#602 Town Team Baseball on the Comstock

     You may have heard stories or comments about baseball being played on the Comstock by a local Town Team.  There were baseball town teams in VC and Reno and Carson City as early at the 1880s and they often played each other for fun.   I came across this accounting of town team baseball in Virginia City in the 1930’s in the Comstock Chronical of February 17, 1995 by Bill Henley, a local old timer.

 

     “The Virginia City Town Team in the 1930’s played on the Pan-mill down Mill Street toward Six Mile Canyon.  (California Pan Mill on the North side of Mill St at about R street:.  editor cly)  The area formed of Con Virginia mill tailings, it was level enough to play then: it is but mounds of mounds now.

 

     The team itself had quality players, some recruited by the mines, given jobs to play ball, some local.  Bert Parrish was a miner by actual work experience, not an athlete developed into one, and had also been a minor league pitcher.  Perry Taylor the second baseman was a Stanford football center who was made into a skip tender at the small Ophir mine on A Street, if memory serves.  Lionel Osborne at third base was maybe married into the Arizona Comstock family of ownership.   The local construction man Johnny Giuffra, still on the Lode, also played a little third base.  High school faculty men and bigger-than-life characters John Gilmartin ad Jake Lawlor were first baseman and catcher.

 

     Joe Viani, an owner of the Smokery/Delta, was the business manager.  He was the husband of former Fourth Ward school teacher Julia Baldini.  He had to deal as much with monkey business on the ball club as with business.  There were internal fights, parts of seasons were cancelled.  Umpire Carl Boegle, fire and police chief factotum, (Boegle had a bookstore and office supplies business. Ed.)  once laughed himself all the way to Greenhalgh’s Garage over a scrap which ended a game in the early innings.  He shared his hilarity with Jack Winters, now a retired engineer of San Diego but then a young garage attendant.  Viani got stuck with uniform costs, bar tabs of some of the players.

 

     Another umpire was Ping Gallagher with two distinctions; he called the game from behind the pitcher’s mound, not home plate, and his voice reverberated over the Chalk Hills and Sugarloaf Mountain.

     Some of the spectators gathered around the backstop above the creek which ran down Sixmile Canyon (kids retrieving balls from there by going after them or with homemade nets).   Most of them, though, sat on the surrounding hillsides.  The outfield was a tangle of sagebrush.

 

     The local defense was not above boosting its catches in the outfield.  When a long drive was driven by the wrong people a Virginia City outfielder would run to the area.  He faked the catch if he couldn’t make it.  He reached down in the brush, grabbed a ball salted there there for the purpose, and triumphantly held it up.

 

     An American Indian sat on the hill on one of these wondrous plays.  He snorted as the “Out” resonated from the umpire.  He heaved his considerable paunch up, waddled purposefully to the pitch’s mound and to Ping Gallagher…..”Him no catchum goddam ball.”

     So such was the infancy of baseball on the Comstock.”

 

Editor:  Photo of one of the several 1880 era VC town team sponsored by the Hatch Brothers Grocers and Provisioners store in VC.  I think the guy on the right end of the back row is Ron Gallagher, also known as the Relic.