The South Dakota All-Stars

The Basin League mascot, as drawn by the Rapid City Journal

I get a lot of emails in my day job, with story pitches or about upcoming events and I breeze through most of them. But when I see an email about baseball and history, I’m willing to pay a little closer attention. 

The South Dakota Cultural Heritage Center in Pierre has a display at their museum called “Play Ball! The National Pastime in South Dakota.” Now, I haven’t seen the display in person but it appears to be right up my alley.

And then I read this quote from Jay Smith, who is the director of the museum and this blog post was hatched:

“People do not realize how many exceptional baseball players played baseball in South Dakota,” commented Smith. “Players like Jim Palmer, Bob Gibson, Don Sutton and many more -- the talent level of baseball in South Dakota produced players that went on to play in the All-Star Game at the major league level. I think that our visitors could put together a highly competitive All-Star team from those players with South Dakota roots.”

Hmm, yes, I think I could do that. South Dakota, for never having a professional team and never having more than a million people live here, has a really fascinating baseball history. Most of the greats’ connections to South Dakota came through the Basin League, the semi-pro league that existed in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s along the Missouri River basin. It usually consisted of college kids who had not yet been signed by big-league teams. It did, at times, include some former professionals, but generally the rosters were filled with unsigned players who still had baseball in their future.

The teams came and went (13 South Dakota cities had teams over time, plus Valentine, Neb.) but the league has had an incredible roster of players who later saw the Big Leagues. There was also the Aberdeen Pheasants, who were a longtime Class A affiliate of the St. Louis Browns and the Baltimore Orioles. Having more than 30 years of minor league talent in Aberdeen gives us more than a handful of Major Leaguers.  

To make our team, I had a few ground rules: I want players who have played for an extended stint in South Dakota and have had professional success. I could have counted players born in South Dakota or who played in college in the state but I’ve excluded those players. South Dakota does have some interesting ties from people who were born here, such as Keith Foulke and Terry Francona.)

I’m not counting players like Hank Aaron or Roger Maris or Gaylord Perry, who were all part of the Northern League and would have played in South Dakota over the course of their stints with other teams. For example, Aaron played in Eau Claire, Wis., in 1952 and rounded into form, becoming the league’s rookie of the year and Lou Brock played for the St. Cloud Rox in 1961, hitting .361 and jumping to the Chicago Cubs the next season.

The list is subjective and I feel like I could definitely be missing some guys. I’d be interested to hear your feedback, because I know there’s some out there …

Starters:

Catcher: Johnny Edwards (Pierre, 1958) - A career .242 hitter, Edwards makes our lineup as a starter for his well-rounded game. He put up solid offensive figures from 1962 to 1965, earning three All-Star appearances for Cincinnati. But it was the arrival of Johnny Bench that forced Edwards to be traded in 1968 to St. Louis. He was a two-time Gold Glove defender and was known for his defense in the National League

First base: Mike Fiore (Aberdeen, 1964) - Fiore wasn’t a big-time major leaguer but our team would be happy if he could channel his 24-year-old season in 1969 with Kansas City. There he hit .274 with 12 home runs (including the first home run in Royals franchise history!) and 35 RBI but also slugged .848 in 107 games. He fell off badly in later years, plagued by injury and struggling at the plate but we need a potential slugger and Fiore was that at his best.

Second base: Dick Green (Mitchell, 1959) - Green is the only player on our team that grew up in South Dakota, despite being born in Sioux City. After he graduated from Mitchell High School in 1959, he played for the local Basin League team at shortstop. Green worked his way up to the Kansas City Athletics in 1964, where he hit .264 in his first full year and hung in the lineup until he had a career year in 1969. He hit .275 and knocked in 64 in Oakland. Green was on three championship teams from 1972 to 1974 and he won the postseason MVP award for his play in the 1974 series, despite going hitless. His fielding was stellar, turning six double plays including tying the record with three in one game during Game 3. He would be released before the start of the 1975 season, ending the 12-year major league run with a lifetime average of .240 and 427 runs scored.

Third base: Jerry Adair (Huron, 1957) - Adair only played about 60 games at third base over five seasons but we’re making sure he’s on the field. A career .254 hitter, Adair was known as a great clutch hitter, according to Boston teammate Carl Yastzemski. He was one of the best defensive infielders in the mid-1960s, leading the league in fielding percentage.

