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Man in the Box: Dan Collins has spent over 30 years covering minor-league games at Ernie Shore Field
Journal photo by Bruce Chapman
Sportswriter Dan Collins has been covering baseball games at Ernie Shore Field since 1978.
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Published: August 24, 2008
The old blue press box at Ernie Shore Field was a sweatbox, small and cramped enough to be downright claustrophobic. Bolted to the rim of the grandstand roof, looking almost straight down on home plate, it was also a prime place to catch a foul ball -- with your hands if you were looking, off the side of your head if you weren't. The cracks in the paneling on the back wall revealed what damage a screaming horsehide ball could do from such point-blank range.
On many a summer's night, it also offered the only light in the park. Everyone else -- fans, players, club personnel -- had already cleared out by the time my last words were written.
Light attracts all kinds of flying creatures. More than a few of the stories I sent back to the office were written with one hand as I batted away the swarm with the other.
When the high winds whipped across the park, the box rattled and shook. Friends predicted that the box would be my coffin, as I rode it down to shatter into a billion pieces on home plate.
I covered my first game at Ernie Shore Field in 1978, when the only way up to the press box was by opening a door at the back of the concourse and scaling a series of iron steps up through a latchdoor to the roof. By the 1990s, a more accommodating set of steps was built along the left-field side of the room, next to where the beer garden is today.
Still, nobody in the press box needed to be told we were about to have visitors. The roof vibrated with each step.
The press box, in terms of comfort and amenities, was about as lacking as any I ever stepped foot in. But there are trade-offs to pretty much everything in life, and the press box was not without its appeal. As a baseball game unfolded on the green sea of grass below, the view from up there was breathtaking.
Jimmy Piersall called it as fine a view as he had ever seen in baseball, comparing it to the one at old Tiger Stadium in Detroit. Piersall, best known for his nervous breakdown and the book written about it, Fear Strikes Out, was a good enough outfielder during his 17 major-league seasons to be hired by the Chicago Cubs to impart his expertise to minor-leaguers.
The Winston-Salem Spirits were affiliated with the Cubs from 1985 through 1991, and Piersall would swing through town as the club's roving outfield instructor. "Raving" outfield instructor was a better description, but, again, there are trade-offs to pretty much everything. The dozens of games I watched alongside him in the two-person cubicle separated from the one next to it by a thin sheet of plywood served as a doctorate in baseball. The guy may be eccentric, but he knows the game.
Originally, there were frames of chicken wire that could be latched into the openings for protection from foul balls. We took ours out one day and were overwhelmed by the new view. I experienced the sensation years later watching the western Silverado, when early in the movie the cowboy steps from his dilapidated shack and a panorama of natural beauty opens up to him.
And few things in life, to these eyes, are more beautiful than a baseball field adorned in the shadows of an early summer's eve.
Soon, everyone in the box had their screens out, including the blind man whom owner Dennis Bastien had hired to play the organ. Fearing the worst, we tried our best to persuade him to re-insert his screen, but he would have none of it. If our screens were out, so was his.
He survived, somehow.
Many a rainstorm was waited out in that press box. The rain could slant in at such an angle that the wooden coverings to the windows had to be unlatched from the press box ceiling and lowered into place to keep our scorebooks and microphones from floating away.
One night, rain stopped the first game of a doubleheader so many times that it didn't end until 12:45 a.m. I was impressed that they had gotten at least one game played.
That was until I saw the visiting team pulling the tarps off the bullpen mound to get the starting pitcher for game two warmed up. I can't remember who the Spirits played that night, but I do recall going downstairs to find only four fans in the ballpark by the time that the game ended at 2:30.
The official scorer declared he was a working man who needed his sleep and climbed down from the press box and drove home. I looked around and, not seeing a replacement handy, decided I'd better keep the book.
The exact season is lost in the haze, but it had to be either 1991 or 1992, the two seasons that C.B. Bucknor umpired in the Carolina League. He's in the majors today, and every time I see a game he's working I'm reminded of the night he kept me at Ernie Shore Field until way past the midnight hour.
As fun a day as I've ever had in sports writing was Sept. 11, 1993. The Spirits beat the Wilmington Blue Rocks to win the CL championship, and after I had written the story, I walked next door to Groves Stadium to cover Wake Forest beating N.C. State 34-16.
Searching for stars
We sat in that press box year after year, handicapping the players and their chances of making it to the majors. We considered how high they were drafted, their age, their abilities and liabilities.
