If this week’s All-Star FanFest boasts the world’s biggest baseball, that’s news to Jeff Hanson.
He has a dream to revive his small town in Kansas, and it involves a giant baseball of his own — built from the tank of Muscotah’s old water tower and turned into a museum.
Hanson didn’t know about the record-holder, MLB’s 121/2-foot baseball, and grew thoughtful when it was described to him.
“Well,” he said. “Ours is 20 feet.”
Major League Baseball officials, for their part, didn’t know about Hanson either, and say they never really considered the idea of someone building a bigger baseball.
...It was Hanson’s idea to turn the enormous metal orb that now sits in his front yard into a baseball and the only museum created in honor of Joe Tinker, a native son of Muscotah and a Chicago Cubs Hall of Famer. The connection to Tinker is one of Muscotah’s very few claims to fame, and Hanson hopes to capitalize on it and bring people and dollars into a town that has seen little of either in recent years.
Jeff Hanson understands the American mania of baseball, although he admits he is not a baseball fan and has little interest in the coming week’s All-Star festivities in Kansas City.
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1. RoyalsRetro (AG#1F) Posted: July 08, 2012 at 12:18 PM (#4176081)EDIT: Hang on a sec, AG: Isn't Muscotah north-north-east of Topeka and only 60 miles from MCI? How is that considered "Western Kansas?" Or are you just behaving like older New Yorkers who refer to Scarsdale as "upstate" and Port Jervis "the country?"
One of my uncles was born in Elsmore - population 77.
Exactly. Just look at the congressional districts.
Hehehe. Not quite. According to that map, Muscotah is in the 2nd CD.
I always joke that, to people from NYC or Long Island, "Upstate New York" begins at the sign that reads "Welcome to Yonkers".
All that would require is someone who thinks outside the box; someone willing to undergo a little road trip, to do what it takes to acquire the item in question, wrap it up in a giant 3-legged cow skin, or twelve, and then do some extra stitching. Not that I'm encouraging anything, but that all sounds like a very Kansas kind of thing.
It has to be at least... three times as big!
The only reason I opened this thread was to make that joke... and I was too late.
I'm from Long Island, and that statement is a completely true non-joke.
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