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E-mail StoryDevoted Blaze boosters shag balls for tickets
| Monday, Apr 21 2008 5:36 PM
Last Updated: Tuesday, Apr 22 2008 11:50 AM
From his position beyond the home run fences at Sam Lynn Ball Park, Walt Bledsoe looks up at a row of juniper trees and sees them not as one of the few aesthetically pleasing features left at the old stadium, but as baseball gobbling monsters.
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Linda and Walt Bledsoe have been fetching stray balls during batting practice at Sam Lynn Ball Park "since about 2000," says Linda. In exchange for a set of Bakersfield Blaze season tickets her and her husband Walt communicate on walkies talkies to locate each and every ball that flies over the back wall, "and when we're all done we sit down and enjoy the game," says Walt, who bikes home from the home games when Linda has to go to work.
Linda stays in a tent just off third base with her walkie talkie and watches for home-runs during batting practice while her husband Walt waits behind the back wall for Linda to tell him where they drop.
Walt Bledsoe and his wife Linda have been fetching stray balls at Sam Lynn Ball Park for about eight years. In exchange they get a set of season tickets.
His competitors, really.
Were it not for them, he could improve his haul of batting practice baseballs each Bakersfield Blaze season by maybe 20 percent.
“If you could get one of them things like they have to shake almond trees to shake those junipers, you wouldn’t believe the baseballs that would come outta there,” he said, stroking his long, gray moustache-less beard that gives the semi-retired handy man a distinguished, Amish look.
“There’s baseballs up there since the Dodgers were here.”
For the record, the Dodgers were last here in 1994.
One armed with a five-gallon bucket and each with a walkie-talkie — indispensable (and only) tools of their trade — Walt and his wife Linda are batting practice home run shaggers. The Bledsoes, devoted Bakersfield Blaze boosters, are informally commissioned by the Blaze to retrieve pre-game batting practice balls that sail over the fences into the scrub grass and brush, unless it’s really long, varmint-infested prickly brush.
“If a ball goes in there and there’s a snake in there, which there is, I know it ... he owns it, cause I ain’t goin’ in there,” Walt says, pointing to an area about 50 feet beyond the right center field fence. “It belongs to him.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if one day we spotted a body in there,” Linda says. “I really wouldn’t be surprised at all.”
The balls that don’t belong to the snakes belong to the Blaze to reuse again and again until “seams bust loose, or they get run over by a lawn mower the ones we don’t find,” Walt says. There aren’t too many he won’t find, providing they don’t stick in the junipers, and that’s due in large part to Linda’s contribution to the operation.
“Got one behind the hole,” she says over her walkie-talkie from inside the park — “the hole” being a gap in the juniper trees beyond the wall in left-center field. There used to be trees there, she said, until some homeless people camped there for the night set them on fire.
“Bull cr— ... I’m standing by the hole and I don’t see nothin,” Walt snaps back. “Oh, OK ... you’re right, you’re right. There it is, I got it.”
Linda smiles, shakes her head as if she’s heard that from him a thousand times, which she has, and then re-peels her eyes on the ball launched by a Rancho Cucamonga Quake hitter in the cage.
“Got one over between the brown pole (the old Marlboro Man) and the foul pole,” she signals to Walt.
“C’mon?”
“Between the brown pole and the foul pole.”
“OK, on my way.”
Over the course of the season, the Bledsoes will team up to retrieve roughly 1,200 baseballs. For their efforts they receive tickets to games.
“They’ve got a good system down,” says Blaze General Manager Shawn Schoolcraft. “They’re out there every day, even when there’s not a game. They do a really good job.”
If they don’t fetch the balls, kids will and won’t bring them back. Or another tandem like the Bledsoes could accept the responsibility, although there aren’t two many tandems out there like the Bledsoes.
Linda, 57, and a pretty fair heckler from her perch behind home plate once the games get under way, works part-time as a graveyard shift stocker at the Rosedale Wal-Mart. She often wears pink ribbons in remembrance of friends she lost in the Oklahoma City bombing incident in 1995. Most days during a home stand she’ll start her shift at Wal-Mart after balls have been shagged, about three innings completed, and half a dozen bogus umpire calls rebuked in a high-pitched, nearly incomprehensible shrill that serves as her cry of discontent.
“Oh, they do hear it from me,” she says.
Walt is also 57, but has the worn look of a much older man. He dabbles occasionally as a handyman, but spent a good portion of his working life as a body transporter for the county coroner.
“When you’re having trouble breathing, you ride with Hall’s Ambulance. When you’re not breathing, you ride with me,” he says, jamming his pointer finger into his chest.
While Linda’s job inside the park is pretty straight forward, Walt applies technique and strategy to his ball-tracking outside the park.
“The key to the whole operation is this,” he says holding up his walkie-talkie.
“You have to constantly keep your eyes moving,” he says a few minutes later, almost suggesting that the walkie-talkie really isn’t all that important. “You gotta keep your eyes up there right above the fence there or you could get hit with a ball. You don’t want to get hit with a ball.”
Walt, and Linda, too, is anticipating a day during which a particular home run ball will be hit he won’t have to fetch — the one that comes off the bat of a Blaze hitter, with the bases loaded, during a home game at Sam Lynn Ball Park.
“That’s when my beard comes off,” he says. “But it has to be by one of our guys and it has to be here.”
Once it happens, Walt and Linda will be back at their posts the next day, as usual, walkie-talkies and bucket in hand, shagging baseballs the junipers don’t get. The only thing different will be Walt’s dimply, clean-shaven face.