Take Two and Hit to Right: Golden Days on the Semi-Pro Diamond »

Hobe Hays was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, and played baseball for the University of Nebraska as well as for semi-pro teams in various Nebraska towns. Hays has also been an artist, art director, and teacher in the New York City area.

Memoir of a baseball player for the McCook Cats, a semi-pro team in Nebraska's far southwest, in the late 1940s.

Kirkus Reviews

A leisurely, enjoyable memoir of semi-pro baseball in the rural Midwest during the sport's halcyon days, the late 1940s and early '50s. The author played in the Nebraska Independent League from 1948 to 1953. Many small towns throughout the US had semi-pro teams whose players—like Hays, often recruited from college teams—usually equaled the caliber of minor-league squads. This book profiles a radically different sport than the major-league spectacle encountered today on TV. In lieu of multi-million-dollar contracts, Hays and his teammates initially received $20 $50 per game and held day jobs. They drove to far-flung towns for away games, didn't wear batting helmets, and encountered almost no blacks (though one who did play briefly in the NIL was future Chicago Cubs great Ernie Banks). Five decades later, Hays recaptures both his enthusiasm for and aesthetic appreciation of "a beautifully executed double play, a great one-hop throw right on the bag to cut down a runner, a smooth hook-slide around a tag, an echoing double down the left-field line." He depicts the camaraderie and the loneliness of a semi-pro player's life, portraying such difficulties as "the early uncertainty that puts anyone on the edge." Finally, he depicts how important semi-pro ball was to both the self-image and the economy of such towns as McCook, Neb. (pop. 8,000 throughout this period), and how the competitive recruiting of higher-salaried star players ultimately made unviable the whole rural Nebraska semi-pro enterprise. Hays focuses almost entirely on the sport: memorable games, plus brief profiles of dozens of fellow players. A vivid chapter about a year spent studying at the Art Institute inChicago makes one wish he had written more about his off-season life. Hays's prose isn't great, but it's good enough to transport the reader back to a simpler, less glitzy but more colorful era in the history of both baseball and rural America. (b&w illustrations)