Carl and Pigpen

 From the desk of an old baseball player

It's now 2024...and Carl and Pigpen are a bit older...and still swinging

Rarely do I write about myself when I'm whaling away on my laptop. Most of the time, I'm happy writing about others, and I'm satisfied with the fact I have an idea in my head and can string enough words together to post yet another story about my favorite sport: baseball. After all, I have plenty of characters on the 60-and-over Tucson Old Timers to write about.

Today's post will be a little different. I'll entitle this offering: Carl and Pigpen, or should I call it: The Baseball Junkies?  Carl is Carl Schwanbeck, and Pigpen, of course, is yours truly. 

This story begins long ago, in the 1960s, when you could buy a Rawlings baseball mitt for less than twenty bucks.

And now, for the rest of the story...

Carl Schwanbeck, 74, and Danny "Pigpen" Price, 75, are baseball junkies. These two codgers have been around the game of baseball since both were knee-high to a grasshopper in height and had barely enough meat on their bones to keep from being blown away by a tumbling tumbleweed.

They both ended up in Arizona and know the difference between a dust devil and a tumbleweed.

Let's start with Carl. He bounced around as a young fella. Talk about baseball; Carl was born in Williamsport, Pa. -- the land of the Little League World Series. "I didn't even like baseball then," Carl recalls. "I was probably the worst player and always sat at the end of the bench."

Things changed for little Carl as he ended up in Marietta, Georgia, about 20 miles northwest of Atlanta, where he started to pick up the game of baseball. When he moved to Monroeville, Ohio, Carl had become good enough to play high school ball. Somewhere along the way, he picked up a first baseman's mitt. "I even hit a home run in a regional game," Carl said. "The opposing pitcher had struck out 15 of us, but we still won the game, and I got my homer."

Next stop: Kent State. He passed on playing baseball at Kent State but did get his degree. This was in 1968, and the starting battery for Kent State was Steve Stone and Thurman Munson. That alone convinced Carl that maybe he wasn't quite ready for a college baseball career.

Fast forward to Tucson, and after many years of service at Raytheon, Carl retired from the workforce and found his way to the Tucson Men's Senior Baseball League. By 2011, now a somewhat tall and experienced lefty first baseman, Carl, now in his mid-60s, had made a name for himself and played on many Tucson MSBL teams -- 18-and-over, in some cases, all the way up to 38-and-over and 45-and-over. In 2015, the league honored Carl by inducting him into the Tucson MSBL Hall of Fame.

Now at 74 (he just turned 74 on Halloween), Carl has become a "semi-rookie" on the 60-and-over Tucson Old Timers. He has yet to join the club but unofficially has a few games under his belt.

"My heart is still with the Tucson MSBL," Carl said. "It works for me. I'm the oldest in the league, but my manager Rick (Bitzer, 65, a TOTS rookie and now a club member) understands that, and I'm comfortable with my role on the club."

When you're a Tucson MSBL Hall of Famer and can still play the game. Why not?

"I have some eyesight issues and the normal aches and pains, but I can still play," says Schwanbeck.

The COVID-19 virus has done a number on the TOTS and the Tucson MSBL (see above). The TOTS have continued playing this year, missing only the month of March and a few weeks in April, but the Tucson MSBL has canceled many of their games at Reid Park, while many of the teams elected to wait until the spring of 2021 to start back up. Hence, the reason the TOTS has picked up Bitzer on its roster and also has Schwanbeck, the baseball junkie, hanging around.

We'll get back to Schwanbeck and the Tucson MSBL in a minute (or maybe in 30 minutes, depending on how tired my fingers get and how my back holds out in this office chair), but let's switch gears and talk about this Pigpen fella for a moment.

This guy was a career .250 hitter in college and now, at 75, is in a slump. "I can't hit my way out of paper bag right now," Pigpen adds.

"But back in the day," Pigpen recalls. I wasn't too bad."

After "having trouble with the curve" in high school at Tucson Catalina (Class of 1963), Pigpen received a sports writing gig as the sports publicist at Eastern Arizona College in Thatcher.

