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Baseball has a rich history in Keene

JIM FENNELL

Sports like soccer, basketball and lacrosse are giving kids of all ages increasingly more options each summer, but baseball is still king.

The roots of the game have been planted deep into the soul of the community, nurtured over a century and passed down from one generation to the next.

Baseball, you see, was not just a sport at one time, it was a way of life.

“It’s all we ever did,” Walt Harris said. “There wasn’t anything else to do.”

Harris was 79 years old when he was interviewed for this report, and spent most of his days bantering with the customers at the service station he bought on Main Street nearly 40 years before. (Mr. Harris has died since the interview was conducted.)

Down the road, George Hanna, a year older than Harris was, still practices law at his Court Street office. He, too, will always have a few minutes to talk about baseball.

Men like Harris, Hanna and untold others have kept the history of baseball alive in this area.

Tom Hanna, George’s son and an accomplished player in his own right, is working on a collective history of the teams and games that have been played in this area.

What a story there is to tell.

Consider, for example, Red Kibbee. Who’s he? Well, sit back, get comfortable, and we’ll tell you about him and others. Don’t be in a rush; after all, we’re talking baseball.

The late Maynard “Red” Kibbee owned a machine shop on 93rd Street, just out behind Roxbury Street. He is probably also the best-known pitcher from around these parts.

Red started pitching just around the turn of the century and is associated with two of the more famous teams from here, the Keene White Sox and the Winchester Athletic Club.

Town teams were prevalent in the early part of the century and some were run by the large mills that operated at the time.

Places like West Swanzey and West Keene had their own teams, and good ones at that. And each town seemed to have its own field, whether it be an old cow pasture, or the impressive park built on an island in the Connecticut River, between Hinsdale and Brattleboro.

Some teams even went as far as to bring in ringers, good players from other areas who were paid to play.

The White Sox were more than just a town team. They played throughout northern New England, and their reputation was such that other towns would pay an appearance fee for the White Sox to come and play. Cliff Knox, a hard-hitting first baseman, was one of the star players, and Kibbee was one of the top pitchers.

By the 1930s, the Winchester team had replaced the White Sox as the best team in the area. Because New Hampshire law didn’t allowed baseball games to be played on Sunday at the time, the team played its games in a vacant field in nearby Warwick, Mass.

“We went into a cornfield and bulldozed the grass off and had a dirt infield, all-dirt infield,” George Hanna said. “It was just amazing the number of people we used to have. I think the largest crowd we had was 1,600 one time at that field. We had limited bleacher space but they would park their cars all around the outfield. People had to drive to get there because it was 4 or 5 miles out of any town. We used to play double-headers every Sunday.”

Kibbee was still pitching, and would often wear the hat he got during a brief call-up with the Washington Senators. There were also the Harris boys, Walt and Jupe, and the Hanna brothers, Charlie, Weed and George, who would patrol the outfield.

 “Red was amazing,” Hanna said. “We’d be the first ones to arrive at the Winchester/Warwick field every Sunday about noon. And Red was already there pitching to his kids. Then he would pitch batting practice. Then he would play second base one game and pitch the next.”

People would come from the surrounding towns to see what barnstorming teams Winchester was playing that day. Teams like Milton-Bradley of Springfield, the Philadelphia Colored Giants, the Boston Colored Giants, and the Taunton Lumber Company.

“Jackman of the Philadelphia Colored Giants was the best pitcher I ever faced,” Hanna said. “He couldn’t play big league ball in those days. He threw underhand and he could throw you a curve that would break up and then he had a shoot that would break down. He was just an outstanding pitcher.

“They bantered with the crowd, they were great showmen. And they loved to come up here.”

Red Kibbee’s career was ending by that time, but he was still part of the game, making bats for the players in the area. In fact, Marty Dedo, another of the top players from these parts, once hit the cupola on the barn out beyond right field at Alumni Field with a bat Kibbee made for him.

If it seems old-time players like Kibbee are remembered more fondly than players who came along later, there’s good reason.

There was no television back then and radio, as Harris recalls, “was not that elaborate, it was mostly static.” There were few two-car families, so people didn’t travel as much, making the town, its people and its activities the focal point of a person’s life.

“And don’t forget, kids didn’t work in those days, so we’d play ball all day,” Walt Harris said.

There were no formal leagues like Little League or Babe Ruth, so the more enterprising youngsters in the neighborhood would start teams and organize games that included kids and adults.

“I was the manager of my team in Swanzey when I was 9 or 10 years old,” George Hanna said. “We got a game up to play John White’s team at Keene State College. I arranged for three different cars to take us up here. They all dropped out and couldn’t take us. So the game couldn’t be played, of course.”

“(Dad) ran a little country store in West Swanzey. He closed the store and put nine of us in his Model-T and drove us up.”

And when they piled out of the cars, the boys from Swanzey weren’t wearing batting gloves and didn’t have new gloves or bats.

“I used to sew up baseballs,” Hanna said. “They would tear apart after so many uses, so I learned to sew them up. And then when the cover came off we’d tape them. And we didn’t have those kind of gloves they have now. We used both hands.”

When the players were old enough for college, they found summer leagues throughout northern New England to play in. Walt Harris and the Hannas played in a league that included teams in Littleton and Bethlehem.

“There wasn’t anything else to do,” Harris said. “It was different back in those day, kids going to college were not looking to get into professional baseball.”

The Northern League, which swept through New York, Vermont and New Hampshire in the 1930s and 1940s, helped popularize the college leagues as a good source of talent for professional baseball.

The list of players who played in the Northern League is impressive: Robin Roberts, Vic Raschi, Al Campanis and Chuck Connors, who played baseball for the Dodgers and basketball for the Celtics before going on to television fame in “The Rifleman.”

