Reusse: In a fitting tribute, Dundas names baseball stadium for Bill Nelson, team’s biggest booster

On a lazy summer weekend when overcome with an urge to see a grassroots ballgame, the cure often has been to take a drive an hour south to Dundas. The Cannon Valley League offers some of the state’s top competition, and if it’s the Dukes vs. Miesville’s Mudhens, you have an unmatched rivalry.

I was there one Sunday when there was a playoff game, with both teams guaranteed to advance to the state tourney. Immediately after the game, the managers went into a small area to draft pitchers from other Cannon Valley teams.

Joe Driscoll had been drafted by Dundas the previous year. He walked around with a beer in hand, waited a couple of minutes and then found out he would be a Mudhen for this tournament.

Driscoll tipped the beer upward in a salute and said, “Well, every team needs a role model.”

Joe died three years ago, and the world has been a less enjoyable place since then.

On Saturday in Dundas, there was the celebration of the life of another great baseball man: Bill Nelson, not quite the humor champion that was his friend Driscoll, but the gent with whom I talked more “townball” than anyone over the past 30-some years.

Nelson, a great pitcher in Albert Lea, at Augsburg, for Dick’s Place in Class A baseball, and then the Dukes — pitcher, turned manager, turned recruiter, organizer and ballpark zealot. He also had a long stretch as the baseball coach at Carleton College in Northfield.

On Saturday, down there next to the actual Cannon River, Dundas’ ever-improving Memorial Park received a new name: Bill Nelson Field at Memorial Park.

Last summer, Nelson had a reunion in Florida with his brothers, wasn’t feeling great, came home and discovered he had pancreatic cancer. “It’s a tough one, but we’ll give chemo a try,” he said last summer.

He died at age 73 on April 19. His wife, Pat, and other Dundas baseball zealots went to the City Council with a request to rename the ballpark. The council signed on.

Which led to Saturday’s gathering, which was large in number and in telling baseball tales.

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The gruesome reality that is pancreatic cancer took another baseball man — sportswriter and author Scott Miller — at 62 last week. Miller was the Twins beat writer at the St. Paul Pioneer Press for five years in the late 1990s.

He then went to the CBS Sports website, one of the early challengers to ESPN with written internet coverage. He was there for a decade.

Along with other internet work, Miller became an author and produced his latest effort while fighting cancer: “Skipper: Why Baseball Managers Matter and Always Will.” It came out in May.

All-time nice guy as a sportswriter, but he did bark at me one late afternoon in Cleveland’s pressbox in 1998.

“Hurry with that game story,” he said. “We’re going down to the park above the lake for a John Fogerty concert.”

And we did.

• • •

The Augsburg Athletic Hall of Fame includes two pitching brothers: Bill and John Nelson. The Auggies have been successful in a variety of sports (starting with wrestling), but football has been primarily tough sledding.

Derrin Lamker was a quarterback on the upstart Augsburg team that won the MIAC title in 1997 — Augsburg’s one and only since 1928. Lamker came back filled with fire to coach the Auggies in 2020, was waylaid by the COVID-19 shutdown, but seemed to get his program on an upward swing.

I was in St. Peter early in the 2023 season to witness the last-play Hail Mary that gave the Auggies a 33-31 victory over Gustavus. The Auggies fell back to 4-6 last season and, surprisingly to outsiders, Lamker resigned in mid-May.

He returned to Osseo High School, where he had led the Orioles to an upset run to the Class 6A title in 2015.

On Friday, new athletic director Amy Cooper — hired from St. Thomas with June 1 as a starting date — brought back KiJuan Ware as the Auggies football coach. He had been a defensive backs coach and recruiting coordinator for Lamker in 2022-23. He then went to Shippensburg (Pa.) for two seasons as offensive coordinator.

Ware comes from Hartford, Conn., graduated from college in 1997, and his travels include two years as a coaching intern at Notre Dame — also, the 2021 season as the interim coach at Macalester.

The Scots were 3-7 that season, with a 37-29 loss to Augsburg. When Macalester defeated Chip Taylor’s Hamline team 23-13, it was the first time two Black head coaches had met in any sport in the MIAC.

Taylor will be entering his 10th season and will face Ware again on Nov. 18 at Augsburg.

“I look forward to building something special together, and representing the Augsburg community with pride,” Ware said in a news release.

Good luck, coach, but I’m still mystified as to why the charged-up Lamker that I interviewed while he was there a few times left his alma mater.