On a good day, I can hear one of the telltale sounds of spring just outside my office window. No, it’s not the melody of a meadowlark, or the honks of snow geese heading north on their spring migration, although for many South Dakotans both are indicative of winter’s end. For me, it’s the crack of a baseball off a wooden bat.

While South Dakota’s northern counties may still be under copious amounts of snow and water, the white stuff has all but disappeared in Yankton. Temperatures weren’t exactly springlike, but it was dry enough during the final week of March that both Yankton High School and Mount Marty College hosted baseball games at Riverside Field, just two blocks south of South Dakota Magazine’s historic headquarters.

It’s easy for people who grow up in South Dakota to develop an affinity for baseball. The game is in our roots. In our state’s formative years, it seems that almost as soon as a town popped up a baseball team soon followed. In 2013, we published a book called South Dakota 125. Meant to celebrate the state’s quasquicentennial in 2014, the book includes one photograph for every year since statehood that helps encapsulate life in South Dakota. Our photo for 1908 shows three men wearing baseball uniforms with “Philip” across the chest. The Haakon County town was barely a year old.

Growing up in Lake Norden, I had the entire history of baseball in South Dakota just two blocks from my house. The South Dakota Amateur Baseball Hall of Fame is our state’s repository for photos and artifacts that help tell the game’s rich history within our borders. I revisited the museum not long ago to search for a photo of Jim Abdnor, our former congressman and baseball coach from Kennebec. We ran a story on Abdnor in our November/December 2018 issue, but had trouble locating photographs. I remembered a picture I had seen on one of my many childhood visits to the Hall, but when I emailed a museum volunteer, she reported no such photo on display. Friends had the same vague memory of the Abdnor photo, so I arranged a trip back to Lake Norden. After about 30 minutes of digging on a Saturday morning, we rediscovered the photo, framed and mixed among a pile of other historic images in a storage closet.

With my mission complete, I thumbed through more historic photographs and perused the exhibits, reacquainting myself with our most treasured South Dakota baseball stories. I saw perhaps the most famous baseball in the state: the one Bill Prunty slugged out of the park in Aberdeen to win the 1938 state championship for Claremont. The game had been tied 4-4 through nine innings and darkness was descending upon the park, so umpire Tommy Collins said the game would be replayed the following day if neither team scored in the 10th inning. Aberdeen was held scoreless in the top of the inning. In the bottom, Prunty worked the count to 3-2 and then crushed a home run over the center field fence. The ball was recovered the next day and now resides in the Hall.

I’m sure the sound of the ball meeting Prunty’s bat brought despair for the Aberdeen faithful and jubilation for the entire town of Claremont. I wonder if anyone heard it from their office window?