Old baseball pastime would serve well nowadays

What if when you were a kid, your local professional baseball team promised you free tickets… What if when you were a kid, your local professional baseball team promised you free tickets to every regular season home game if you received good grades? Sounds too good to be true, right?

Yet this was a reality to the original members of the “Knothole Gangs.”

Not to be confused with the title of the popular 1950s TV show “Happy Felton’s Knothole Gang,” baseball’s original knothole gangs began sprouting in select ballparks across America as early as the 1930s.

The St. Louis Cardinals were one of the first organizations to adopt the idea for the gangs. Their intention was to entice children to perform well in school, and as a reward, they would then be given free tickets to see the Cardinals play at Sportsmen’s Park (their home field before moving to Busch Stadium).

The system worked as follows: Interested kids would sign up for knothole membership in their elementary schools. They were only awarded a knothole membership card, however, if they could meet the academic requirement, which basically consisted of making all A’s.

If successful, a kid could then get his knothole card stamped at the ballpark and enter for free. The Cardinals allowed all knothole members to attend each home game free of cost, with the exception of playoff and All-Star games.

Joseph Shank, a retired Korean and World War II veteran and lifelong Cardinals fan, fondly remembers the St. Louis Knothole Gang.

“That used to be our favorite thing to do, to go down to the ballpark and watch Joe Medwick, the Dean brothers and the rest of the Redbirds play baseball,” said Shank. “They used to have the girls sit on the right field bleachers while the boys sat in the leftfield ones. Sometimes between innings, they allowed us to go down to the side of the field to ask for autographs. Those experiences made some great memories.”

The Cardinals’ version of the knothole gang remained in effect until the team moved to Busch Stadium in 1966. The knothole gang provided underprivileged kids an opportunity to watch the nation’s best ballplayers in action, while additionally involving an entire generation of young fans in the game. Similar cost-free programs existed in other Major League ballparks as well.

Today, the knothole gang lives on, but only with popularity on the minor league level. The major difference between the old and new gangs is that the new ones are not associated with school performance. Most minor league teams that have knothole programs have only one requirement, that members be less than 14 years of age. Another difference is that the benefits differ from team to team.

For example, knothole gang members of the Bakersfield Blaze (a Texas Rangers affiliate) have the opportunity to take the field and meet Blaze coaches and players prior to every game.

Yet, the team only reserves a total of 20 tickets a game for knothole members to attend. Another minor league team, the Iowa Cubs (a Chicago Cubs affiliate) allows all knothole gang members to attend every Sunday home game for free, and they are given complimentary sodas and treats. Members also receive a membership card, a Knothole Gang T-shirt and other small prizes.

There are very few existing knothole programs on the Major League level, and they differ greatly from the originals. These consist of reserving certain standing room sections outside a stadium, where people of all ages can watch games free of cost. A good example of this is at Pacific Bell Park, the home of the San Francisco Giants.

When it was designed, the owners decided to leave open a long stretch of fence along the outfield wall for fans to watch. According to Gwen Knapp, of the San Francisco Chronicle, it is a place where “homelessness and tourism, two of this city’s defining features, merge. In the same place, there are yuppies in deck shoes, parents pushing strollers and men of all colors, with bristly faces.”

Fred Leach, a homeless man who was interviewed by Knapp, had this to say about Pacific Bell’s own knothole gang,

“Access to free baseball is a blessing for people like me.”

It is a place, according to Leach, where middle-class people will start conversations with him. They don’t treat him like a homeless man, but rather as an ordinary baseball fan.

This feeling of communalism that has been created and shared by San Franciscans of every socioeconomic background was made possible due to the establishment of Pac Bell’s knothole gang.

The knothole gang, as it originally came to be, and as it is appears today on the minor league level and in Pacific Bell Park, demonstrates an appreciation by teams for their fans.

It is my belief that Major League Baseball should re-establish knothole gangs (in some form) in baseball parks all over the country. This would not only improve baseball’s image in an era of greed and rampant steroid usage, but would also demonstrate great effort on behalf of MLB to reach out to those fans who have lost faith in the national pastime.

It is true that teams initially could lose some money; but more importantly, they would be gaining back old fans and a new youthful generation of baseball aficionados.