Shortstop: Mark Belanger (Aberdeen, 1964) - In 1964, Mark Belanger was coming off a year of service in the U.S. Army when he arrived in Aberdeen to play in the Northern League. He was the league’s rookie of the year in 1964 at age 20, even though he only hit .226. He would be up with the Orioles in 1965, where he would stay for 17 years, but like the rest of our lineup, he was a light hitter and batting .228 for his career. (He had a very respectable .300 OBP for his career.) During his 1976 season, he made the All-Star game and finished with a .270 average. But his glove was his best asset, leading the AL in defensive WAR every year from 1973 to 1978 and was an 8-time Gold Glove winner.

Left field: Frank Howard (Rapid City, 1957) - Howard, who stood at 6-foot-8 and 275 pounds, quickly became a Basin League star. He hit .390 and mashed 13 home runs during his 1957 season and was soon a must-watch player in the league. When he graduated to the bigs, he had a 17-year career and hit 382 home runs, including 44 blasts in 1968 to win the home run title that year. For his time in Washington, it was fitting that he was called both “the Washington Monument” and “the Capital Punisher.”

Center field: Del Unser (Pierre, 1964-65) - Unser is our defensive rock in the outfield. He twice led his respective league in double plays turned as an outfielder and was a four-time leader in outfield assists in either the American League or National League. He hit .258 for his career and became a champion at the age of 35, winning with the Phillies in 1980. Unser delivered big RBI doubles in Game 2 and 5 of the 1980 World Series, both in pinch-hitting roles and was 5-for-11 in those playoffs, despite only starting one game.

Right field: Merv Rettenmund (Winner, 1963-64): According to the record books dating back to 1960, Rettenmund holds the single-season Basin League record for home runs with 15 in 1964, which is impressive considering the season was usually never more than 50 games. But Rettenmund never had much sustained slugging in the bigs, even with an OPS+ above average in eight seasons. He was a career .271 hitter who had 66 homers in 13 seasons. He was a part of two championship teams; the Orioles in 1970 and the Reds in 1975.

Bench

Outfield: Lou Pinella (Aberdeen, 1964): Another guy who is more well known for his managerial duties with the Yankees, Reds, Mariners, Devil Rays and Cubs, “Sweet Lou” got that name for his swing. In 1964, at age 20, he played 20 games with the Aberdeen Pheasants and hit .270 and was called up to the Orioles later that year. With more minor league time, Pinella wasn’t formally a rookie in the bigs until 1969, when he won AL Rookie of the Year with the Royals and was with the team in the KC squad’s first five years. He played for the Yankees for 11 seasons after that and amassed 1,705 hits, hitting a career .291. That time with the Yankees put him on two world championship teams before he got a third ring as Reds manager in 1990.  

Outfield: Bob Bailor (Aberdeen, 1971) - Bailor is the perfect guy for a bench spot because he was a utility player for almost all of his career. He hit .264 but only had 9 home runs for his career. During his time with the Pheasants in 1971, he led the Northern League with a .340 batting average and 25 stolen bases. When his career was over after time with the Orioles, Blue Jays, Mets and Dodgers, he was a coach with Toronto and was part of two World Series teams.

Infielder: Dick Howser (Watertown, 1954) - Better known as the future manager of the New York Yankees and the 1985 World Champion Kansas City Royals, Howser had a great first season with the Athletics in Kansas City in 1961. Playing shortstop, he hit .280, stole 37 bases and scored more than 100 runs. But his skills tapered and coaching became one of his best skills.

Catcher: John Stearns (Chamberlain, 1970-72) - Stearns is forever in the record books of the Basin League for his 21-game hit streak for Chamberlain in 1972. A two-sport star at Colorado, Stearns played his first game in the bigs in 1974, coming off the bench in Philadelphia and went 1-for-2. But that would be it for Stearns in Philly, with Bob Boone firmly the full-time catcher. He would be traded to the Mets in a trade involving Tug McGraw. Stearns was never a big hitter (.260 career) but he earned a reputation for hard physical play, breaking Dave Parker’s cheekbone in a collision. A four time National League all-star, Stearns broke the 76-year old NL record for stolen bases by a catcher in 1978 with 25 and was pinch-running late in his career, even as injuries kept him from throwing the ball as a catcher. Stearns was on some terrible teams for the Mets in the 70s, which kept him from the playoffs but he had a fine career.

