Several years had passed since I’d driven to South Bend for a minor-league baseball game, and many things had changed–most of them recently–by the time I traveled back last week. Most prominent among the changes, especially for Chicago fans, was the White Sox having abandoned the Silver Hawks as their Class A Midwest League affiliate earlier this year–in fact, they’ve abandoned the Midwest League altogether. The league has a reputation as a relatively inferior A league, so the move might have made strategic sense, but it was nevertheless another Sox public relations disaster. It deprived them of a nearby place where fans could see the future incarnate (like Scott Radinsky, whom I saw the year before he jumped from A ball to the big leagues), and it severed the natural ties between the south side and South Bend, home of Notre Dame.
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Despite these radical changes in the team, little has changed over the years at Stanley Coveleski Memorial Stadium, affectionately known as the Cove (Coveleski, a Hall of Fame spitball pitcher, is now best remembered for his contribution to The Glory of Their Times, Lawrence Ritter’s classic oral history of the early days of major-league baseball). The stadium is still a small wonder, dug into the landscape on the south side of South Bend near the old Union Station. Its blue grandstand roof clangs like a deadened conductor’s bell when foul balls land on it; the comfortable blue seats behind home plate and the dugouts give way to bleachers ($2 cheaper) that extend down the grandstand along the right- and left-field lines. The concession stands have all the modern conveniences, including microbrews on draft and jalapeno poppers. Viewed from the grandstand, the skyline is dominated by a church steeple behind left field and a bank building–the only thing in sight that could possibly be described as a skyscraper–behind center. There’s something appropriately small-town America in that juxtaposition. That evening the clientele was a disarming melange of small-town families, teenage couples, groups of kids out on their own, and, of course, a few dedicated baseball fans like ourselves.
Our luck didn’t end with the weather. Checking the lineups printed in Magic Marker on a board at the concession level, we discovered that one of the Silver Hawks’ most promising pitchers, a 19-year-old with the natural baseball name of Nick Bierbrodt, was slated to start. According to the remarkably detailed stats sheet included with the scorecard, Bierbrodt was pitching just his fifth game of the season, but so far he’d allowed only 12 hits and nine walks in 18-plus innings, striking out 25 batters and holding opponents to a team-low .179 batting average. He arrived on the mound after warming up down the right-field line and received the game ball from a delivery woman for team sponsor United Parcel Service (she arrived in uniform and made him sign for it).
In the sixth the Silver Hawks got their first two men on base; Scott called on his best hitter, Jason Conti, to bunt. The sacrifice moved both runners into scoring position, and the man on third came home on a groundout to tie the score, but that was all they got. The WhiteCaps nudged ahead in the ninth after a run-scoring single by Dubose, who never did strike out. In the bottom of the inning West Michigan summoned 19-year-old closer Francisco Cordero, the league leader with 22 saves, and he blew the Hawks down with a blistering fastball that should put him in the majors within two years. We can say we saw him when.
