Reusse: Summer baseball still reigns in Land of 10,000 Lakes

There was a remarkable baseball tradition played out in our midst over the past five days, and it came with an excellent bonus.

“I don’t think we had a rain delay in the tournament,” Jim Peck said. “Every game went off as scheduled.”

Larry Addington looked at the field down below as a pair of visiting teams from Nebraska were about to start Tuesday at the 9 a.m. semifinal and said: “That doesn’t happen often.”

Peck nodded and said: “It might be a first.”

The Gopher Classic was started officially by Peck and his recruited partners and volunteers as a 16-team American Legion tournament in 1977. It grew rapidly from there and for more than two decades it has been the largest Legion tournament in the country:

Ninety-six senior teams (19-and-under) guaranteed five games apiece in bracket play over a three-day period; then, the 16 bracket winners playing down to a champion, with the trophy handed out by mid-afternoon on Day 5.

You wonder how it is possible to organize this chaos, and then you realize this is Minnesota, where the grassroots baseball people — facing the challenges of soccer, being so much easier for a 10-year-old to play without causing family embarrassment, and lacrosse, where you can swing a stick without hitting anything — are extremely united with baseball as the underdog of modern youth sports.

Peck, now 85, and his many helpers have been able to keep lining up 16 quality baseball fields for a three-day weekend of bracket play in the middle of summer.

“We’re able to get a lot of cooperation in the metro area, and this year we also had a bracket in Mankato,” Peck said. “And then we have this as a home field, which is tremendous.”

That would be Minnetonka High School’s Veterans Field, with an up-to-date turf surface and the other amenities to qualify as a first-class ballyard.

Peck and his cohort Addington could be found in those up-top grandstand seats for most of the five days. The rooting interest was in Excelsior Post 259, the Legion post for Minnetonka, included since Peck took over as manager/coach in 1974.

“I’m not a member; I was not in the service,” Peck said. “Excelsior 259 was the only post in the Minnetonka School District, and the club was always great to us, in helping with the team.”

Legion baseball — it’s not what it used to be, right Jim?

“Wrong!,” he said, firmly enough to earn that exclamation mark.

“Minnesota has 403 Legion teams; that’s the most in the country,” Peck said. ”And that’s also the largest number we’ve ever had."

Tim Engstrom, from the Minnesota American Legion, clarified slightly: “We had 403 teams register, but then a small number were not able to field a team. We wound up with 383 teams at all levels. And that is the most in the country.”

Three of the four teams reaching the semifinals were from Nebraska. There were 16 Nebraska teams among the 95 (one dropout could not be replaced at the last minute) that started play on Friday.

“Nebraska has some of the best baseball in the country,” Peck said. “They don’t have many ‘travel’ teams there. There’s one baseball academy in Omaha, I’m told. We have academies and ‘travel’ teams all over.”

Those travel teams feed the idea that Legion baseball is suffering.

“We’re missing a couple of good players because of travel, but, really — in Minnetonka, we almost have more players than we can handle," Peck said. “There are five different Legion teams made up with ballplayers from this school district.”

OK, the numbers are solid, but the days of yore — when Peck, the pharmacist (then owner) at Deephaven Drug — went from coaching Babe Ruth in 1974 to Legion ball, and became perhaps the greatest promoter of a team and the game in our state’s grand Legion history … that won’t return.

Jim’s got a very bad wheel now, and he gave up all forms of coaching in 2019 (“That was the best team we ever had,” he said), and the youth of Minnetonka have mobility and endless options.

And here’s another reason? “They don’t print phone books anymore,” Peck said.

When he took over the Post 259 team, Peck started expanding the fundraisers. He had the usual raffles, smokers … even had the team sell and deliver tulips.

Then, Peck said:

“One day a guy from [Bloomington] Jefferson came into the drugstore and said, ‘I’ve been delivering phone books for years; I’m giving up.’ You interested?’ That’s how it started.

“We had our players deliver phone books for 32 years. Rich, poor, in-between … anybody can deliver phone books. You can’t throw ‘em in the driveway, though. Put that thick book on the front step, ring the bell and run.

“I dealt with the same contact for 32 years. And if you played with our team, you delivered your quota of books. We made way more money doing that than any promotion.

“We went more places to play than any Legion team in the country. We went to Europe twice. We went to the Dominican Republic. We went to Australia; also New Zealand, where they had seen very little baseball.

“It was winter when we were there, although more like spring for Minnesota kids.”

Phone books? That was the secret for Post 259, a traveling team long before there was “travel” ball?

“Great fundraiser,” Peck said. “I kept track. In three decades, I personally delivered over one million phone books.”