Infielder: Ted Sizemore (Sturgis, 1965) - A catcher when he played in the Basin League, he would become a swift gloved infielder in the bigs. Sizemore’s best season came when he was 24, winning the 1969 NL Rookie of the Year award with the Dodgers, hitting .271 and driving in 46 runs. His career at the plate never really took off from there and he provided a steady defensive presence for the Cardinals and Phillies in the 70s. Another rock solid defender up the middle for our team, especially at second base.

Pitchers:

Bob Gibson (Chamberlain, 1956) - Probably the best pitcher on this list. Gibson was a 9-time All-Star who won the NL Cy Young in 1968 and 1970 and he won the MVP award in 1968 as well. In that 1968 season, Gibson had an ERA of 1.12 and a WAR of 11.8. He had 268 strikeouts and 28 complete games. The Cardinals have had a lot of great arms and Gibson is probably still the best one. And he played in Chamberlain, South Dakota in the mid-1950s. I can hardly imagine what that was like.

Don Sutton (Sioux Falls, 1964) - Sutton had an incredibly long career of 23 seasons, which started in 1966. He reportedly had a hard time getting signed out of high school in Alabama, leading him to the Sioux Falls Packers. The records show he threw 13 innings of relief on July 22, 1964 to win a 3-2 game over Pierre and was named to the all-star team at the end of the year. He was also used frequently in relief performances. In the majors, Sutton would record 324 wins and have an ERA of 3.26. But it took Sutton a while to reach the Hall of Fame, because he never won a Cy Young award and had only one 20-win season, even though he’s 14th on the all-time wins list. Thankfully, he was voted in on his fifth chance on the ballot in 1998.  

Jim Palmer (Winner 1963, Aberdeen 1964) - Jim Palmer might have forgotten about playing in South Dakota but the baseball fans in Winner and Aberdeen surely have not. From his SABR bio:

After his high-school graduation, Palmer, 17, played summer ball for a team in Winner, South Dakota, a team that included future major leaguers Jim Lonborg, Merv Rettenmund, Bobby Floyd, and Curt Motton. The club lost in the league finals, but Palmer impressed Baltimore Orioles farm director Harry Dalton, who scouted the series. Some league observers thought the 17-year-old Palmer threw harder than anyone they had ever seen. On the 1,200-mile drive home, a friend of Palmer’s (driving Palmer’s car) fell asleep at the wheel, and the car careened into a ditch and flipped several times. There were no seatbelts in the car, and Palmer escaped with a sore left knee, an injury that eventually required surgery. The Orioles were unaware of the injury when they signed Palmer to a $50,000 contract right after he returned home.Just before heading to spring training, Palmer married Susan Ryan, whom he had known throughout high school. The couple headed to Aberdeen, South Dakota, where the Orioles had a Single-A affiliate in the Northern League. Aberdeen ran away with the league pennant, while Palmer finished 11-3 with a 2.51 earned-run average, throwing a no-hitter in June. He battled control problems—130 walks in 129 innings—but otherwise kept the opponents off the bases.

He made the big league club out of spring training in 1965 at age 19. He was a six-time All-Star, all in Baltimore. He won three World Series titles and won three Cy Young awards in a four year span (1973, 1975, 1976) and was a first ballot Hall of Famer. And he ate pancakes on the days he pitched.

Don Larsen (Aberdeen, 1947-48) - At 17, Larsen found himself in Class C baseball in Aberdeen, where he made 16 appearances and was 4-3 with a 3.42 ERA, where Larsen was five years younger than his teammates on average. But fans saw a hint of what type of pitcher he would be in 1948, when he was 17-11 with a 3.75 ERA in 211 innings pitched. Larsen struggled in the bigs some more before latching on with the Yankees and having the ball in Game 5 of the 1956 World Series when Larsen pitched a perfect game for a 2-0 win. The accomplishment helped him to World Series MVP but Larsen never finished with more than 12 percent of the vote for the Hall of Fame and wrapped his career with a 81-91 record over 14 seasons.

