The Road to Cooperstown
The Road to Cooperstown
By Mike Cecconi
When I was a young boy, the only thing I found interesting about my hometown of Little Falls, NY, was that we had an affiliated minor league baseball team, the smallest city to have one. It was the lowest affiliate of the New York Mets, in the New York-Penn League, for teenagers drafted straight out of high school.
Most of them, of course, wouldn’t make the big time but just a few of them in five years would be millionaires playing on WWOR, near Young People’s Day Camp—no doubt feasting on Goya and Fudgie The Whales—in the terrifying miracle, New York City. A four-hour drive a world away, but for one summer they had to live in the place I tried to escape with books and TV—a momentary distraction on the road to fortune and fame. That’s how I saw my childhood as well, back then.
They moved when I was nine. First to Pittsfield, then finally to Brooklyn, so unfairly close to the goal of all dreamers. Maybe starting out at the edges of greatness isn’t a good idea, maybe time down in the sticks running on nothing but hope pushes you harder. Maybe distance makes it matter. Most of them never made it, either way. I went broke in Brooklyn once myself.
For the great, the road to Cooperstown’s paved with 500 home runs. Where I grew up, the road to Cooperstown’s paved with 500 speed traps on Route 28, every cop for 30 miles slavering to nail reckless tourists with the tickets to pay their mortgages.
When I was a teenager, someone rummaged through the defunct team’s old office and found a roll of tickets for the Little Falls Mets. I bought a few to hold as keepsakes. I collect all kinds of souvenirs from that team thirty years gone, pennants, programs—all the ephemera minor-league teams generate. I save them as physical proof it all actually happened. It all seems so impossible, seems so far away, those young men striving for greatness, my own dreams. But the tickets held a special magic for me. I wore them in hospital bands for surgeries, sacrificed them after teenage heartbreaks over girls who could only love boys who play guitar, until I eventually only had one of them left to my name.
In my twenties, I went back to the Cooperstown Hall, past the speed traps, but there was no mention of my Little Falls Mets. A footnote, at best, thirty-odd years ago, now beneath history’s notice entirely. In this life, though, we take our lumps and learn the little ways to make marks, nonetheless. I folded up that last ticket, tucked it behind the frame of some random exhibit. If you happen to see a fleck of blue somewhere in the frames, maybe it’s even still there. At the fringe, my Little Falls Mets enshrined in the Hall of Fame despite all sane reasons to the contrary.
And in some even tinier, more secret way? Maybe that starstruck yearning little boy too.
Mike Cecconi has been featured in such publications as Utica’s Doubly Mad and the UK’s Critical Quarterly, recently receiving honorable mention in the 2020 Wergle Flomp Comedic Poetry Contest. He’s performed Rochester Fringe Festival & Manhattan’s Anti-Folk Festival as well, part of the TEDx Utica series. He’s currently a library aide, also assisting with the Utica Poets Society open mic & Little Falls Public Library’s Flash Fiction group. Mike holds a degree in screenwriting from Newhouse at Syracuse & lives in northern New York state. For more, you can follow him on Twitter or watch his TED Talk.
Andy Lattimer is a gay guy making comics about men, real and made up, playing baseball. He also is a freelance illustrator. You can read Andy’s most recent work, Safe at Home, an autobiographical comic about COVID-19 and Clayton Kershaw, on his website. His favorite baseball player is Ted Williams, and you can find him on Twitter and Instagram.
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