"In 1965, I made the college baseball team and played second base," Price said. "My only claim to fame: We played a doubleheader at home against the Arizona State "Freshmen" Sun Devils. We were called the Gila Monsters, but we won't go there. After all, Scottsdale Community College, one of our opponents, was called the Artichokes, for goodness sake.

"At any rate, I'm at second in the second game of a doubleheader, two outs, and a young speed demon on first base for ASU named Reggie Jackson. He runs. Our catcher, Cliff Martin, who went on to a long coaching career at a high school in Paradise Valley, just outside the downtown Phoenix area, made a beautiful throw on the money. Jackson, barely 19 years old at the time, begins his slide with spikes high in the air and, of course, spikes the heck out of me, and I drop the ball....end of the story," said  Pigpen.

As for Pigpen, after a 30-year career in the airline industry, he became a sportswriter in the Phoenix area from 1990 to 2001. He managed to play his share of fast-pitch softball in Utah, Nebraska, and finally in Phoenix and Tucson.

In 1997, Pigpen hooked up with Carl Schwanbeck for the first time. Both baseball junkies were members of the 1997 National Senior Olympics team, which beat a Maryland team in the championship game at Hi Corbett Field. Carl was the first-sacker, Pigpen at second base, and the shortstop was Bud Warnke, another Tucson MSBL Hall of Famer and the baseball coach at Tucson Amphitheater High School.

And here we are 23 years later and counting. The baseball junkies and we are still at it.

The Tucson area is full of players who have played in the Tucson MSBL since 1989. Many are in the Hall of Fame, and many play for the 60-and-over Old Pueblo Club at Santa Rita Park, and a few have played for the 60-and-over Arizona Rattlers at Mission Manor Park. At Udall Park, where the TOTS and the 60-and-over Tucson Aces play, Ernesto "Doc" Escala, now 68, pitches for the TOTS and was inducted into the Tucson MSBL Hall of Fame in 2008.

In fact, it's easy to connect the dots with the best ball players of the past with the Tucson MSBL Hall of Famers. Men like Gary Williams, Jim "Cowboy" Grace, Joe Jimenez, Herb McReynolds, Mark Sewell, Mark Stevens, Jim Stone, Charlie Riesgo, Don Holp, Steve Badart, Robin Badart, Mike Gray, Vic Acuna and Ted Abel.

And the list goes on...

Jesus Felix, Arnold Mares, Jose Pico, Jim Baugher, Lou Russo, Gasper Limon and Dave Bies.

I'm sorry. I'm sure I should have included a few more. But chances are Schwanbeck and Pigpen Price have played for or against many of them.

Take, for instance, Dave "Diamond" Bies, who played for 23 years in the Tucson MSBL and passed away in 2017 at the age of 53. According to Schwanbeck, who knew Bies since the first day he joined the league. "Dave was well-liked. I enjoyed the traditional "hand slap" at the end of the game, and he always had something friendly to say," Carl added.

Many of the Hall of Famers are legends; some are still out there putting on their spikes, grabbing their gloves, and heading back on the field.

Which brings us back to those two baseball junkies again. Wouldn't you know it, but Carl and Pigpen met again in 2012. Price played, alongside his 48-year-old son, Michael, on Robin Badart's Blackbirds, while Carl was with the Phillies in the Tucson MSBL.

Until then, Carl was the oldest player in the league. Pigpen, in 2012, took over the role as the most senior, at least for a few months. "It wasn't for long," Price recalls. "I was taken out at second base at mid-season by a 40-year-old runner, much like the young Jackson speedster who did the same in 1965."

So where do the two baseball junkies go from here? They both showed up at Udall Park yesterday morning and threw the ball around.

There's plenty of baseball left in Carl and Pigpen (see photos below).

Photos: Carl Schwanbeck (top photo) 1. Swinging for the fences in 1997 at the National Senior Olympics (next image), 2. taking a healthy cut with the Cubs in a Tucson MSBL game, 3. Carl, in the center with the Hall of Fame Award in 2015, and the bottom photo of Pigpen Price and his son, Michael, in 2012 before a Tucson MSBL game.