Eventually there were teams all along the Connecticut River, in places like Claremont, Rutland, Brattleboro and Keene.

The Keene Blue Jays entered the league in 1946. The team was coached by Dartmouth Coach Jeff Tesreau and featured local players like George and Weed Hanna, Marty Dedo and John Watterson, in addition to future major leaguers like Lou Berberet and Jim Brideweser of the New York Yankees. Carl Braun, who went on to play basketball for the New York Knicks, pitched for the team.

And some players never left. Ed Willis came from Stoughton, Mass., in 1949. He played for the Blue Jays and attended Keene State. He met his wife, Jean Mullvaney, in the dugout at Alumni Field.

Jean was the daughter Arthur Mullvany, the Keene High School coach and the business manager for the Blue Jays. Ed later became the first principal of Fall Mountain Regional High, and the couple still lives in Keene.

“This town reacted well to us,” Willis said. “I think we averaged 1,100 fans a game in 1949. The ballplayers enjoyed it up here.”

Howard Kerbaugh was 13 years old when the Blue Jays made their debut in Keene and remembers chasing foul balls for a nickel.

“It used to be great for us kids,” Kerbaugh said. ”They used to let us use their gloves and shag fly balls.”

The Blue Jays’ success didn’t last long. The Northern League began to crumble with the advent of television and more stringent guidelines by the National Collegiate Athletic Association that made it harder for college players to play in what were basically semiprofessional leagues.

The Blue Jays left Keene after four years and the quality of baseball at that level suffered for nearly three decades.

Except for a brief run by the Keene Cubs, college players had to find other places to play after American Legion baseball during the ’50s and ’60s.

Players like Carlton Fisk, the  Hall of Fame catcher from Charlestown, and Tom Hanna, the Keene native who played on Dartmouth’s College World Series team of 1970, went to play in the Cape Cod League. Others played in the Boston Park League.

Not that baseball suffered during that time; in fact, one of the all-time highlights in Keene was hosting the 1963 American Legion World Series. There just wasn’t a lot for older players.

One of the more interesting games during the lull was an exhibition game in 1970.

Dartmouth had qualified for the College World Series that year and had a long layoff after the regional tournament.

Dartmouth Coach Tony Lupien, the former Red Sox, arranged for the team to play a team from the Cape League at Alumni Field.

The Cape League team was Falmouth, which was coached by Bill Livesey, who would become the player personnel director for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Livesey was the Brown coach at the time and had recruited Tom Hanna, who was at Dartmouth, for Falmouth that summer.

“Gubby Underwood must have allowed us to use Alumni Field,” Tom Hanna recalls, “and we had a pretty good crowd. Mom made sandwiches for everyone.”

That began a change in the 1970s. In 1971, along came the Keene VFW team started by local businessman George Stavrou and coached by Glen Theulen of Keene State College.

The team played in a league based out of Connecticut and had some of the area’s best players. There was the battery of former minor league pitcher Larry Oliver of Marlborough and catcher Calvin Fisk, the brother of Carlton and a former farmhand for the Baltimore Orioles.

There was Kevin Keefe of Springfield, Vt., who eventually reached Triple A with the Los Angeles Dodgers, along with Brian Tremblay, Hank Beecher, Conrad Fisk, Kevin and Daryl Watterson, Mike Aumand, Joe Sarsfield, Skip Mason, Jimmy Drew and Steve Cutter, among others. Most of the players were from the area or attended Keene State.

The team lasted four years before giving way to the Keene Collegians, a team that played one year and included the Wattersons, Beecher, future major league Joe Lefebvre and Brian Sabean, who would become general manager of the San Francisco Giants. Lefebvre and Sabean came from Concord.

There was another lull as softball became more popular. The players who did want to play baseball went out of town, to places like Brattleboro. That changed in 1979 when a group from Walpole that included Rick Prentiss and the late Frank McGill entered a team in the restructured Northern League. The team was called the Blue Jays.

“It had nothing to do with the old Blue Jays,” Prentiss said. “We tossed around a lot of names and that just happened to be the one we picked.

“We thought there should be a team around here made up of college kids who wanted to further their careers.”

The team was based in Walpole for its first seven years, starting out with secondhand uniforms from the Walpole American Legion team and a 1-37 record in its first year in the Northern League.

“I can remember that first win like it was today,” Prentiss said. “We beat Saxtons River.”

The Blue Jays eventually moved to Keene and enjoyed a success that hadn’t been seen in this area for years. With players like former minor leaguers Dean Prentiss and Brian Chandler, as well as standout collegians like Tim Hennessey, Rick Pearce, Rob Yeaw and John Luopa, the team dominated the Northern League.

“For a couple of years, we were as good as any team I’ve been involved with or seen,” Prentiss said. “I remember one year we had four left-handed pitchers, and they were all good.”

In its heyday, the Blue Jays would draw upwards of 500 fans a game and drew well over 1,000 for a Northern League all-star game one year.

“I thought Keene was a perfect setting,” Prentiss said. “In Keene, I figured you had to recruit three or four key players and the rest would show up because of the size of the area. In Walpole, you had to recruit 12 or 14.”

However, as their star players got older and retired, the Blue Jays struggled to maintain their success. The Northern League folded, further hurting the team’s ability to draw top talent, although the team still operates today.

And that’s where college-level baseball in Keene stood. Until 1998, that is, when a new era began with the arrival of the Keene Swamp Bats in the New England Collegiate Baseball League.

Attendance-wise, the Swamp Bats have been a huge success; its hometown crowds dwarf those of more established teams in the wooden bat league — a measure of the rich depth of tradition of baseball in the region.

Jim Fennell spent 11 years as a Sentinel sportswriter. He is now on the sports staff of The Union Leader of Manchester.

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