There's a saying in the low minors that each team has to keep 20 players around who have no chance of ever making it to play with the five who might.
We tried to determine which were which, and were often utterly confounded.
Rich Amaral, for instance, played second base for Winston-Salem during the CL championship season of 1985. As a second-round draft choice of the Cubs, he was a prospect -- then. At age 23, Amaral was not young, but was still young enough.
But when he was still stuck in Class AAA five seasons later, I had written off his chances. He got a cup of coffee with Seattle late in 1991, at age 29.
But he played nine more major-league seasons with the Mariners and Baltimore Orioles, hitting .276. He defied the odds.
Because I arrived in Winston-Salem in 1978, I missed seeing Wade Boggs play in Ernie Shore Field by a year. But nobody I saw ever hit the ball harder and better for Winston-Salem than another third baseman named Gary Scott who played for the Spirits in 1990.
Scott was a second-round draft choice of the Cubs who arrived in Winston-Salem at age 21. He won the CL Most Valuable Player Award by hitting .295 with 12 homers and 70 RBIs through just 380 at-bats before being promoted to Class AA Charlotte.
By September of 1991, he was playing in Wrigley Field. When he hit only .165 in 79 at-bats, there was no cause for alarm. Many of the best prospects need a period of adjustment.
But when Scott failed even worse the next season, hitting .156 in 96 at-bats, he was sent back to the minors, never to return. He finally retired after four more minor-league seasons, the can't-miss prospect who did.
The best pitching prospect I ever saw at Ernie Shore Field is in the majors, but he's not pitching. He was 18 when he pitched for the Prince William Cannons in 1998. The year before he had been named the USA Today high-school player of the year, and the St. Louis Cardinals had paid a bonus of $2.5 million to keep him from playing college ball at Miami.
Tall, left-handed and armed with a blazing fastball and baffling curve, he struck out 11 and walked two in seven innings. The Warthogs managed one hit, a single by Josh Paul in the fifth.
"He's got no fear," Manager Chris Cron of the Warthogs said afterward. "He just went right after us.
"We're a team that's leading our division and he just comes out there and he's 18 years old and he dominated us. He just battled us. We didn't have a chance tonight. He just shut us down."
You might have seen him on highlight shows recently throwing out runners from center field. His name is Rick Ankiel.
The city of Winston-Salem tore down the old grandstand roof before the 2002 season, and with it the little blue press box. The new press box is air conditioned and spacious, and the view is tolerable.
But I may never see a game as well as those I saw from the press box on the roof above Ernie Shore Field.
I was spoiled.
Dan Collins' All-Time Ernie Shore Field All-Stars
Carolina League
C: Johnny Bench, Peninsula 1966
1B: Willie McCovey, Danville 1956
2B: Carl Yastrzemski, Raleigh 1959
3B: Tony Perez, Rocky Mount 1962
SS: Chipper Jones, Durham 1992
OF: Barry Bonds, Prince William 1985
Dave Parker, Salem 1972
Darryl Strawberry, Lynchburg 1981
DH: Rusty Staub, Durham 1962
SP: Mel Stottlemyre, Greensboro 1972
Dwight Gooden, Lynchburg 1983
Bartolo Colon, Kinston 1995
Rick Ankiel, Prince William 1998
RP: Jeff Reardon, Lynchburg 1977
MGR: Bill Slack, Winston-Salem 1963-68,
70, 73-74, 78-79, 83-84
Winston-Salem
C: Joe Girardi, 1987
1B: Bubba Smith, 1993
2B: Rich Amaral, 1985
3B: Wade Boggs, 1977
SS: Rico Petrocelli, 1962
OF: Dwight Evans, 1971
Carlos Lee, 1997
Aaron Rowand, 1999
DH: Leo Daigle, 2005.
SP: Jim Lonborg, 1964,
Robbie Snow, 1966
Bill Lee, 1968
Jon Garland, 1999
RP: Sparky Lyle, 1965
MGR: Bill Slack, Winston-Salem 1963-68, 70, 73-74, 78-79, 83-84
Baseball Hall of Famers who played at Ernie Shore Field
Willie McCovey, Danville 1956
Carl Yastrzemski, Raleigh 1959
Tony Perez, Rocky Mount 1962
Joe Morgan, Durham 1963
Johnny Bench, Peninsula 1966
Rod Carew, Wilson 1966
Wade Boggs, Winston-Salem 1977
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