would be the Denver Post Tournament, which began as a regional championship and evolved into one of the largest events outside of Major League Baseball.

Six members of the Baseball Hall of Fame played in the tournament, but it is best known as the first event in more than 50 years, which reintegrated blacks and whites in baseball.

However, Marcell was playing semi-pro baseball in town with a number of local teams most not knowing his stature in the Negro League.

But he came to boss Parsons, and suggested he bring the Kansas City Monarchs into play.

And this is in the 1934 tournament and Parsons understanding the promotion side of the business didn't take a lot of convincing, invited Kansas City to come and play, and they did that.

And that was the first integration of that level of baseball anywhere in the country from the late 1880s until 1934.

And that's an important moment in history.

Leroy Satchel Paige, long a fixture with the Monarchs, Pittsburgh Crawfords and Homestead Grays, pitched the predominantly white House of David team to a 2 to 1 victory over Chet Brewer and the monarchs in the 1934 post tournament In 1936, many still remember how Paige, in a group of Negro League All-Stars like Josh Gibson and Cool Papa Belle, breezed through all opponents en route to the tournament crown.

He threw the ball so fast a lot of pitches he threw on the mound you didn't even see it, im not kidding.

You didn't see the ball.

Thats how fast he was throwing.

It was a carnival atmosphere.

The summer evenings were tremendous.

Evenings of partying on the street and and eating on the street, and they treated them to celebrities, which they got in some communities.

In many communities, of course they didn't.

But it was a wonderful time to to be here in 34, 36, 37. when these teams were coming in, was great for the black community here as well as the community and as a whole.

Black players had not been allowed to make such a major contribution to Colorado baseball since the days of Bud Fowler in the late 1880s, one of the game's true vagabonds and the first ever black professional player, Fowler played for the Pueblo Pastimes in 1885 and was well received while in Denver the very next year.

In 1886, he played with Topeka in the Western League, and when Topeka came in town for their first trip, the crowds were bigger than they had been all season.

because of his popularity in Denver.

They'd really taken to Bud Fowler, and as a result of Bud doing that it opened the gates for black professional players in Colorado, and those gates stayed open much longer than they did in other parts of the country.

And I think that's something we can be proud of here.

Many blacks came west as ex-slaves shortly after the Civil War.

A great many took advantage of post-Civil War liberalism and found jobs in the larger cities, including Denver, Pueblo, and Colorado Springs.

They were just intimately involved in every aspect of life here in Colorado Springs, and at one point they were allowed to be entrepenuers.

And they weren't all these restrictions.

And when they began getting the influx of of vacationers here who were coming from the south, tourists from the south.

Then the situation changed and became more segregated.

It was amazing to to know, to find out when you go to towns like Colorado Springs, Longmont, Louisville, places like that.

That some of them were just as bad as a lot of them in the south.

You know, call you different names out loud too Just keep it going.

They trying to get on your nerve to make you not concentrate on the game so that you might lose.

And if you lose, if you lose the game, you know they gonna throw a whole lot of slanders at you then.

Right here in Colorado, in this state, in this state.

In the towns like Ouray and Brighton, blacks were tolerated on white ball clubs, particularly if they were good players and they weren't enough men to form a full team.

Diamond Duke White played for the Rocky Mountain Athletic Club of five points in 1911.

This team was referred to as the Rockies.

Duke White would later become an outstanding amateur league umpire.

As a pitcher, I was very well aware the way he called things.

He was a very vocal man.

He was a very fair guy.

He had such command and understanding of the game of baseball Ill always remember him and he had such a fantastic voice when he'd call a ball or a strike or it was almost he'd holler it out, almost like he got hit by the ball.

But it was he was one great memory that I always had.

I was considered a tom boy because I liked to play ball and swim and things like that.

In those days, the mothers and fathers thought that girls should stay in the house and cook and clean house.

But I didnt.

Young Lucille Callisito first came to play with the boys in her North Denver neighborhood.

She later played on a state championship Denver drygoods softball team.

Scouts came calling and she was signed and sent to Wisconsin, where she played two years for the Kenosha Comets for the All-American Girls Baseball League.

I imagine that most, most people just didn't realize that girls could play ball.

A round of ball that was really enjoyable and considered very good.

I think they were all amazed because women and women didn't do things like that you know.

But we showed them.

While the women played in their own league, G.I.s stationed in Colorado did the same at the many military bases, which were a big part of the state's economy.

Future name players and others participated in what became known as the Victory League.

Baseball is my life.

I honestly don't know where I'd be without baseball, said O'Neil Hobbs, the owner and general manager of the Pueblo Dodgers.

During the postwar decade, the Dodgers would draw as many as 4000 fans a night to Runyon Field, for class A Western League baseball.

Renowned X Dodgers include Walt Austin, George Sparky Anderson, Maury Wills, and a skinny kid from Brooklyn, Omar Turk Lown, who liked Pueblo so much he stayed after his major league career was over.

I was pitching that night and got knocked out of the ballgame in about the fourth inning, and I had a real good friend who I met here when I first arrived and he said, Turk, come on, let's go sit up in the stands.

And he introduced me to this girl who I later married.

So getting knocked out of the box isn't really that bad.

In 1923, young Jake Gotfried liked baseball so much that he volunteered his time to become an equipment boy for the Star Journal semi-pro team.

By the time that Dodgers had arrived, Gottfried's family knew the young Dodgers well.

There was a little restaurant in Pueblo, called the Canton Cafe, which was a little Chinese restaurant.

And after the baseball game, most of the players used to go to the canton to have a little snack or a bite to eat.

