Saying Goodbye To Ray Winder

Paul Allen, my friend and former roommate during our interning days in Little Rock, tagged me in this photo of Ray Winder Field, which is currently making the transition from  historic ballpark to less than historic parking lot.

After 81 years, a significant chapter of Arkansas sports history has come to a close. Ray Winder Field, the home of minor league baseball’s Arkansas Travelers from 1932 to 2006, is being brought down piece by piece to make way for a parking lot for the University of Arkansas for Medical Services.

I myself have mixed feelings about the former relic. In 2005, I spent seven months at the park as an intern for the Travelers. I remember cursing the fact that we had to pick rocks out of the infield and questioned why the playing surface was no where near perfectly level. I remember picking up peanut shells and scraping gum off grandstand seats that were 75 years old at the time. And I remember power washing – dragging a hundred foot of hose up and down ancient stairways to hose off the nasty things that accumulate after a few months of baseball.

But no matter how many bad things I recall about Ray Winder Field, I can’t help but feel saddened by its demise. The place holds so many fond memories for me that it will always hold a special place in my heart, even if the former field is on its way to becoming a slab of asphalt.

There was the time myself and another intern managed to wrangle a stray cat and her kittens out of the storage area between the stands with nothing but an old batting practice net and a wand off the power washer. There was the time that the relief pitchers took to the mound with pick axes and shovels just hours after their complaints that the mound was too low fell on deaf ears (the opposing pitcher nearly broke his ankle on the first pitch of the game just a few hours later). There was the time when I was doing donuts in the parking lot in one of the “Clunker Car Night” giveaways so the battery would stay charged enough to take it out on the field.

All of the fond memories I have of the park and the people that I worked with cloud out all of the negatives about that summer (the heat, the long hours, the unabashed stupidity of some people).

In June of 2010, I got what would turn out to be my last chance to see Ray Winder Field thanks to a surprise birthday trip planned by my beautiful wife Mary to go see the Travelers play in their new stadium in North Little Rock. After being out of commission for four years at that time, the stadium was obviously rough. Weeds and grass grew where the ball diamond once was and much of the paint was faded on the billboards that dotted the outfield wall.

But there was still something special about the place. You could almost close your eyes and hear the crowd cheering for that big hit as it cleared the 30-foot “Screen Monster” in right field and bounced across I-630. You could see the joy on the faces of the millions of baseball fans who had set foot inside the park to watch the next big thing come to the plate.

And now it's gone, but not forgotten. Someday though, when Mary and I take our daughter Grace down to Arkansas to see the Travelers for the first time, I'll drive past where Ray Winder FIeld once stood and remember all of those sights, all of those sounds and all of those memories.