Take This Rock Star Out To The Ballgame

On a day off from his world tour, Jack White played a baseball game in Austin.

May 27, 2022

AUSTIN, Texas—Sex, drugs, rock n’ roll, and…baseball?

Less than 24 hours earlier, Jack White was on stage at Austin’s brand-new Moody Center as thousands of fans banged their heads and sang along to hits like “Steady As She Goes” and the arena classic “Seven Nation Army.” He slayed guitar solos and instructed the crowd, “Whatever you give me, I’ll give back,” as the crowd roared in delight. He does this nearly every night and is now in the middle of a tour that includes nearly 60 shows and will take him from his hometown of Detroit to Europe and back. It’s nice to be a rock star.

There’s not much time to relax. But in those fleeting moments, White carves out space to enjoy his favorite sport.

Yesterday, just outside of Austin, White and his band took a day off before a show in El Paso to make a pilgrimage to one of the most offbeat meccas of sports. Far from the Major Leagues sits the Long Time, part art project, love letter to sports, and oasis. It’s the spiritual home of sandlot baseball, a homemade baseball field in the middle of a farm on the outskirts of Austin—if the Field of Dreams had a hippie cousin; the outfield wall is made up of hay bales and recycled shipping pallets. White and his crew, which call themselves the Warstic Woodmen, scheduled a game against the Texas Playboys. Yet this probably wasn’t like any game you’ve seen before—and not just because a rock star was playing the field.

There was a bar pouring mezcal margaritas and bourbon lemonades. Local Austin bands played cosmic country music. A greyhound raced across the field, stopping play while fans watched from the comfort of a picnic blanket. The teams kept score on a chalkboard, but the score isn’t the point in Sandlot baseball. The players on the field are artists and architects and businessmen, and they wear bespoke, throwback jerseys with stirrups and the occasional cowboy hat. Competitiveness is discouraged: If you hit a home run, you have to take your next at bat from the opposite side of the plate, and if you hit another dinger after that, you have to use a custom-made, extra heavy bat known as “Gracie.”

In his screed The Sandlot Manifesto, the founder of the Long Time and the Playboys Jack Sanders writes, “Even if we don’t win, we can’t lose.”

He adds, “Sandlot is a lifestyle, an ethos, a community in the making.”

Jack White stands at the plate at the Long Time on May 26.

Sanders built this place five years ago and started the Playboys in 2006. He’s an architect by training, and while earning a master’s degree at Auburn, he was introduced to Sandlot baseball by a group of 50- and 60-year-old men in rural Alabama who played games on the weekend to raise money for community causes. For his thesis project, Sanders built them a backstop. When he moved to Austin, he recruited a team that travelled to Alabama to play a game themselves. They’ve barnstormed across the Southeast and have grown their version of baseball—one that harkens back to long summer days as a kid when the ballpark was an escape.

It's that ethos that drew White to steer the tour bus to this unlikely spot. The rock star grew up playing baseball at Clark Park in Southwest Detroit where middle school PE coach Morris Blackwell would run summer ballgames. “It was just ragtag kids,” White remembered recently. “Whoever showed up got to play.”

This isn’t the first time that White has adjusted his tour schedule to squeeze in some baseball. The Woodmen have played in Cooperstown (the bat White used is now in the Baseball Hall of Fame) and raised money to rebuild Hamtramck Stadium, one of the only Negro League parks still standing. In Washington, DC, in 2019, White attended the first three innings of the Nationals-Brewers game before he had to leave to play a show at a nearby venue. When the show ended and White learned that the game had just entered the 14th inning, he came back. Earlier this year, he played the National Anthem at the Detroit Tigers home opener and sat in the booth showing Kirk Gibson old baseball cards.

Yesterday, White dug into the batter’s box. The band kept playing. White’s a lefty, and when the pitch was lobbed to him he took a swing and—

Well, it doesn’t really matter what he did. That’s the beauty of Sandlot baseball after all. Even rock stars don’t need to keep score to cut straight into the heart of the game.

Take This Rock Star Out To The Ballgame

On a day off from his world tour, Jack White played a baseball game in Austin.

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