And that was a restaurant that we frequened often too.

And so usually after the games we went there, the baseball players went there.

Yes, we knew them.

Almost all of them personally .

Sharon Gottfried Crane had a particular crush on Jim Gentile, about whom she had written a poem at age 13.

When it comes to batting, Jim can't be beat.

When the Dodgers look like they go down with defeat, up comes Jim and smacks the ball and it goes sailing over the wall.

Jim never gives up without a fight.

If he knows the umpires are wrong and he's right.

So on your birthday, I'd like to say, may you have success always in every way.

A Dodger fan Sharon Gotfried.

By 1950, the Western League's revival also had minor league clubs in Denver and Colorado Springs.

The latter hadn't seen professional baseball since the millionaires of 1904 The general manager of the new Sky Socks,Bill MacPhail, remembers receiving little optimism from parent club GM Frank Lane of the White Sox.

And I said, if it's D or E , but I want to be general manager And he said, well, we just signed a working agreement with Colorado Springs.

And that's going to be very difficult, they never had baseball before.

And it's a silk stocking town and baseball wont go there I said I want it.

I want it.

And it was just the opposite.

They supported beautifully The Dodgers and Sky Sox had quite a rivalry with the Denver Bears, which were now owned by the Howsam family and we used to have as many And this may not sound like big figures today, but in those days it was big.

We used to have as many as 1000 people drive down there just to see a ballgame in Colorado Springs.

and root for the Denver Bears.

One of the first moves Bob Howsam made was to build a new stadium to replace Old Merchants Park.

It was a fire trap, and I tell you, I we always worried about when we played there.

We only played their a short time, but if anything started a fire, that was going to be a tragic thing.

Howsam and his family built Bears Stadium on a city landfill west of downtown.

At the time that they were getting ready to to break ground, they had a collection of dignitaries, including Senator Johnson and the mayor and the governor, and everybody was standing there.

And when they turned the first spade, the odor was so bad that people turned heads and started to run for cover because they had nothing but refuse underneath, you know, that had been rotted and deteriorated.

Postwar Coloradans had much more leisure time than before.

Television was in its infancy, and class A minor league baseball in a new yard was fun and affordable.

You could go to a beautiful stadium, Bears stadium.

You could plunk down $0.90 or a dollar for a grandstand seat or reserved seat.

Box seats cost a buck and a half.

It was a great deal.

The crowds were huge, like on on Sunday afternoon in class A ball, and you had 12 to 14,000 for doubleheader.

It was something we hadn't experienced before.

And the way they treated us, they were good fans.

The people took care of us.

There was a family beside us named Choens.

When you make 200 a month, it's hard to get everything together.

And sometimes we had to watch what we ate.

But I think they kind of knew & she would send food over.

Shed say Oh, this is extra.

And we had extra here so we want you to eat it.

one lady would take my wife to Colorado Springs and we'd play ball games, we couldn't afford it.

Tanner was 19 years old and what I called an ice cream kid.

He was really nice.

Clean cut young fella.

And Johnson wound up winning 15 games and losing five.

He turned out to be one of the top pitchers in the league.

I first refused to go there from Triple-A because my wife was in Vermont expecting our first child, and so I more or less said, I want to go to Hartford.

That's class A too.

They said, no, I said, I quit.

They said, wait a minute, well get Mr.

Howsam on the phone And he talked me into coming to Denver.

He talked about Denver.

And he said, when your first baby is born, we'll fly you back there and you can see her.

And he talked me into it, and I'm glad he did, because after that year, I had a chance with the Boston Braves in spring training.

We played on the muddy field and it was raining, and I wore my old shoes because I only had one pair that was good and I use them on the dry days, and I hit a ball in the right center field.

And as I was rounding third, my shoe stuck in the mud and it stayed there.

And I came out and I was running for a home run inside the park with one shoe and one shoe off.

And it's kind of funny.

I slid across home plate and I was safe and that's all I cared about.

And they finally brought my shoe and they waved it to the fans and the fans had a good time.

And some of the people said, we're going to chip-in & buy chuck a new pair of shoes.

More people remember the funny strike zone uniforms than they do the bears winning the pennant in 1952.

These odd threads lasted but a short time, and are now confined to collectors closets The players hated these things like sin.

And the umpires didn't exactly jump with joy at having them and trying to gauge their their calls according to the strike zone uniforms and the idea kind of fell flat.

The Bears became the Triple-A affiliate of the New York Yankees in 1955.

Players like Tony Quebec, Marv Thrown Berry and manager Ralph Houck are remembered well.

Others reminisce about their days in Denver.

I had one good day here in Denver.

I'm not a home run hitter.

Don't hit a lot of home runs.

But in one game here in Denver, I hit two home runs in one game.

In the 11th inning, I hit a home run that won the game.

So that was a highlight for me.

The most memorable was, you know, the no hitter that I pitched right off the bat.

But certainly I had a one to nothing game going one time with Ralph Halk and Jim DePaul had pitched the first game of of a doubleheader and and shut him out in Charleston and Hawk told me he thought I was running out of gas in the ninth inning.

It happened to be his birthday.

Anyway, I struck out the side on nine pitches and and I gave him the ball after the game.

And, you know, we were kind of macho guys.

And I said, here there's a birthday present from the guy that's about out of gas.

Since so many of us come from other places.

The sense of community wasn't something that came easily.

We came from other states, other countries, as we still do today.

And I think we're a little bit unique in that because the eastern seaboard had been settled and you had that sense of community.

Denver was searching for that, as all communities do.

Baseball helped make that happen.

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