David Vaught wrote a nationally acclaimed essay on baseball history, but there is a part of the game's past that Vaught hasn't revealed to his parents for 40 years.
A San Francisco Giants fan from a family and neighborhood largely uninterested in the sport, Vaught started sneaking off to Candlestick Park when he was 10 years old.
"Unbeknownst to my parents to this day, I would go off to Candlestick Park by myself," Vaught said. "I think I was in the sixth grade maybe. I'd take a bus ride across the bay to the Transbay Terminal in, shall I say, a less-than-desirable neighborhood. I would go across the street and get on a bus that went all the way down Third Street to the park. It took a long time to get there, at least 20 minutes. Candlestick Park is south of the city."
Vaught's love of baseball began around age 5, when he listened to future Hall of Fame announcers Russ Hodges and Lon Simmons broadcast Giants games on the radio. More than 20 years later, Vaught developed a passion for history.
Eventually, the passions intersected. The most notable product yet of that merging was an essay that made the Texas A&M history professor one of three winners of the McFarland-Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) Award for the best papers or articles on baseball history or biography in 2008.
Vaught's prize-winning essay, Our Players Are Mostly Farmers: Baseball in Rural California, 1850-1890, was part of a book titled Baseball in America and America in Baseball, published by the Texas A&M University Press.
The essay sprung from Vaught's research for two previous books he wrote on the history of rural California agriculture.
"Reading through newspapers, columns always had snippets about baseball games," Vaught said. "When you are doing research on microfilm, you copy anything your mind tells you to. I started copying all those snippets. In the book there was a single paragraph about baseball. It just didn't occur to me that it was significant in what I was doing.
"Some time after that, my editor was asking me what I wanted to do next. He said to think about what I would want to do if there were no restrictions whatever. Out came this notion of rural baseball. I have no idea where it came from, except I knew I had all those clippings."
Vaught is now a couple of years into researching and writing a book about baseball history, tentatively titled "Country Hardball: Baseball in Rural America." The prize-winning essay will be a chapter in the book, one of seven case studies.
The winners of the McFarland-SABR Award will be honored in August at the annual SABR convention in Washington, D.C. The award includes a $200 prize.
Vaught, 51, grew up north of the San Francisco Bay in El Cerrito, Calif. His father was a math professor -- "Baseball wasn't in his sphere," Vaught said -- but David connected with the game as a player on the schoolyard and a fan listening to the radio.
"Baseball's always been special to me," Vaught said. "It became a place for me. It was something uniquely my own."
Vaught greatly admires the work of author Jules Tygiel, and considers his biography of Jackie Robinson one of the outstanding books about baseball in society. On the field, Vaught grew up a fan of former San Francisco first baseman Willie McCovey.
"I would copy the way McCovey walked, his warmup swings, everything," Vaught said. "I would go in the summer in the middle of the week. Back then in the '70s, if you went to Candlestick in the middle of the week you'd be lucky if there were 3,000 people in the stands. You could pay $1.50 to get in and sit wherever you wanted. I'd always sit as close down behind home plate as I could. I can still visualize two people, McCovey and [Willie] Stargell, who hit the ball so hard it was frightening."
Vaught and his wife moved to Aggieland 12 years ago. The distance didn't end Vaught's love of the Giants.
"All of the other teams like the 49ers faded away, but not the Giants," he said. "I tried really hard to become an Astros fan, and I did to an extent. But it's easy for me to turn off a tie game at 10 at night and go to bed. I could not do that with the Giants.
"I don't know the team as well now with all the turnover [in players], but I look for them every morning."
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Posted by: Pablo On: 7/1/2009
Comment Title: Good stuff
A baseball fan, I love this game for many of the reasons Vaught fell in love with the game. Would have really enjoyed watching Stargell hit.