We’ll get the puns about Major League Baseball’s pitch to stage a game in a national park — and the Washington Post’s report the Park Service scouted Grand Teton National Park for a suitable site — out of the way quickly. (Please groan in advance.)
Was it a bush league proposal that came out of left field? Did the Trump administration’s “not a priority” statement mean it won’t play hardball? Was Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred’s concept a screwball idea, a whiff right off the bat? If it was a Biden idea, please say it ain’t so, Joe.
MLB said Thursday it would not pursue the idea in Grand Teton National Park, even though a ballpark in Grand Teton or Yellowstone would be déjà vu all over again. Research turned up seven ball diamonds in the two federal reserves.
In Grand Teton, there used to be a ball diamond in the middle of a park staff residential area at Moose. It’s since been developed as staff housing.
Farther north in Grand Teton’s community of Moran, there’s a diamond at the elementary school. And in Yellowstone National Park, Google Earth reveals five other diamonds.
Jackson Hole photographer Brad Boner found perhaps the strangest one near Yellowstone’s West Thumb Geyser Basin. He was researching his book “Yellowstone National Park Through the Lens of Time,” a rephotographing project in which he duplicated the images that pioneer photographer William Henry Jackson took in 1871. Boner was looking for the exact viewpoint of a Jackson image.
Stumbling through the woods south of the West Thumb Geyser Basin, he broke into the outfield of the ball field and saw the looming backstop. (West Thumb Ballpark’s center field tree line is 262 feet from home plate and probably 60 feet high.)
He felt like he was in a movie, he said. “It was like walking out of the cornfield in ‘Field of Dreams.’”
With recent events, he became obsessed and took to Google Earth. He found that there are or were ball fields at the Yellowstone communities of Mammoth, Canyon Village, Old Faithful and Fishing Bridge. The one at Old Faithful can no longer be found in satellite photographs.
Boner and Jackson Hole News&Guide reporter Cory Hatch may have had a hand in the demise of the Moose ball field in Grand Teton. They were touring the housing site before construction began in 2011, working on a story about the planned development.
Park officials were set on building the new housing near the Chapel of Transfiguration, a scenic and storied chapel in the park that features a view of the Grand Teton from the altar. Many thought the park plan intrusive.
Boner had married his wife Jeannette at the chapel.
The news crew asked why the park didn’t just build housing on the ball field.
“They said that the field was a good place for employees to get outside and recreate,” Boner said. “Cory and I both turned and gestured towards the Tetons at the same time and said something like ‘they have this right here.’”
“I think at that moment they understood that their proposal wouldn’t fly,” Boner said, “and Cory and I take credit for the leveling of that baseball field.”