Jim Lonborg (Winner, 1963) - Unfortunately, we’re running out of room for guys to be in our all-star team rotation (especially since they used a four-man rotation in that era). Lonborg would provide a good arm in the pen. He won 22 games and struck out 246 batters in his Cy Young winning season of 1967 with Boston. The Red Sox made the World Series that year, going to 7 games and Lonborg pitched three of them, including Game 7. But he ran into a fellow Basin League buzzsaw in Bob Gibson, who the ex-South Dakota pitcher battle, striking out 10 batters in a complete game performance. The Cardinals got to Lonborg for 6 earned runs in 6 innings and the Cardinals won at Fenway Park, 7-2. Lonborg gave up about a hit per inning pitched (2,464.1 IP and 2400 hits allowed) and thanks to the advanced statistics of today, we know he was close to the league average for his career, with an ERA+ of 95.

Bob Turley (Aberdeen, 1949) - Known as Bullet Bob, Turley was known as a power pitcher, which was on display with the Pheasants in 1949, where he went 23-5 with a 2.31 ERA and led the league with 205 punchouts. Turley was playing with the St. Louis Browns by 1951 was traded to the Yankees for the 1955 season. His best season would come in 1958, when he won the Cy Young, the World Series MVP and the Hickok Belt, which awarded the top professional athlete of the year with an alligator-skin belt with a solid gold buckle. Turley

Dan Quisenberry (Sturgis) - One of the best closers of the early 1980s, Quisenberry used a submarine pitching style to lead the American League in saves five times for the Royals, where he helped them win the 1985 World Series. Without an overpowering fastball, Quisenberry had pinpoint control, yielding very few walks and he finished with 244 saves, the sixth-most baseball history when he retired in 1990. We can also look back to Quisenberry, along with Goose Gossage and Bruce Sutter, moving from a style of a relief ace to a 9th inning closer style, that we've come to know now, made popular by Tony La Russa.

Don Schwall (Mitchell, 1957) - The summer before he was an all-conference basketball star at the University of Oklahoma, Schwall was on a standout squad in Mitchell as a pitcher. The next year, he would sign with Boston and he won Rookie of the Year in 1961, when he posted a 15-7 record and had an ERA of 3.22 on a team that was 10 games under .500. That would be a career highlight for Schwall, who would finish with 408 strikeouts in 743 innings pitches and his career was finished after seven seasons and a 49-48 record.

Dave Giusti (Mitchell, 1959) - A palmball master, Giusti would lean on the pitch heavily for the Pirates of the early 1970s, winning Reliever of the Year in 1971 from The Sporting News, a season where the Pirates were World Champions. He had four seasons in a row of 20 saves or more, capped by his 1973 National League All-Star season.

Eddie Fisher (Mitchell, 1957) - Fisher quickly developed his knuckleball, learning in the White Sox bullpen from legend Hoyt Wilhelm. His career would be known for his relief work, including 1965 when he finished fourth for the American League MVP award and made the All-Star team. He made 690 appearances, which is in the top 100 for pitchers all-time.

Dick Radatz (Watertown, 1957) - Before he was known as “The Monster” for continually stumping Mickey Mantle, Radatz had to be convinced to be a reliever by Red Sox legend Johnny Pesky. It was Boston where Radatz made his name, standing at 6-foot-6 and 230 pounds, where he pitched his first 18.1 innings without an earned run and led the American League in saves, games and relief wins in his 1962 rookie year, winning the Fireman of the Year award. He would be an all-star in 1963 when he had 33 scoreless innings in a row and earned the Fireman Award again in 1964, striking out 181 batters in 157 innings, something that won’t ever happen again for a reliever. And it would be over after that. He would play for four other teams in his final five seasons but would never find his form again.

Phil Jackson (Mobridge, 1966) - OK, he’s only on the team for his name. But he famously figured out that baseball wasn’t going to be his thing by playing for a season in Mobridge in the Basin League. He had been at the University of North Dakota when he gave pitching a professional try. He got knocked around and was relegated to mop-up duty. But he soon moved to basketball, where a career as a player and an 11-time NBA champion coach was eventually realized. Good call, Phil.

Manager:

Sparky Anderson - We don't have to overthink this one. The pride of Bridgewater, S.D., Anderson gets to run our club with his championship pedigree. (We fudged our rules a little bit here but it's worth it.) Earl Weaver was also out here in South Dakota for a while but he would hate this lineup of light hitters and defense.

