WICHITA, Kan. — There are three things that are most difficult about baseball. One: your teammates. Two: your coaches. Three: the ball.

If you don’t really know how to play, as a child, you have to decide why you’re there, and the reasons that works out will determine whether you ever play the game again.

When you live in Kansas, the ceiling of achievement is decidedly high in sports. Have a large group of players come through the state to excel at every level, up to and including guys who have hit homers that won the World Series? That’s no joke. Just ask Mitchell Steven Williams. During Game 6 of the 1993 World Series, the then-Philadelphia Phillies closer threw a fastball to Toronto Blue Jays star Joe Carter, who hit a walk-off, Series-clinching home run. Williams learned the hard way that you can’t just throw a bunch of meatballs and expect to win a title in the big leagues.

Carter taught him that lesson in Toronto on Oct. 23, 1993. Carter, who played at Wichita State, learned a lot of his baseball at the amateur level on the plains of Segdwick County. He is credited for putting Wichita State baseball on the map. His likeness is now on the wall in the Kansas Baseball Hall of Fame as one of the ballplayers who came through Shocker Nation and established a form that still resonates.

Back across town, where a burgundy Chevy Blazer is sitting on blocks in an industrial park, it’s unlikely that any parent who pays $30 to be a part of League 42 at McAdams Park, the creation of a longtime local journalist, is remotely concerned about anything other than what’s happening with their kids.

Canadian MLB teams are not on the brain. Jack Roosevelt Robinson, on the other hand, absolutely is.

On this hot and dusty Saturday morning, Bob Lutz, League 42 executive director, is sitting between fields, watching different age groups play exhibition games, before their season begins in earnest. What is not there is the statue of Jackie Robinson that was stolen Jan. 25 by vandals who left nothing but the feet.

After the games, a ceremony to reflect on Robinson’s impact was held, with children showing artwork and reflecting on what Robinson meant to them as players. Morale is relatively high at the event, even if the centerpiece of their location is no longer there.

“We’re now nearly three months from that very dark day, and I want to assure everyone that with the help of many people, we are making the best of a bad situation,” Lutz said over the public address system to the gathering of about 150 kids and parents. “I’m sorry if I’m a little on edge about Jackie Robinson. This has been a difficult time for our league. As I said, so many people have stepped up to help lead in the wake of this theft.”

“I think it triggered some trauma that Black people have, how it was found burnt and cut up in pieces. No, there’s been too many crimes on Black bodies and that’s what that reminded me of. So it wasn’t just like somebody stole a statue, it was more than that because it’s like Jackie Robinson.” – Ellamonique Baccus

All throughout the day, local artist and art therapist Ellamonique Baccus was crisscrossing the grounds, asking kids if they wanted to write down their feelings about Robinson and baseball as part of a new exhibit that will exist as a sort of a part-art, part-security measure for the new statue. It’s her art that adorns the protective walls of the plaza, based on the book Jackie’s Nine: Jackie Robinson’s Values to Live By written by Robinson’s daughter Sharon in 2001.

“I wanted them to have the opportunity to respond in a constructive way and not a destructive way. And a lot of times we don’t listen to children and so it was important for their voice to be heard,” Baccus said. She moved to Wichita from Chicago with her husband and daughter. “The kids all wrote statements about what they thought was important and then these statements are going to be made into permanent sculptures that are also going to protect the sculpture from future vandalism. So, they’ll have bollards to keep people from being able to drive up, but their words will be permanently a part of that work.”

It’s a tricky situation for many Wichitans, because while they don’t want to believe that the reasoning for someone destroying the statue was outright racism, someone trying to deface the image and likeness of an American hero like Robinson stings in such a specific way. One of those instances where you feel like whether this was racially motivated doesn’t matter, compared to the general belief that you just wouldn’t do this to a non-Black person.

I saw five other bronze statues alone on a casual stroll through the Old Town district. And they all looked like — were a thief to want to get to them to be scrapped for money — they would be far easier to take.

“It was very emotional because it wasn’t just stealing a physical thing. It would seem really violent. And I think it triggered some trauma that Black people have, how it was found burnt and cut up in pieces,” Baccus said with a grimace. “No, there’s been too many crimes on Black bodies and that’s what that reminded me of. So it wasn’t just like somebody stole a statue, it was more than that because it’s like, Jackie Robinson. If somebody could do something against somebody who was as great as that — his memory, his legacy — that’s pretty bold. But how the sculpture was treated even when it was found was just, it is like a trigger, some type of traumatic memory thing I think.”

Wichita is a bedroom community with a small town feel even though a lot of people live there. But it’s no stranger to making history in terms of race relations in America. Not remotely.

If you’re standing on the corner of South Broadway and Douglas Avenue, you might think you were in a scene from the 2002 Tom Hanks film Road to Perdition, set in the Midwest during the Great Depression. Buildings are old and tallish, but few people walk the streets. Vibrant is not a word that comes to mind.

