(Continued from last week)
The tale went something like this:
During the year, the Mt. Ida baseball team would meet the Y City baseball team for two games a year. One game was to be played on the Fourth of July and the other would be played on Monday of Memorial Day. One year they would play the first game in Mt. Ida and the second game in Y City, then the next year vice versa.
The rules of the game were that the chief umpire would be from the home team and he could overrule the visiting umpire who was stationed behind second base. This arrangement would often cause a rhubarb and sometimes a donnybrook. On this occasion the Fourth of July game was being played in Mt. Ida.
When the 1 o'clock starting time arrived, Mt. Ida's main player "Big Ike" hadn't shown up. Big Ike was a huge wood chopper and could hit the baseball to kingdom come. Mt. Ida was trying to stall the game, but Y City demanded they start the game without Big Ike.
They finally started the game and had played nine and a half innings with a score of 2 and 2. The first batter for Mt. Ida in the bottom of the ninth struck out. The next batter hit a long fly ball but the center fielder caught it. Mt. Ida was in a deep gloom, when lo and behold, here came Big Ike walking out of the woods with his trusty ax on his shoulder. The audience gave a big cheer for they were sure that Big Ike could win the game.
Big Ike walked up and picked up the last bat that Mt. Ida had and walked up to the plate. On the first pitch he fouled the ball out of play. On the second pitch, Big Ike hit the ball clear out of the park, but it too was foul and he had broken the last bat! He went to the Y City team and asked if he could borrow a bat, they told him that to loan him a bat to beat them would be crazy. Big Ike walked over and picked up his trusty chopping ax and walked up to the plate.
The catcher moved so far back that he was trying to push the umpire into the back stop. The umpire signaled the pitcher to throw the baseball. The Y City pitcher reared back and threw Big Ike a hard high one. Big Ike took a mighty swing and the strangest thing happened. Big Ike hit the baseball dead center, the top half of the ball went high in the air and the first baseman caught it in foul territory behind first base. The other half of the ball took a huge circle over the center field and kept on going.
The visiting umpire was watching the top half of the baseball and was pumping his right thumb and hollering, 'Out! Out! Out!' The chief umpire was watching the other half and was circling his right arm in a huge circle and hollering "Circle them a Home Run!"
The two umpires finally saw what the other was doing and headed for each other. They met at the pitchers' mound in what became the biggest donnybrook of all time. The next morning, the Mt. Ida Bee had a huge headline that read 'Mt. Ida Wins!' Then below it read, 'Big Ike comes through a hero!'
Then it read that the chief umpire behind home plate declared that with two and a half innings in the bottom of the ninth, Mt. Ida won the baseball game by a score of two and half to two.
This was the tall tale that won the event and I will never forget it. After a busy Saturday night at the carnival, Johnny and I knocked down all of the tents except the sleeping tent and the pony ring and loaded them. Early Sunday morning we were sitting in front of the Slim Jim Cafe waiting to get our short stack of pancakes.
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Editor's note: Joe Pitts (1920-2008) was a native of Pea Ridge and regular columnist for the newspaper. This column was first published Oct. 26, 2005, in the Pea Ridge TIMES.
Editorial on 05/27/2020