No matter how the kids do at the Cooperstown Dreams Park tournament, they won’t go home empty-handed. Far from it, actually.
And, no, this is not one of those “every player gets a trophy” situations. With this tournament, it sounds like everything that isn’t nailed down is fair game.
Game jerseys, jackets, warm-up tops, fence-clearing baseballs, baseball bats, caps, socks, Under Armour gear and — if you’re lucky — championship rings are all some of the things that the boys get to bring home. I would have included Garrett Gould’s favorite doughnuts, but it sounds like those don’t even last for five minutes at a time.
Perhaps the coolest things, though, are the tiniest of details: the little, team-specific pins that every kid gets once they get to Cooperstown.
The Florida Rawlings pin is simple, yet still pretty neat: In addition to the team logo and a little, dangling glove, it has baseballs inlaid with the jersey number of every player on the team.
Maybe you’re thinking, “So what? It’s just a pin. You can get a heck of a lot more mileage out of one of those bats, and other stuff is way cooler.” I get it — maybe you’re onto something. But it’s not so much the pins themselves that are cool — it’s what you do with them.
And if you’re playing in the Dreams Park Tournament, you’re trying to collect as many of those suckers as you can.
There’s a lot of work to be done there, because it requires meeting at least one player from all or most of the 104 teams that file through Cooperstown for this tournament. They end up meeting so many kids with similar interests that they don’t want it to end or even think about getting Pin No. 104 and leaving.
“The kids, when they get there, most of them don’t want to leave,” Tim Dowdy says. “Parents come and get them sometimes, but the kids don’t want to leave. They trade pins and make friends and text back and forth.”
Even the umpires get in on this. They’re also given their own pins and, when two kids from each team meet them at the plate before games, they swap pins.
Maybe the kids aren’t so focused on collecting as many umpires’ pins as they can, but the quest for 104 is serious business. Everyone is given a list of all 104 teams and pins upon arrival, so it’s almost like a scavenger hunt. And, if someone’s unable to get a pin in person, they’ll be able to pull off some trades to get what they need.
Just ask Tyler Dowdy, who managed to leave Cooperstown last year with all 104 pins — an accomplishment of which he is quite proud.
“You’re welcome,” Garrett Gould quips.
To get to 104, Dowdy and Gould had to pull off a last-minute trade: As they describe it, Gould giving up the “best pin” for the “worst pin.”
“I did it so that he could have all of them,” Gould says.
Even with a trade, rounding up all of the team pins is an impressive feat. Dowdy still has them but hasn’t done anything with them yet. His plan is to get a shadowbox and make a memento at some point soon.
“We’re going to build a frame and put them all in there,” he says. “And the ball from a home run I hit last year, and we all got bats.”
It’s one thing to have a 104-pin collection on display, but 208? That could be even better.
— Justin Kline