The Long Time

When I was 10 years old, I borrowed my uncle’s Toro riding lawnmower, and I went across the street to a suburban empty lot, mowed the lot, lowered the blades, and cut in base paths, even built a makeshift backstop with my friends. And here we were the kings of our own little sandlots. We did all sorts of sandlot sports, obstacle courses and hurdles and high jumps. But from this moment, I decided that baseball was going to be my thing. And I really did think from this moment on that I would be playing baseball for the rest of my life, that I would go to college and play baseball and someday even be paid to play baseball as a professional. That all changed with an injury in high school, softened by the discovery of my creative interests. By my twenties, I discovered the art and architecture of Samuel MBE in the rural studio, MacArthur Genius celebrated architect that founded this program where students like myself would go to rural Alabama and design and build houses in one of the poorest counties in the country. One weekend I met a man named Tiny at a Piggly Wiggly in Greensboro, Alabama, and he invited me. He asked me for a ride to the baseball club. What the hell is a baseball club? I think I probably asked, but I definitely obliged. Offered him a ride. Drove 11 miles to New Bern, Alabama. Turned left on Lewis Road and entered the New Bern Baseball Club.
I gave a man $3 and he had a big cigar box with cash in it, and I was greeted then by another three or 400 people enjoying this beautiful game behind a cedar post and chicken wire backstop. They were enjoying cold beers, shots of whiskey, and fried catfish and tilapia on white bread. I introduced myself to vendors like Susie Lee Williams and Velma Lee, also Williams. I started introducing myself to Players Juice Cottingham and Cedric Cadel and the manager, major Ward. I asked if I could come back again next weekend and the next weekend as much as I could, excuse me, my senior thesis project actually became to build a backstop, work with the community, design and build a backstop, make field improvements. This backstop represented the rural studio in the 2002 Whitney Biennial in New York.
It was an important experience in my life. Obviously it’s come to define the practice that I have today, and I learned how to work collaboratively. I learned how to weld, which I still do, but the real magic happened after I was asked to play in AM mid-summer game. The visiting Melting clowns were short, a player and the manager yelled at me specifically into the bleachers and asked if I had a glove, which I did. And I had three hits and made a diving catch in my jeans. At the end of the game, major ward of the new Brun team asked me if I’d like to play for the new Brun Tigers. I played parts of the next four seasons for the new Brun Tigers and actually was paid $500 over that period. That’s another tiny talk that I’ll tell you all about. But in 2002, I played 27 games with the new Brun Tigers, and I led this team in triples, which was probably surprising to everybody there.
But my baseball career seemed like it was at an end. But the baseball, the Sandlot lifestyle was baked in deep. I was interested now in how this experience was going to inform my new design and build practice, design, build adventure. When I moved to Austin, I was very, very fortunate that my first project out of graduate school was to build a tree house for the famed Austin filmmaker, Richard Linklater. And Richard Linklater, first of all, is about as sandlot as it gets, but at an early design meeting, he actually had a baseball field on his property and he asked my design partner, Steve Ross and I, if we’d like to hit some balls, which the answer is always yes, it’d been a while. But I hit a few into the pine trees and he asked me if I’d ever about my baseball history. I remember thinking at that time, I get to tell Richard Linklater a story. Within about an hour of that time, we decided that we, me, Rick, and our, and Steve, decided we were going to form the Texas Playboys Baseball Club. And we referenced that photo of the Barnstorm in Texas Playboys. Within months, I took 25 of my new family and friends to visit New Brun, Alabama to eat the food, see the architecture, and to play at the now famous Newburn Baseball Club.
It was hopping that day. So my new team got to see the magic that I’d seen just a few years before, and the type of baseball that we were going to play was now set deep. So from 2008 through the next couple to present, we became the Barnstorm in Texas. Playboys played in Oxford, Mississippi, Florence, Alabama, new Orleans, Dallas, San Antonio, El Paso, Paris, France, Toto, Santos, Mexico, next one’s Paris, France actually. And then this last year I actually had the opportunity to play at San Quentin State Penitentiary, probably the most awesome baseball experience of my life. But during all this time, I’d really started to wonder about that magic down Lewis Road and why don’t other places like the Newburn Baseball Club exist, or where are they at least? And we realized that. I think I had a moment where I realized that what they were doing at the long time was practicing, or what they were doing in New Bern was practicing what I call the long time.
And I realized that we were going to have to build our own. So fabrication began on that project, and now it is a sandlot facility here in Austin and Lockhart, Texas. There’s two of them. If you build it, they will come. We now host this year in 2025, we will host over 60 baseball games with teams making pil our own unique style of baseball, Austin style of baseball, and we will host 60 baseball games with teams from Saskatchewan, Canada, Minnesota, Los Angeles, Baltimore, new Orleans, Nashville, Tulsa. They come from all over. So the question is, what is Sandlot baseball? I think it’s a little bit different for everybody. For me specifically, I think it’s about stripping baseball to its purest form down all the way. It’s also about making or making your own fun. It’s the joy of a smooth swing or cleanly fielded ground ball. It’s really literally like kids on the sandlot, and it’s actually, it’s something that robots can’t do. That’ll be my time. Thank you very much.