Team outlook:

Our team is about pitching and defense. A one-two punch of Palmer and Gibson would be dangerous and we could lean on Turley, Lonborg, Larsen and Sutton to fill things out. Frank Howard is our slugger and we'll need some timely hitting around him. We're hoping to win a lot of 2-0 and 3-2 games. 

*Sources: Thankfully, a lot of the good Basin League research has been done before me. Darrell Shoemaker of the Rapid City Journal did a nice series in 2003, summing up the highlights of the league. Also my paper, The Daily Republic, had some helpful pieces in its archives. My old boss as a Capital Journal intern, Lance Nixon, had a good story about the Pierre connections earlier this year. A big thanks to the great resources at baseball-reference.com and their minor league pages. 

The news doesn't discriminate

For the second time in a few months, I was left shaking my head about the reaction to the news. 

Not so much the news itself, but people online -- primarily on Facebook -- complaining about the local news media reporting on bad news. 

A few months ago, there was a fatal one-vehicle car crash in Mitchell which came at the end of a pursuit through town. A bad deal all the way around, made only worse when it was revealed a week later that the driver had a blood alcohol content level of nearly four times the legal limit. 

People were furious. A bunch of Facebook comments, saying our paper wouldn't let the person rest in peace (or my favorite, rest in piece). I took a phone call from a woman who seemed to be a family member. She was angry, but also biased. I wasn't going to be able to understand her pain or try to get through her tears to have her understand my point. Sometimes you just let people have their say, if even they call you some unprintable words about a story you didn't write. 

I'm not one to speculate, especially on death but it seems plausible that the blood alcohol level played a role in the decision making and the crash. But there were people irrationally upset that my newspaper reported on the man's previous history of run-ins with the law and that the paper reported on the blood alcohol content level. It was important to the story, no matter what people say. 

Sioux Falls outlets were the target on Friday when they reported the news circumstances surrounding the death of a Valley Springs volunteer firefighter in April, who had a blood alcohol level more than twice the legal limit when he died fighting a fire. 

Dozens of Facebook comments poured in on the story, claiming that the news stations and newspapers had no business tarnishing the hero's reputation by reporting his blood alcohol content level and blaming one outlet for "ruining lives." This time, I was an outsider, a consumer of the news who knew exactly what it was like to be blamed for that. 

The general public doesn't understand how the news is made. For a newspaper, as an example, they don't care if sources didn't cooperate with you or if there was a tight deadline to turn in the story. They just expect the full story online as quickly as possible and then the story in their print edition the next day. They don't care how difficult your job is. And they have that right. They subscribe or pay $1 each day at the gas station and buy the paper and readers have standards. I'm glad they do. 

But when you get the news, you get all of it. You don't get a watered down version. You get the facts. And if the facts suddenly don't fit what people want the story to be or their personal narrative, they get defensive. 

In both cases, there were a few who understood that the stories were important because both provided key context to the story. That's why news outlets have the jobs they have. You have to dig into stories, and go beyond the basics. 

In addition, when you're talking about death or serious incidents, 99.9 percent of the news outlets are willing to wait for confirmation from authorities regarding who died or what happened. All of this information comes from the cops or the investigators. TV stations and newspapers don't make it up or take their own liberties. It's not worth getting sued over. Most outlets are going to try to be respectful as possible when you're talking about something this serious. 

But there's still people that blame the outlet and that's interesting. I'll put it this way: if members of the public found out that news outlets were holding onto information that fundamentally changes the story, they would be pissed. They wouldn't trust those places for news and they shouldn't. They wouldn't be conducting journalism. It would be censored and disingenuous. 

This information about the firefighter's death didn't come through "sources." It came in a press conference, directly from Brandon's police chief. From the police. If the police didn't release this information, it would be a pretty big piece of the story that was being held back, so the authorities here deserve some credit.

And the metrics -- the website clicks, the social media impressions which are so closely watched in this media landscape -- clearly indicate that the general public isn't nearly as interested in "good" news as they are in "bad" news. People don't read good news like they read bad news. I would know. I've spent a lot of time on a really nice feature about someone courageously fighting cancer that is barely read in comparison to a story about a local meth bust that contains only the bare bones reporting and information. 

