I'm standing on the edge of a baseball diamond just west of a church called Pilgrim's Rest, at North Tulsa's Lacy Park, surrounded by dads. Over the course of an hour a few of these guys have been carrying gloves, bats and beers out onto the field from their trucks parked in the grass, warming up while their kids play under the trees, eat snacks on the bleachers, play a little catch. A lanky player from the neighborhood runs up as things get going, wearing a Tulsa Breeze jersey and double checking the date of this weekend's game against the Tulsa Rumblers at ONEOK Field. Some Rumblers are here too.
Wait—aren't they the competition? It's a friendly rivalry, I'm given to understand. Guys on both teams have been playing together at Lacy Park for years as part of this totally ragtag, utterly devoted confederation of old-school baseball lovers.
It's hot. They stretch, talk, walk around. Stiff knees start to ease up. One kid on the bleachers wields a plastic lightsaber. Nobody calls anything to order, or tells anybody what to do. Things just start to happen.
It goes from two guys on the field, to four, to six, their throws getting looser by the minute. One ball sails overhead as another crosses low at my peripheral. Before long someone brings out a wooden bat and then he's swinging, and random space organizes into four dimensions as players shift wordlessly into positions, spread out in a configuration so satisfying, so organic and familiar, it's as if it were made by nature itself. They lean from foot to foot. A pitcher goes into an easygoing windup. A crack—a hit—and everyone is running, tracking, eyes up, arms out, moving on a horizontal arc as the ball is moving on the vertical, a field full of parabolic motion, till the right-field glove and the leather ball connect and the kid in the bleachers jumps up in celebration and a cheer from a half-dozen voices rolls across the clover-dotted grass.
Josh Kampf, a Rumbler called "Captain" or "Coach" by the team ("I'm sure they call me other things too"), smiled out across the field. "Every once in a while, something amazing happens," he said. "The Breeze had one guy, Abe, who hit a ball way outside the fence one time. Incredible. He's a Sandlot guy, you know, he'd been coming out and playing consistently. I don't know his background. I don't think he played at a professional level, but I mean he nailed one and it was just the coolest thing in the world to see. But those are few and far between. It's more about getting a single, trying to turn it into a double. I grew up watching 1980s baseball. I love seeing stolen bases, or you pass the ball and the guy gets to second. That's really what this is. Because we're just not capable of hitting, you know, 400-foot shots."
What these players are capable of, if you'll forgive the corniness, is capturing the joy of the game. "We're in our thirties and forties, and we realize what a gift it is to be able to still play," baseball historian and Rumbler Jake "Skipper" Cornwell said. "One thing we kind of pride ourselves on is the attitude that we're going to go out and play, not 'we're going to go out and win.' I wouldn't say it's the best physical representation of baseball, but it's the truest. Everybody that's out here is going to put everything they've got into it, no matter what that might be."
Kampf and Cornwell are two of the Tulsa Rumblers' "founding fathers," and the club runs through the efforts of its core members, some of whom (writers, graphic designers, advertising professionals) are responsible for the sharp look and warm vibe of its website and social media accounts. They make sure there are bats and gloves for anyone who needs them on Sundays, when folks drive in from all over just because, Cornwell said, "they know there'll be baseball going on."