If you followed our blog for this year's trip you will know we have a passion for the game of baseball. So I am going to digress a bit for the sake of history. That passion started many years ago for me as a child and I loved to play baseball. In the summer when we were not playing organized "Little League" baseball we had our gloves on the handle bars of our bicycles and we would scare up a game whenever we could.
I became a pretty good pitcher myself and I had a really good coach. Yep, Lefty, my father! Lefty was also a very good baseball player as a youngster in the Urbana Iowa area in the 1930's and early 1940's.
He pitched left-handed hence the nickname "Lefty". The newspapers called him "sensational"!
He was so good that in September 1940 he was drafted by the Cedar Rapids Raiders farm team to play for them.
In 1941 he signed a contract with the Appleton Wisconsin Papermakers ball club, Class D (today's AAA equivalent) affiliation with the Cleveland Indians.
Then along came 7 Dec 1941. The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the battle cry went out to every able-bodied American male to "take arms"! Lefty and his brother (my uncle) Bernard enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and went off to fight in the South Pacific. During my father's Marine Corps training he pitched for the Marines team and my son Dan has his uniform.
So our passion for the game continued to grow. Fast forward to today. Our connection to the Indianapolis Indians, besides the pure love of the game, is there pitching coach, Joel Hanrahan! So how did that come to be? Well our son Dan played high school baseball in Norwalk where all of our kids grew up and attended school. Dan was a very talented baseball player, pitching a "perfect game" at the age of eight years old. No runs, no hits, no errors, and no walks in the six inning game. There was not a position he couldn't play but as time went on he seemed to find his niche as a catcher.
As a high school freshman he caught Varsity games and one of the awesome pitchers the Norwalk team had was this young lad named Joel Hanrahan, a big ol' strapping right handed pitcher. Man, could he throw the heat! He once threw the ball so hard he actually broke a bone in Dan's glove hand!
Joel was drafted straight out of high school to the Major League Los Angeles Dodger's organization. You can check out the video of his 20 Jun 2000 signing here: https://youtu.be/5PmmsVCTpTw
From there he progressed and was traded to the Washington Nationals where he evolved into a closer and was traded to the Pittsburgh Pirates, also in the closer role and nicknamed "The Hammer". He was selected to the All Stars two years. We was traded to the Red Sox but was diagnosed with flexar tendon strain in his elbow which required Tommy John surgery. He was traded again to the Tigers and a second Tommy John surgery ended his playing career but over the years he was brought back into the fold by the Pirates and has progressed to his current position of pitching coach for their AAA Indianapolis Indians team.
Victory Field opened in 1996 and was the spark for the downtown revitalization for Indianapolis. It replaced Bush Stadium which had also been called Victory Field for the past 25 years. It seats 13,300 with added lawn seating in the outfield area totaling 15,696.
Soon Joel emerged and greeted us. He is doing great and looking great! He obviously enjoys what he is doing and the Pirates obviously respect his coaching ability as they draw their major league pitchers from Joel's tutelage.
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