Legion Baseball
Post 162 at Midseason: Better Than They Were, and Still a Light Short
The Legion nine has climbed to .500 as the bats come around — playing, as ever, beneath the one tower that still works.
MISQUAH — The Misquah Post 162 Legion baseball team has reached the midpoint of its season at an even .500, a record manager Sonny Dahl called “about right, and a good deal better than we looked in May,” as the team’s bats have come around and its roster, in Dahl’s phrase, “started to resemble a ballclub instead of a list of names I read off a clipboard.”
The improvement has been driven by the long-awaited awakening of the offense, which spent the season’s first weeks leaving catcher Ben Aune to drive in nearly every run by himself. “For a while there Ben was the whole lineup,” Dahl said. “Now we’ve got four or five fellas hitting, which means Ben can go back to just being a catcher, which is what he is. You can’t win a ballgame with one man batting. We spent May proving it.”
On the mound, Cody Lindholm has settled into the role of staff ace, his early-season struggles — which he attributed, memorably and at length, to the wind — having given way to a stretch of genuinely strong outings. Asked whether the wind had improved or he had, Lindholm allowed that it “might be a little of both,” which Dahl pronounced “the most growth I’ve gotten out of that kid all summer, and I’m including the curveball.”
The team continues to play its home games beneath a single working light tower, the others having gone dark over the years and their repair — estimated at roughly $7,400 for the next one alone — remaining on a Legion to-do list the post diligently maintains and conspicuously does not act upon. “The boys can see the ball. Mostly,” Dahl said. “It builds character, it saves on the electric bill, and one of these years we’ll fix it, same as the stop sign, and probably the same week.”
Post 162 plays through July and into August. Dahl, pressed for a midseason verdict, offered the closest thing to optimism his position permits: “We’re not embarrassing anybody. We may win a few more than we lose. For a club that had three practices in May, I’ll take it — and I won’t say it too loud, in case the baseball gods are listening, which in my experience they always are.”