Field of Dreams. (Hell, no! We won't go!)

Whether due to COVID, or because of their drive for streamlining, efficiency, or good old-fashioned greed, Major League Baseball has been doing some downsizing of it minor leagues. 

One casualty of MLB's drive was the Frederick (Maryland) Keys, which lost its position as a single-A minor league club in the Orioles organization. Quite a blow to a team that had consistency drawn well and was the pride of its town.

That would be Frederick, made famous as Frederick's Town in the Civil War era John Greenleaf Whittier poem, "Barbara Frietchie." Some folks probably weren't required to memorize poetry during grammar school. I'm not one of them, and this bit was on the agenda when I was a girl, along with "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere" and "O Captain, My Captain." Whittier's poem recounted the story of one Barbara Frietchie, a town resident in her 90's who refused to take down her American flag when the Confederate Army marched through. She also threw some shade at General Stonewall Jackson while she was at it.

"Shoot if you must this old grey head, but spare your country's flag," she said. 

Barbara Frietchie was an actual person, but there's no evidence that this noble incident ever happened in real life. Something similar may have occurred, but the woman who waved the Stars and Stripes at the men carrying the Stars and Bars was supposedly someone else. Maybe her name didn't scan as well as Barbara Frietchie's did. 

The Stars and Stripes has another big connection to Frederick's, as Francis Scott Key grew up in those parts. And his name was bestowed on the local minor league team. 

It took me a while to figure out that those things that look a bit like daisies are actually fireworks - "bombs bursting in air". The colors didn't help any. The predictable, the pedestrian color scheme would have been red-white-and-blue, no? But, hey, star-spangled black, orange, and yellow works, too. Sort of.

While I'm digressing, how's this for a digression:

Another denizen of Frederick was Roger Taney, the first Catholic member of the Supreme Court  - and doesn't the composition of the current SCOTUS more than make up for that lack? sigh... - who had his law practice in Frederick. As Chief Justice, Taney authored the Dred Scott Decision, which held that Black people, whether enslaved or free, could ever be citizens. Citing the Constitution - hmm, where else have we heard about originalists on the court? hmm - Taney further tossed aside the Missouri Compromise. (The Compromise restricted the admission of new states as slave states only if they were located in the South.) And the rest, as they say, is history. Terrible history.

The Dred Scott Decision is widely considered the worst and most consequential decision the Supreme Court ever made. (Let's give the current Court a while. They're just warming up, as it were.)

Which is why the team was called the Keys, and not the Taneys. 

There is, by the way, a Key-Taney connection. Taney was married to Francis Scott Key's sister. 

Digression. Over.

The Keys have been a key part of the Frederick community for more than 30 years:

After arriving in Frederick, the Keys instantly became the pride of the city, which then had about 40,000 residents. Games were routinely sellouts. Fans would show up on players’ birthdays with baseball-mitt-shaped cakes. There were fireworks, bobbleheads and promotions involving monkeys riding dogs. Once, even President George H.W. Bush came to a game. (Source: Washington Post)

I'm down with the mitt-shaped cakes. And the fireworks. And the bobbleheads. But it might have been more fun to see a monkey riding George H.W. Bush. He was said to have been a good sport. So why not.  

Anyway, despite being dumped by MLB and the Orioles, the Frederick Keys decided that hell, no, they're staying put. 

“The team has been here for over 30 years,” says new Keys General Manager Andrew Klein, who was promoted in early April. “And we have no intention of leaving.”

They won’t be, at least for now. Come May 26, baseball will once again be played in Frederick, but in the new MLB Draft League, essentially a last chance for unaffiliated college juniors and seniors to show off their skills to a professional organization. Hope — and grass — is springing eternal on this baseball diamond.

Single A minor league ball is pretty scrubby to begin with. The MLB Draft League? The players who'll be taking the field next week for the Keys will likely include both hangers-on, last ditchers like the Kevin Costner character in Bull Durham, and pure amateur college kids. All hoping, perhaps against hope, that they'll make it to The Bigs. The Keys, giving proof through the night that the opportunities are still there, are providing a Field of Dreams. Hope it works out for some of them.