The Enterprise- Article 7-07

If one were looking for the inaugural home game of the Lockport Sleepers baseball team, it may have been assumed they would be found on one of the many baseball diamonds in Dellwood Park in Lockport.

The Sleepers, a vintage baseball team, honors its 1850s style with an all-grass playing field lined on three sides by trees, off the main path of the blacktop road leading into the park.

“We want to keep it as close to vintage as possible,” said Mark Harmon, Director of the Gaylord Building Historic Site. “In the 1850s, there would not have been nice, manicured fields with back stops. The fields they played on would have been much like what we had.”

Harmon, the team founder, plays for The Sleepers on road games and serves as umpire at home.

In vintage baseball, the umpire primarily calls batted balls fair or foul and determines if a batter, or striker as they were called, is safe or out.

There are no called balls or strikes. The striker has a chance to hit the ball, which is pitched underhand, or can strike out with three missed swings.

The Sleepers did not miss much, racking up double-digit hits in a 14-1 win of the Elk Grove Village Bucks Saturday.

The team, in its first year of existence, gets it name from an historic baseball record.

Harmon said that according to a book titled, “Baseball in Old Chicago,” written in 1939, there is an article from the Lockport Telegraph Newspaper on August 6, 1851 that talked about a baseball game between the Joliet Hunkidoris and the Lockport Sleepers.

Harmon said, according to the book, that is the oldest account of baseball in the state of Illinois.

“With so many old newspapers not around any more or poor records kept back then, there could have been earlier baseball,” Harmon said.

The name Sleepers comes from the definition of a sleeper as a “surprise success.”

The uniforms the Sleepers wear are modeled after tow different uniforms from 1850s teams in New York – the Knickerbockers and the Mutuals.

Harmon obtained photos from the American Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum and chose parts from both samples.

As for the players on the Sleepers, they come from all over the area, including one from Plainfield, Jeff Turnbull, or “Specs” as he is known by his teammates.

In the home opener, Specs was the second baseman, or basetender, and was the second striker in the lineup. For Turnbull, he first found out about the league in an ad in The Enterprise.

“I saw it in a notice in The Enterprise that they were having an informational meeting last fall,” he said. “I thought it would be interesting so I attended.”

Turnbull played high school ball for Urbana High School in his home town of Urbana, Illinois and then for a year at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois.

“The different rules and vintage aspect of the game were interesting,” he said. “Some of the teams we have played put on one heck of a show.”

“It is all about having a good time and not really being that competitive. We are here to win, don’t get me wrong, but not over having fun.”

“That ‘out-for-blood’ attitude is frowned upon in vintage baseball,” Harmon said. “We play a gentlemen’s game.”

Turnbull’s wife, Kim, and daughters, 9-year-old Lauren and 11-year-old Emma, were on hand at the home opener.

“It is fun. It is faster than a regular game and it is interesting to see the rules,” Kim said. “The girls love it. They love to watch him and cheer and learn the old sayings.”

“We have players as young as 20 and some a bit older than me,” said 37-year-old Turnbull. “It has been a while since I have played and I feel that after every game. We have some really good athletes and some guys just out here having fun.”

This site was developed by Canal Corridor Association, manager of the Gaylord Building, with generous financial support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Interpretation and Education Fund of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.