Baseball Past and Present

By Matthew Linenbroker

            In 1985, the Kansas City Royals faced the St. Louis Cardinals in what was deemed the “I-70 Showdown Series.” During the ninth inning of Game 6, first base umpire Don Denkinger called Royals’ batter Jorge Orta safe at first, although replays showed that Cardinals’ first baseman Todd Worrell actually beat Orta to the base. After another base hit and intentionally walking Hal McRae, a single to right field drove in two runs, giving the Royals a 2-1 win. After that loss, the Cardinals melted down in Game 7, letting the Royals take their crown. Missouri was halved into bitterness and glee, caught in a newly inflated intra-state rivalry.

            The Royals are once again in the World Series, for the first time since 1985, and the Cardinals could have potentially become their opponent. The scent of a rematch wafted through the air, but the San Francisco Giants overtook them (although the Cardinals have won the World Series twice since their loss to the Royals).

Missouri is an explosive epicenter of baseball fanaticism, which is often due to the deafening dedication of Cardinal Nation. However, Royals’ fans are doing their part this year too – Anchorman actor Paul Rudd even invited everyone to a kegger at his mom’s house in Overland Park after the Royals’ American League Championship Series win.

Hit singer-songwriter Lorde penned her breakthrough song “Royals” after seeing a picture of Kansas City Royals’ player George Brett signing baseballs in a 1976 National Geographic magazine. A couple of San Francisco radio stations have responded to this by banning Lorde’s KC-inspired song from the radio until after the World Series is over.

             A look back at Missouri baseball history reveals more than just a kegger and a 17-year-old musician, and more than just an infamous umpire and a Royals’ triumph. Before the Cardinals’ #11in11, before Jarrod Dyson, before Jon Jay, before Pujols, Eckstein, and Edmonds, even before Don Denkinger and the 1985 Show-Me Showdown, Missouri basked in the sunlight of groundbreaking baseball culture. Roger D. Launius’ book Seasons in the Sun digs into the dirt to examine the Midwestern roots of baseball. St. Louis became a charter member of the newly formed National League in 1876, and Kansas City housed one of the premiere Negro National League

teams, the Kansas City Monarchs, in the 1920’s.

The history of baseball is intertwined with the history of Missouri, existing through political turmoil, war, economic depression, and segregation. Prior to his death in Kansas City in 1982, star Negro League Pitcher Leroy “Satchel” Paige impacted the baseball African-American civil rights fight. Donald Spivey’s If You Were Only White follows the tense political struggle, and Satchel’s important role in it.

Stan Musial is more than a Cardinals’ legend; he is a baseball legend. When America fought the Great Depression, war, and post-war turmoil, Stan the Man offered the nation a taste of hope and escape as he broke records and barriers. James N. Giglio’s Musial illuminates the life and career of the man immortalized in statue-form outside of Busch Stadium.

Missouri’s exceptional baseball past will forever help forge the legacy of excellence in Missouri’s baseball future. It is the nature of friendly competition to bring people together in solidarity; as fans assemble for #BlueOctober and #RedOctober, seeing Missouri once again bask in the possibility of its two teams uniting once more over America’s pastime feels like an intrinsic homage to Satchel, Musial, and all the others, large and small, who made Missouri baseball the noble creation that it is today. These books highlight a time in Missouri that helped shape the baseball culture we live in today, and just as people study the Declaration of Independence to understand the conception of our current government, so can Musial be looked at as a stepping-stone to Ozzie Smith, to Pujols, to Jay, so can a possible Royals’ World Series win be viewed through a retrospective of the Negro League Kansas City Monarchs. As a central facet of American culture, Baseball is ever evolving, and by learning of its progression, we can deeper our understanding and appreciation of the glorious baseball present.

Author Spotlight: Kate Saller

The Moon in Your Sky: An Immigrant’s Journey Home by Kate Saller

The Moon in Your Sky: An Immigrant’s Journey Home brings to life the remarkable story of Annah Emuge. Growing up in Uganda under the rule of Idi Amin, Annah and her peers faced hardships few of us can imagine. As a young woman, Annah escaped to the United States, only to face more devastating challenges. How Annah overcame the trials she endured in the land she had thought would hold only promise for her and her family is a riveting story of perseverance that will inspire any reader. Annah’s sorrows give depth to the great joys she experiences as she not only survives but triumphs, devoting her life to the suffering of orphans left by the ravages of war in her homeland.   


Preface 

I had just finished speaking to the Rotary Club of St. Charles, Mis­souri, about my humanitarian work in Africa when a beautiful, stat­uesque black woman approached me. Without prelude she asked me, “Do you know how to get mosquito nets for fifty-four children in Uganda?” This was my introduction to Annah Frances Acam Emuge, the determined and courageous woman who is the subject of this book.

As I came to know Annah, I was amazed to learn about the joys and tribulations of her life. It seemed as if, every time she told me a story from her past, I was incredulous that one human being could have survived it, and yet that was just one part of her story. Annah was the third daughter born to a poor family in rural Uganda in 1959. I wrote her life entirely through her eyes, to give readers a full sense of growing up as a village child in a country being systematically decimated by its maniacal dictator, Idi Amin Dada. As a child and teenager, this remarkable young woman matured and set the course of her life while enduring the kinds of devastations and threats that we have read about in many such accounts of life in twentieth-century rural Africa. What set Annah’s story apart for me was that it is not about an individual overcoming such an existence, coming to the United States, and finding a clear path back to her roots to improve the lives of those left behind; rather, it is the story of a woman who was faced with even tougher challenges here, and of her extraordinary and largely solitary triumph over all of them.

Entwined in Annah’s tale of grace and strength is the sadder story of her husband, who came to this country filled with hopes and ambitions, only to find that they were all beyond his reach. The loss of his dreams, along with the realities of the life he found here, proved to be more than this talented and brilliant man could withstand.

To accurately portray Annah’s life, I created an outline of the book and then had her tape-record her recollections from each period of her life, one section at a time. I took notes from each recording and then interviewed her to fill out my knowledge of that part of her life. After writing each chapter from my notes, I went over the material with Annah to ensure that she felt it was an accurate and complete picture of her life at that time. As this pro­cess progressed, Annah and I realized that I am unusual among her American acquaintances in that I understand and have observed firsthand the life she led in Uganda, sleeping in mud huts and work­ing on the family’s subsistence farm to survive. Through my affilia­tion with the service organization Rotary International, I have been to five African countries, traveling to and staying in rural areas to immunize children, distribute mosquito nets to orphans, and coordinate the placement of filtered wells in poor communities with no access to clean water. In spite of the unbelievable hardships suffered by the people I encountered there, all of them were warm and wel­coming, finding joy in things like the simple act of offering me a crude, handmade stool to rest on in the shade as I worked. It was this same spirit that drew me to Annah when I met her.

Annah did get her fifty-four mosquito nets through Rotary con­nections, and St. Louis-area Rotarians donated the money needed to purchase them. She has now created a 501(c)(3) organization, the Atai Orphanage Fund (www.ataiorphanage.org), which col­lects donations to help support the children who live in the orphan­age created by her mother. I am a member of the AOF’s board, and we are proud to say that we were able to raise the funds to place a 240-foot bore-hole well on the orphanage’s land in 2010. Although the children sleep in mud huts and live a simple, poor life that dif­fers very little from Annah’s childhood there, they proudly tell any­one who asks that they have a mama in America who loves them. 

All of the author's proceeds from sales of this book will be used to support Annah and the orphans of Atai.