This Prince of a home-run slugger
once blasted 'em out of Farms fields

Former Grosse Pointer Prince Fielder won the Home Run Derby the night before the annual Major League Baseball All-Star Game. He also got to shake President Barack Obama’s hand the next day. One of his home run shots, described in the media as "jaw-dropping," was a blast to right-center estimated at 503 feet.

In 2007 Fielder was the youngest player in major league history to hit 50 home runs. He was 23.

Home runs are nothing new for the Milwaukee Brewers first baseman, who lived for several years in the Farms while his dad, Cecil, played the same position for the Detroit Tigers.

Fielder has been poling long balls over fences since his days in the Grosse Pointe Little Leagues. My son, James, 26, who now plays for Microsoft in the X-Box games marketing division in Seattle, says perhaps his claim to fame will be that he once pitched to Prince Fielder in Little League and Prince didn’t hit a home run.

My fading memories of that experience, when I was manager of a Triple-A Little League team striving to make the playoffs at Elworthy Field, reminds me of the only time I ever asked a Little League pitcher to issue a walk.

Our team, I think it was the Yankees, was up by a run in the bottom of the seventh inning. There were two outs and the opposing team had runners at first and third. Prince, who was younger by a couple of years than most Triple-A ballplayers, but twice the size of some of my athletes, had already established a reputation for hitting long balls–at age 9.

The crowd tensed as he strode to the plate. (Can a 9-year-old stride? Probably not.) I called time out, summoned my pitcher over and got down on one knee on the sideline so I could look him in the eyes. “Can you deliberately walk him?” I asked. That was a fair question because while AAA Little League pitchers issue a lot of bases on balls, most are accidental. The trick was to do it deliberately without throwing the ball anywhere near Prince, but also not out of the catcher’s reach, allowing a runner to score. My pitcher said, “Sure.”

His first pitch was six feet wide of the plate, but the catcher fielded it. The opposing manager called time out and protested to the umpire that we were deliberately walking the young giant. The umpire said he knew of no rule banning intentional passes.

Four pitches and Fielder trotted down to first. The next batter dribbled a ground ball to the second baseman, who stepped on the bag. The game was over and we were in the playoffs. I can’t say that I’m proud that we didn’t let Prince hit, but my tiny team members were sure happy. Most remember that game with varying facts to this day. I ran into one recently who recalled that we had advanced and won the AAA championship that year. We didn’t, but I didn’t disabuse him of the fond recollection.

After his Home Run Derby win, the media quoted Fielder as saying: “I’m just happy. It was pretty cool to actually win one,” before Fielder explained his hitting philosophy. “I’m not quite sure about my mechanics. I just know I have to swing hard. In high school a lot of people told me to swing easier and everything, but I just don't know how to do that."

And that may explain best why we walked Prince Fielder in AAA Little League years ago.

TV Stars

Woods resident Tim Kiska, author of the recently published “A Newscast for the Masses,” was at the Detroit Historical Museum Saturday (July 18) to discuss the early days of television in Detroit with longtime WXYZ-TV anchor Bill Bonds.

It was all part of “Detroit’s Class TV Personalities” Weekend at the museum, where admission is free this month.  John Kelly and Marilyn Turner, WXYZ’s hosts for “Kelly & Co.," were also on for a museum presentation. Kiska says that “Kelly & Co.” was the last locally produced afternoon talk show in the nation.

Kiska, who does triple duty–as a television historian, as director of the U of M-Dearborn journalism program and as a news producer for WWJ radio–has a thousand stories to tell. And even though he has a history PhD in History from Wayne State, he talks the same way he wrote for decades in The Detroit News and the Free Press.  

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