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."
They're here every week: Sandlot Sundays are free and open to anyone and everyone, including kids and total beginners, while weekday and Saturday practice is for those who want a little more commitment, a little more hitting and fielding work, and who maybe end up joining a team. "If one or two of us can't be here, Sandlot still happens," Kampf said. "It's not about any one person. It needs to be something that happens consistently for people to really get behind it, to feel like they're part of something."
They're part of something just by standing on this field. In the mid-20th century, Lacy Park was home to the T-Town Clowns, one of Tulsa's great semi-professional Negro Leagues. (You can get your own replica Clowns jersey, tee or snapback in the new collection from Silhouette in collaboration with Philbrook.) When the Rumblers first talked about holding practice here, Cornwell showed them historical documents and photos with legendary Black players standing where these dads are standing now. Cornwell, who plays the same position as one of his heroes from the Clowns, hopes the field can be preserved and improved, for history's sake—and for the future.
"We want Sandlot to be an heirloom that we can pass down to our children who want to do it," he said. "Not a forced inheritance, but something where, if that tickles their fancy, then it's there, all the infrastructure's there, they've grown up in it." There are Sandlot teams all over the country, too—a tight-knit and welcoming network of folks who love the game. (There's just one hard and fast rule throughout Sandlot, Cornwell noted: "Don't be a dick.")
Just to reiterate: this really is for everyone. Women, too. There's an LGBTQ-and-allies team in Austin called the Switch (one of about 16 teams in that fine city). If somebody in Sandlot played in the minors or college, they're an exception to the rule. "This isn't church-league softball, or competitive fast-pitch," Cornwell explained. "This is an organic, grassroots kind of baseball that I can play. Where this community has flourished and not floundered is because there was a vacancy that this Sandlot philosophy has been able to fill."
Sandlot's priorities might be simple—play ball, make friends, have fun—but for some, it's life-changing. Kampf said he loves to see what happens when somebody who hasn't played in years steps onto the field. Guys might decide to go back to the gym, so maybe they can run a little better. Some might start to drink a little less during the week so they'll be clearer on Sundays. Just want to try to hit a ball? Others will volunteer to run the bases. And for the more experienced among them, Kampf said, "it's great to know that even at this age, with limited practices and limited game time, you can still get better at the game."
"There's also just the cosplay aspect," Cornwell added with a wry smile. "When you were on a kid's team, you didn't get to pick your jersey," Kampf explained. "So we were like, you know what? We should have our own. We're all adults now, right? We've got a little disposable income. Nobody's going to tell us no. So that's when we got the names on the back of the jerseys and the logo and, you know, we just went nuts with it. It's a little more expensive. But when we talked to the rest of the team, we were like, so do we want to do it? And everybody was like, yeah, definitely."
I had to leave just as the guys were really getting going. But I drove by again later in the evening and they were still out there, running for flies as the sun slipped down behind the trees. I'd been too shy to try a swing myself, as they'd invited me to do, but the feeling I took with me was as good as Abe's home run. I'm already ready to go back next time they take the field. "We'll be here," Kampf told me, "till it's too dark to see the ball."