Like I mentioned off the top, most of this vitriol was on Facebook. And in my opinion, there's more of that on Facebook than any other outlet. People say things that they often wouldn't say in person or things that usually lack common sense. I'm not sure what it is about Facebook (and Twitter to an extent on other issues) that makes people do this but you don't see a lot of good in people on Facebook when responding to stories.

People say they want good news but they don't read it like they read bad news. There's comments on the firefighter story, complaining that "this isn't news." The response, readership, comments -- and above all, journalism instincts -- would indicate otherwise.   

Scenes of South Dakota, Part II

If you read the first post in the series, thanks. If you didn't, that's okay. It's not too late to read the first part, which featured various shots of my time in the Rushmore State. By the way, I feel the title is slightly inaccurate because Mt. Rushmore is six hours away from the folks on the east side of the state and the state tourism board is trying to tell people there's other stuff to do anyway. I think it should be called "The Wave At Everyone Who Drives Past You Whether You Know Them Or Not State because I sure experienced that. I had South Dakota plates on the vehicles I was driving (that's right, company car) and pretty much everyone would wave. While it happens in Minnesota, I'm not from South Dakota, so maybe I noticed it more.

If you don't like the quality of my phone pictures, there's a jar at the end of the post to contribute to the "Marcus could use a better camera" fund.

Open roads (and bugs on the windshield.)

This is the Gregory County Historical Society's Museum in Fairfax. They gave me, a complete stranger, the keys and basically said "Have at it." Needless to say, that's uniquely small town.

I think I tweeted this (and I tweet a lot of photos, so I can't remember) but what happened at the Mitchell Walmart that they ran out of bananas? A band of monkeys broke through town? Actually, that almost did happen in Chamberlain. You remember #MonkeyWatch, right?

In the winter, the Corn Palace holds a lot of basketball. In the summer. the Corn Palace holds a lot of ... crap. My astute Twitter followers noted that all gift shops have crap but I feel like its worse at the Corn Palace because it has a lot of corn and Corn Palace crap. My final verdict on the corn-coated attraction: I liked it aesthetically because the art on the side takes a lot of time and patience but it epitomizes the phrase "tourist trap," something the Convention and Visitors Bureau doesn't exactly shy away from. 

A somewhat overexposed shot but the ballpark in Parkston is what small town baseball is really all about.

Notice the prices at the Birdcage in Sioux Falls for beer or peanuts or anything in between and then think about what you pay at Target Field. Just another reason why the minor/summer leagues are worth checking out

The adorable goal posts on the practice field in Bonesteel. They aren't used in games but I could just imagine the two officials under the uprights with puzzled looks on their face because they have no idea if the ball was inside the post or not.

Grumpy McGee and Cornelius the Corn something-or-other

Herrick's old crappy water tower. With about 100 residents, who knows when they'll get a new one.

At Cadwell Park in Mitchell, the best place for photos is atop the dugouts. So I climbed up there and ended up getting this shot of helmets and bats waiting for use. Also, thank your favorite sports photographers. Great shots are never easy.

One of Mitchell's big water towers

When it comes to road construction in South Dakota, you see more of the temporary stop lights rather than the flag men with the poles reading "STOP" and "SLOW." It this instance, it probably makes more sense (or cents, in this case) to have the lights on high-volume roads. I noticed there's a pair on the east side of Brookings earlier this month, which will make a lot of the Minnesota students heading back to SDSU pretty happy, I'm sure.

I said I would tell the story of how I ended up in the back of Green's Grocery in Burke and here it is. I was gathering photos for our Progress Edition, which is taking old photos, doing some research on them and then taking the same photos from area towns. My guide in Burke, Jack, led me around from small business to small business to find old photos until we ended up at the grocery store, which has been there for a very long time. He strolled right to the back of the store, through the boxes and pallets and into the manager's office. The manager was glad to help and pulled out some photos from a safe. It was a small store, with smaller aisles and organized chaos in the back, which was cool to see for my 10 minutes before Jack led me to the next spot. 

 

I mention my Progress work and I covered the towns from Winner to Fairfax and all of them in between on U.S. Highway 18. Except St. Charles. I made fun of the some of the towns but there's truly nothing in St. Charles.

Mason jars at The Homesteader in Gregory.

The work space at work where I did work while working.

