AUSTIN, Tex—Walk by the backstop, past the onlooking fans, and away from the baseball game. At ballfields across the country, there are countless ways to keep you entertained during a ballgame: hot dogs, sundaes, team stores, and even swimming pools. But last month in Austin, if you had come to watch the “Sandlot World Series,” featuring the one-and-only Texas Playboys, you would have encountered something wholly unique in the world of sports.
Off the first base line stood an old house up on risers, and inside was an art show. Every piece, in one way or another, spoke to the soul of baseball.
The show, called High and Away, featured the work of nine artists—just the right amount to complete a manager’s lineup card—including paintings of ballplayers and knuckleballs, hand-painted bats, and even a baseball itself that had been transformed into something entirely new. “It just feels really Americana, leather, baseball—tactile stuff,” explained Jack Sanders, the founder of the Playboys and the mastermind behind the exhibition. “I’ve heard people say that they like the smell of baseball…the work [in this show] connects with that same spirit.”
I visited one day last month, while local teams played on the field Sanders built that he calls “The Long Time.” Players ran to the dugouts to nurse beers between innings. Others hollered for the music to be turned up; they wanted more Waylon Jennings. To understand the show, you first must understand these Sandlot baseball games and Sanders himself. In fact, that’s how the art show started, too: as you walked up the steps to go inside the gallery, you were greeted with different definitions of what Sandlot really is.
Sandlot is counterculture…
Sandlot is free range…
Sandlot is one of the most pleasantly mild forms of anarchy…
Sandlot a new type of baseball. Or rather, it’s an old type of baseball. The rules are loose and encourage play; if you hit a home run, you must hit from the other side of the plate the next time up. Teams are made up of loose collections of friends and co-conspirators, and drinking and socializing is encouraged. “It’s bringing back the spirit of when you were young with all the neighborhood kids and went to go play somewhere,” said Tim Kerr, an influential Austin artist and musician who is a member of the Texas Music Hall of Fame and whose paintings were included in Up and Away.
Sanders is an architect by training, and more than a decade ago, as a student at Auburn’s Rural Studio, he was tasked with heading into rural Alabama and designing and building a project that helped a community. In Newbern, he discovered the tradition of Sandlot baseball, where the community would gather on the weekends for ballgames that were a far-cry from the Big Leagues. People brought food and drink, they played music, and they hardly cared who won. Sanders built the field a new backstop, and when he moved to Austin, he formed his own team: the Playboys, named after Bob Wills’ famous country and western group. Every year, they’d travel back to Newbern to play a game. In 2013, Sanders bought the land that he would eventually transform into the Long Time—a Field of Dreams on mushrooms, where the outfield wall is made up of haybales, the dugouts are chicken coops, and you might find Spoon’s Britt Daniel playing tunes while Beto O’Rourke shags flyballs outfield.
“So much is spoon fed to you at an MLB game,” said Sanders. “And to be able to just say, ‘Well, if you just strip every bit of excess and fat off of that, what's going on?’ That's sort of what sandlot is.”
“It's all about play,” said Elizabeth Gutierrez, who worked with Sanders to plan Up and Away. “I've had my best feelings about myself and the people around me when I'm playing sports.”
At the Long Time, Sanders has become the steward of what’s become known as, “The Sandlot Revolution,” and today, as many as 150 teams have formed around the country. Scores are kept to keep games moving, but they’re not recorded; wins and losses aren’t the point. “Beatniks, hippies, Dada,” said Kerr. “It’s all the same thing as Jack starting a baseball field over here just because, well, what the hell? And then all these other people start coming in, and it turns into this whole other thing.”
At Playboys games, there’s an anything-goes attitude. Years ago, Gutierrez realized there were refreshments for adults but not for the kids running around, so she started a lemonade stand and later a pop-up to buy vintage clothes. Last summer, Sanders started to think that maybe they should host an art show too.
“I'd just been noticing, like, ‘Man, there sure are a lot of cool artists in this town,’” Sanders said. And, he also realized, “the subjects of their work are all baseball players.”
Sanders and Gutierrez started calling artists to see if they’d participate. Kerr was one of the first to agree. Out of his Austin studio, he paints portraits of historical figures, and those included baseball players like Jackie Robinson, Willie Wells, and Lou Gehrig. “I wanted to paint people that inspired me, and maybe might turn around and inspire you,” Kerr said. For the show, he created portraits of players like Satchell Paige and Dizzy Dean.
Cruz Ortiz, the San Antonio artist, contributed posters from past Sandlot games (he’s a member of Los Tigres de San Antonio. Other pieces were both literally about baseball and more far out. Kathie Sever, who is best known for chain stitching company Fort Lonesome, created a sculpture using a baseball and yarn. Maura Ambrose showed a quilt. “The stitching resonated with me as being like a baseball,” Sanders said.
It's a small gallery, with two unpainted rooms where the work is held up with magnets stuck to nails in the walls. “It's not a white wall type of gallery,” Sanders said. “It doesn't even have air conditioning.” But when you walk through, you can’t help but feel as if something is being communicated about the soul of the game, dissected in all different ways. There’s the power of memory that’s on display in Kerr’s and Will Johnston’s paintings of retired ballplayers from bygone eras (under Ernie Banks’ name, Kerr wrote, “It all comes down to friendship and treating people right”). There’s the beauty in the craftsmanship that creates sports’ objects, as seen in Lauren Napolitano’s painted baseball bats. And there’s a sense of community that you can’t help but notice when you consider the show in full—that it’s much more fun to go at it together than alone.
That’s Sandlot.
“I just know that getting those artists together leads to cool things,” Sanders said. “And I hope that we can have other people that can see that and recognize like, ‘Wow, what's going on here?’”
“To me this sort of art show has that sort of weight,” he continued. “But there's also a Sandlot quality to it, where we’re just not going to overthink it. We’re just going to put it in the room. And the people that get to see it are going to be really, really lucky.”
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