There is a plaque on the side of a building halfway down the block headed toward South Topeka Street. It reads “Kansas Preservation Alliance. Award for Excellence.” If you walk in through the door of the hotel on the corner, past the elevators to where a set of stairs under a pharmacy sign randomly appears in the corner, you’ll eventually get to a wooden door at the bottom. There, after three knocks, it opens into a speakeasy that’s named after arguably the most forgotten moment in Black American history.

The pharmacy sign is no coincidence. On the first floor of that hotel once stood Dockum Drug Store, the location of the first organized sit-in in the country. A group of young folks from the local NAACP chapter decided that enough was enough, and conducted a sit-in at the drugstore for three weeks in July 1958 to protest its policy of selling food to Black patrons only as to-go options. This was different from other protests that had occurred on college campuses in California.

This was in public. In the heart of downtown. In the middle of the summer.

The sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, happened two years later to far more fanfare. The protesters are known as the Greensboro Four. The Woolworth store that was location of the sit-in is now the showpiece of the International Civil Rights Center and Museum. I’ve been there. It’s an extremely powerful experience, complete with things like a Coke machine on two sides of a wall in which one side charges 5 cents for a soda, and the other side double that.

In Wichita, there’s a bar. And if you didn’t have any idea, you might come and go and still not know. There is only one picture of what happened that summer in Wichita and some of the participants are still alive. Their grandchildren regularly eat at the restaurant at the old Dockum site to celebrate the anniversary of the event. But that’s it.

In her book Dissent in Wichita: The Civil Rights Movement in the Midwest, 1954-72, Gretchen Cassel Eick highlights how beefing between different movements basically kept a historical moment from reaching the light of day:

The day before the sit-in was to begin, Prentice Lewis and his predecessor as president of the Wichita branch of the NAACP, Carol Parks’ mother Vivian sent a telegram to the national NAACP staff informing them of the plan. Alarmed, Herb Wright, the youth secretary, wired back opposition to direct action. “These are not NAACP tactics,” Wright said. Vivian Parks then telephoned Gloster Current, the national director of branches and Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the NAACP. They both told her they would not give approval for the sit-in.

The organization didn’t acknowledge the protest as the first youth-led lunch counter sit-in of the civil rights movement publicly until decades later: 2006.

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Sharon Collins is sitting in the lobby of the Kansas African American Museum, an old church that’s was converted to a space to remember our history in town. She works at the front desk basically as something to do now that she’s retired.

As it were, the history of Black folks standing tall (or sitting down) isn’t just limited to food counters and park monuments.

“Everybody always says, ‘what do you do in Wichita?’ We used to be called the airplane manufacturing capital of the world because of Boeing. So that attracted a lot of people from like 40, 50, 60 years ago,” Collins said. “A lot of blacks worked for the plants.

“This has been here 107 years. Used to be Calvary Baptist Church. It was torn down the first time because the fire department said it didn’t meet code, and so Doris Kurt Larkins, who was a civil activist, when they came to tear it down the second time, they rebuilt it and she stood out there and said, ‘no, you’re not tearing it down,’ and they didn’t. Her picture is on the wall.”

Which is what most of it is, for the most part: a bunch of pictures on the walls of things that might shock you if you weren’t intimately familiar with a certain part of American history. One poster advertises a Klan State Parade, featuring 50,000 Klansmen and 500 robed horses and a discount for families.

There’s also a clipping of a newspaper article from 1925, headlining just about the wildest baseball game you’ll ever hear of. ONLY BASEBALL ON TAP AT ISLAND PARK: Klan and Colored Team Mix on the Diamond Today — as if it were reasonable that they might just come to blows instead or including, if time allowed. Wichita Klan Number 6 versus the Wichita Monrovians.

The Klan lost, the game happened without incident and the one thing the teams could agree on is that the umpires should be Irish. Must have been a rough evening at the old Lodge No. 6 for hooded dudes. Pretty hard to catch a flyball with a white sheet covering your face, I’d imagine. In all seriousness, from 1927 to 1962, Boeing produced 15,000 aircraft at Wichita. By 2012, most of their operations had been sold off or shut down. It shows in town, which is why things like scrapping metal are popular antics for people desperate for cash. Wichita’s history is as American as any town, which is why a guy like Lutz himself is an incredible inspiration and unique individual.

Before planes were built on the plains, plenty of Black folks flocked to Wichita, to escape the brutal world of the American South. Before that, Africans came to what is now modern-day Kansas with Spanish conquistadors. Because of reasonably progressive politics, Black folks of all walks of life have been coming to the Sunflower State.

While not exactly a major league town in terms of sports teams, the Wichita State Shockers are basically the center of the sporting world, having made the College World Series seven times. But Wichita’s pro baseball history is a specifically fascinating one. For years, the town featured multiple industrial teams that would play each other, and had squads of guys who liked to play.

A throwback of a concept, just playing with locals in front of big crowds, was once quite popular. Perhaps not quite Savannah Bananas-level of showmanship, but gimmicks were certainly used as a way to get butts in the seats. But officially, the National Baseball Congress World Series, which is held in the town, was the kind of homespun fun that makes places like Wichita great. The summer semi-pro tournament specifically focused on an integrated vibe, long before Robinson got to the Brooklyn dodgers. Teams had names such as the Colored Devils and the Mexican Midgets.