As soon as I knew I would be criss-crossing the south-central counties in South Dakota, I figured I would cross into Nebraska, mainly to say I did this summer, even though I've been there before. (Wayne, Neb., what up?) So I crossed over the border about 500 feet before turning around and getting back on route, which ended up being less than a mile out of the way. Side story: One afternoon, I was able to pick up some Omaha sports radio and they were talking about, of course, Husker football. However, they were not talking about the 2012 Huskers but rather the 2013 Huskers and more specifically their schedule and how it would set them up to potentially win the Big Ten. I don't care if that's the case or not, they couldn't talk about this year's team? And Nebraska fans wonder why people think they are nuts? They must be sick of talking about Taylor Martinez and Bo Pelini.

I'll just give you the basics: A man dressed up as a member of KISS riding on the Wells Fargo and Co. stage coach. You can come up with the rest, as far as I'm concerned. (It was awesome to have this parade right outside my door though.)

I celebrated the morning of my birthday by taking in some late, late baseball at the State Amateur Baseball tournament in Mitchell. This photo in particular was taken sometime between 2 a.m. and 3 p.m., as some fans grew frustrated with the three hour rain delay followed by back-to-back extra inning games. The night finally came to an end at 2:58 a.m., not 3:02 a.m. as one tournament official tried to tell me. You see, my colleague Kevin Pottebaum and I were eagerly waiting for the game to end after 3 a.m. and we both had our phones out to document the time of when the final out was recorded, so when Mr. Tournament Official tried to tell me his time, I wasn't going to have any of it. Take that!

My favorite photo from this summer. It has the best cross of colors and Americana.

Scenes of South Dakota

Here's a photo recap of my first six weeks or so in Mitchell, S.D. (Note: All photos taken with my iPhone. How 'bout that?)

Needless to say, I had to move the seat back a bit.

Did you know the whole building is not made of corn?

Did you know Mitchell is only known for the Corn Palace outside South Dakota? Actually, in South Dakota too.

Welcome to Mitchell, Mr. Taxler.

I loved this Gregory baseball field. The light pole had to be in play.You know somebody has been knocked out going full speed for a foul ball too.

And the press box had to hang over the field, in play.

In the useless info department, the last 26 winners of the Poorman's Fishing Tournament.

Buckshots in Letcher. Not sure if those gas pumps work. Probably do.

Small crowd gathering in Armour to take in some baseball. Also, everyday in South Dakota is cloudy. Seriously, look at the clouds in all of these photos. Unbelievable right? If this wasn't a blog and over the internet, the wind would be slapping you in the face too.

Anyone who has ever lined a baseball field can tell you it's an art. Unless you have no idea what you're doing. That shows through pretty quickly. Sidenote: I have no idea what the chalk cart is officially called. Does anyone know/care?

Armour's Roy King. This reference will only resonate with my Le Center brethren but he is honestly like Ken Schmidt. In his 60s (or near that age), plays baseball in a adult league and is a member of a band. Too bad they don't look alike.

Taken on the first day of work. The sign was damaged by the infamous hail storm and has since been taken down. So I have a real treasure here. (Ok, no I don't.) "It's never been the same old story" is a good slogan. I know The Daily has a couple of other good slogans from past days too.

Near the Missouri River. These sweeping views are underrated in the state. (Not taken far from the Platte-Winner Bridge. I find it funny it is named after those two towns considering Platte is 14 miles away and Winner is 37 miles away. But there is not another town in between the two and it makes perfect sense for those trying to navigate the area. A local used the name and I instantly knew which bridge he was talking about. If if was the Smith Bridge, I might not know what he's talking about.)

These photos don't do it justice. If only I could make a good panorama ...

This was on the Winner side of the Platte-Winner Bridge. I don't know what is on the trailer but the truck had a hell of a time getting out of the valley. Certainly wasn't going faster than 20 miles an hour. It could be a piece of a water tower, wind turbine or silo. I couldn't tell when I was behind him and I can't make it out now. But it's nice to wonder. Also, I've come through Platte three times now and I've seen this Dutch Oven Bakery advertised and there it is on the truck. The store HAS A DRIVE-THRU WINDOW!! YES, A BAKERY!! (Sorry about overdoing it there.) I will be going through Platte again, so I think I'll have to stop. You can't see it but they have a windmill as their logo. If it's anything like the Edgerton Bakery, I'll probably fall into comatose. I'm such a sucker for Dutch-based bakeries.