There was a fever that plagued Mudville and its people, or at least this is what is said by the residents of Golden Oak—a town which has no sports teams whatsoever, thank you very much, a town who’ve inhabited one or two of the survivors from the Last Game Ever Played and could tell you a thing or two about experiments gone wrong.
Mudville—despite sitting between towns, despite having borders that blur between the anteceding and preceding towns; despite being a place whose name you’d remember as one of three posted in studded, reflective white letters on a forest green rectangle as you’re driving to and from cities with tourism boards—was a bit of a dark anomaly. Within 18 square miles, Mudville, buried deep in Idaho, managed to boast a) valleys, b) dells, c) a mountain range and d) a population of 5,028 people. D is the one we concern ourselves with today, as each of these people had one thing in common: they were rabid, fanatical baseball fans. Well, two things: None of them were born in Mudville. And no one who could be considered a functioning citizen ever had been.
Three things: they were, to an extent, all being controlled by the United States government.
A decade and a half before the Civil War started, the U.S. government realized it lacked an insidious way to pacify and divide its people, as many of those people were beginning to realize the objective and obvious cruel and inhumane nature of slavery. So, the government launched Operation Doubleday. What would come to be called the nation’s pastime had been invented, in the iteration most of us know it as, near the 1840’s, as a way to tribalize small white towns. Spin doctors and yellow journalists sold the story of Abner Doubleday and Cooperstown, New York, even though it’s completely false. With the seeds planted, this sport took MASSIVE hold, and became the first of the major professional sports leagues in the country in 1869.
It took America a decade before someone went “I’m pretty sure we can militarize this somehow, right?”
And thus Mudville was born.
The 1880 census was the only to ever feature the question “Would you ever consider moving cities to support a baseball team?” Roughly 7,000 people said yes. So the actors of Operation Doubleday moved into Phase Two, recruiting star players of that nascent era—Jimmy Blake, Russell Flynn, etc.—to create a super team deep in Ohio, where they’d also, conveniently, been able to alter the geography of the town to maximize infection rate, as well as the chemical makeup of the farmland. This part was easy. The part that was somewhat difficult was convincing those 7,000 people to move from various parts of the country. About 5,000 of them did agree, and nearly all of them, as expected, were in attendance four years later the day Casey Manheim took the mound and nearly destroyed a city.
©2020 by Saladin Thomas. All Rights reserved.