But by the time Lutz got to becoming the legendary sportswriter he was at the Wichita Eagle, it was obvious to him how obvious the problem with Black kids playing baseball had become. When he first told some colleagues about the idea, some folks thought he was crazy. Basically giving up his retirement years to run a baseball league in a part of town that many drove through in a rush to get through.

“It’s an opportunity to promote baseball in Wichita for people that maybe wouldn’t have had an opportunity,” Brent Kemnitz, assistant athletic director for outreach and staff development at Wichita State, said April 13, before the ceremony. Kemnitz was Wichita State’s pitching coach for decades. “You get into the travel teams and you get in all the things a lot of people see are necessary to keep playing. It’s extremely expensive. This is an opportunity to get people to play. I’m going to still call it the national pastime. I can’t say enough about it.”

It seems extremely basic, but when you look at youth sports — baseball specifically — everything is showcase this, select that, all-star whatever. The idea of kids just playing to have fun and have a sense of community is so far gone in so many places that the sight of kids who aren’t worrying about their velo or spin rate is a delightful relief.

The commodification is honestly pretty gross when things like U8 “All-American teams” start showing up in Instagram feeds. There is no world in which a kid that young needs to be thinking about national top-25 rankings. Some kids just want and need some fun team building activities, physical exercise and confidence improvement. That’s the level League 42 is operating at.

Across the street from the site of the stolen statue is the Leslie Rudd Learning Center. There, kids can come hang out after school and participate in its enrichment programs or practice at its top-tier indoor facility, which rivals that of any college program I’ve ever seen, including the one across town where Kemnitz works.

“I love the game. It’s interesting to watch, but I’ve never been a sports player, but the kids are awesome,” Chitra Harris, League 42’s educational director, said. She is setting up a mini memorial bouquet made up of metal bats, a catcher’s mitt and a flower before the games. “So, I love watching these kids play. I love all of these people. Baseball people are really cool. Bob is giving back so much to these kids and I think it’s a very nice game that helps people realize how important sportsmanship is, right? Yeah. That’s the best part.”

“It’s important to remember that he [Jackie Robinson] not only carried the enormous burden of racial hatred when he joined Brooklyn, but he also shouldered the weight of the hopes and aspirations of an entire race of people.”

— Bob Kendrick, president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum

The theft of the statue baffled the community and didn’t do any favors for Lutz’s faith in his hometown. But the message of Robinson’s resiliency kept him going. The coaches in the league are basically just dads or friends of coaches that Lutz has met over the years as a sportswriter. It’s not much more complicated than that. No rapsodo machines, no Game Changer apps, none of the typical trappings of a game that has been taken over by parents who want measurables at all times and get thrown out of games for arguing with umpires.

To sign a kid up to play, you have to show up in person. No online registration. Lutz believes in the value of face-to-face interactions. They capped the number of kids in the program at 600 because this isn’t a money grab, it’s about quality of experience. Rumor has it that Lutz still remembers every kid’s name every year and he says he’d rather give the people who stole his statue a job with his program than have them rotting in jail.

The numbers are what they are. MLB donated $100,000 for the statue. Other entities have chipped in and they’ve got close to half a million dollars in extra cash.

“I had no hesitation in accepting the cleats because I firmly believe that they represent an opportunity to give our guests an opportunity to imagine what it was like to walk in Jackie’s shoes,” Bob Kendrick, president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum said. The museum accepted the leftover cleats as part of a new Robinson exhibit it is going to create about artifacts related to him that have been damaged. “It’s important to remember that he not only carried the enormous burden of racial hatred when he joined Brooklyn, but he also shouldered the weight of the hopes and aspirations of an entire race of people.”

“It’s just every time I come out here, it just feels right. And I say that every time I come see Bob [Lutz], and Bob’s a longtime friend, but when I walk in this League 42 — just the feel of it, it’s still roots baseball and an opportunity for young guys to get involved in a worthwhile way doing something they may not initially love, but hopefully learned to love with baseball,” Kemnitz said. “He started League 42 from humble beginnings, and I don’t even think Bob thought it would get as big as it is.”

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A true throwback feel, the experience brought this sportswriter to tears. Playing for the love of the game is such a rarity at this level that it almost felt like watching a movie: seeing an 11-year-old kid in a Yo! MTV Raps T-shirt playing shortstop and a kid named Atticus on the mound. Will they play in high school? Maybe. Will they ever forget where they started? How could you?

Before the first game of the day, one of the younger teams huddled up with its coach, Dominick, a 43-year-old city native whose neighbor was a coach and needed help. He qualifies the extent of his knowledge of the game as “knowing the rules,” which is all you need sometimes.

When he brought his team’s hands in for the chant before taking the field, the kids were clearly focused, motivated and happy.

Coach: “Who are we?”

Kids: “The Aces!”

Coach: “What are the Aces?”

Kids: “Family!”

Coach: “What does family do?”

Kids: “TAKE CARE OF EACH OTHER!”

Which is exactly what Wichita did for Lutz when he needed it most.