Faced those guys a few times also. The were really good!
Please tell me that the U of I is still not granting contracts to Modern Piping
- Thread starter Jimmy McGill
- Start date
Very cool side discussion. Grew up traveling all over watching my dad play for Butt'r Top and then the Iowans. Idolized some of the names tossed around here. Dad absolutely loved playing the game with and against them.
I played in the old Hubbard Park league. Knew Pete a little from mutual friends & the NZ guys from hanging out at the local dive bars in SC. Good guys for sure & a sad history for fast pitch softball.
It would seem (?) you are referencing a State of Iowa Supreme Court opinion; my best interpretation of your posting. It would greatly help 'your readers' if you would post/attached a link to that decision. A reading of that court opinion would greatly help/inform all of your readers.
Wasn't there a guy from New Zealand who was an amazing pitcher? Mike white? Vigortone team from cr.All I know is they had excellent fast-pitch softball team in the 70's/80's!!
The first time I saw White he was playing in our travel league with Vigortone, 1982 or 83. Moved on to Penn Corp. He might have played for other teams in between. We never faced him again … thank god!
The best pitchers were a very well-paid group back in the 80's... guns for hire!
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Some were making 25k for the summer. Pretty good pay for the early 80’s.
There we go, I remember watching the Butt'r Topp teams playing back in the 1970s when I was a kid, but I wasn't too familiar with the Cedar Rapids teams mentioned earlier ITT. I also recall Reames Noodles having a pretty good squad at least for a time in that same era. It seemed like a pretty popular thing in those days, now I never hear anything much about it anymore.
I played for a team in Central Iowa in the late 90s, and the sport was waning then. I hit against Sandman a couple of times at Open State, and there were a few Kiwis still pitching up here at that time.
I think Sandman was playing for Quad Cities at the time? Joe Samoni might have been playing for them at that time as well?
We had a good drop ball pitcher named Dan Wakefield. He played for some really good teams. I think Toll House was one?
Mike White is talked about in earlier posts. I first faced Mike when he pitched for Bakersfield before he came to Iowa. Pretty sure Mike never pitched for Vigortone. Vigortone had Canadian Robbie Scheller. They then become Teleconnect and added Mike White and another Canadian who’s name escapes me.
I had read it that’s why I said he did not play for Vigortone. I was playing for Vigortone when I faced Mike in Bakersfield.
Sponsorship money was getting hard to come by. Not many teams could afford to pay to bring a pitcher over from NZ (where most the good pitchers came from) travel, etc just got to be too much. I think the growing popularity of slow pitch may have had a little impact but it was mostly $.
I think young people stopped playing, especially in small towns, and there was no pitching coming up.
When I played 25 years ago, most of the pitchers were in their late 30s, and early 40s. There were very few pitchers in their 20s.
When I was a kid in the 80s and early 90s when my brothers played; every stupid little town in the state had a team. By the late 90s, not many small towns had teams anymore.
It died off with the small towns themselves.
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He did play for Vigortone. They may have just picked him up. I talked to him at a softball clinic and he remembered playing in Muscatine while pitching for them!
You might be right. Vigortone became Teleconnect after I left and played for Aurora. I was thinking it was the year after I left that they became Teleconnect. Maybe they stayed Vigortone one more year. It was Teleconnect that won the ISC World Championship with Mike pitching. I can tell you this. I introduced Michael to Iowa pheasant hunting and he was hooked! Pheasant hunted with him often his first year in CR.
I went senile many years ago and those softball years were spent mostly in the bar when not on the field.
Was that Teleconnect team mostly an "All-Star" team for the ISC WC? Seems to me they took all the super talented players in the CR Major League to become Teleconnect. I may be misremembering though.
Had a friend that was a pitcher in HS baseball, then went and played/pitched in the CR Minor League. This was mid-80's, so leagues were drying up.
@Birky - I remember when the King and His Court rolled into Coralville and played the "Coralville All Stars" as part of their tour down at Edgewater Park. The CAS team consisted of a bunch of guys from the league that included teams from Hills, Tiffin, Oxford, CVille, North Liberty. All dink towns then with fast pitch softball teams. This would have been early to mid 70's.
I guess you could call it an “All Star” team. When a team has a sponsor to “buy” a world class pitcher other players are going to want to join the team. You could say all the top teams across the Midwest (Aurora, Decatur, Penn Corp, The Farm) all having pitchers from NZ were “All Star” teams. You are correct in that when Vigortone became Teleconnect they picked up a few players from other Major open teams.
$25000 to pitch...check
Housing...check
3-month vacation... check
Bedding as many American girls as possible...Priceless!
On a sidenote, I got paid nothing for my contribution of batting K's for the summer!!
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@jamesvanderwulf The coonrod crane was by to remove HVAC units from my building. I know, cool story bro.
I'm retired from crane shuttle duty, my buddy got his license back and actually quit drinking to boot. We get along well with Coonrod. They used us to set up their 500 ton crane to swing some electrical equipment at the new Tiffin substation. Takes 5-7 semis just to bring the counter weights for the 500T'er...
