The Pecan Park Eagle

Saturday, August 7, 1954, somewhere in the beautiful heartland of the good old USA,

Two kid teams are getting ready to play the biggest game of their hot, hot summer,

It’s the Smithers Drug Store Bulldogs (9-0-0) versus the Adams Cleaners Cowboys (8-0-1) for the whole shooting match at ten o’clock sharp, over at Gruenson Field, next to the feedlot.

Don’t mind the one tie up there. Ties happen in kid baseball when nobody can afford to light up the field when late afternoon tie games drift into extra innings at the mercy of a disappearing sun.

The half game difference has just sharpened the point of this spear: It’s winner take all, marbles and ball.

Then, along about 6:24 AM, CDT, on game day, winds kick up hard, clanging open shutters with a measured banging sound.

Some awaken to the sudden chill of cooler air blowing in across the prairie and into their bedrooms.

Farmer Fletch peers out to see the flicker of lightning in the far away hills. – His umpiring fee is in jeopardy.

“Oh no,” cries little Johnny Blezel, the scheduled starting pitcher for the Bulldogs, as he also grabs a look,

“Why does it have to rain today – on the biggest Saturday of the year – and in my life? – Why, God, why?

What kind of God would do something like this to me on the most important day of all time? It makes no sense!”

Who knows, Johnny? Maybe God needed the sunshine someplace else! And maybe, just maybe , the local farmers, including your own father, needed the rain even more than you needed a pitching start, even if today seemed like it was meant to be the most important day of your life.

By eight o’clock in the morning, the field was floating away under an inland ocean of water as the rain fell  with the weight of nature’s late payment to a scorching-dry earth.

The rain gave no indication that it would ever stop. And it didn’t stop for long – not until mid-September.

It turned out to be the wettest August on record, floating the whole town past baseball and into the start of a fresh corrnhusking new football season. They never did play the championship game, but that’s OK.

Things like that happen in baseball – and in life. – Don’t know about Johnny Blezel. We lost track of him.