Buck O’Neil said this in Ken Burns’s Documentary: “Baseball brings you back. I’m 81, but it makes me feel 15 again, when I’m talking baseball, watching baseball.”

Baseball has changed, along with everything else in our lives. We don’t have flying cars, thanks for getting our hopes up Marty McFly, but we have a torrent of information in our lives, and instant access to any bit of information at a moments notice. With a touch of a finger on some gorilla glass, we can tell our friends the name of the album Joe Pesci recorded, what it takes to make Chicken Spaghetti, and diagnose ourselves before we visit the doctor. The haste in which we can do things increases the speed with which we live our lives, and changes the way we take in things around us. Our minds really race as all of this information comes onto our phones by way of the notification. The iPhone always asks us if we want to turn on notifications–a sort of automatic way to live, but one that is quite heavy with the burden of needing to keep up.

Today’s game of baseball is not immune to this information overload that we experience in our daily life. Inundation at the ball game–I went to a Charlotte Knights game and the scoreboard not only showed Yoan Moncada’s batting average, but showed how to eliminate bugs and rodents out of my crawl space. The trivia question was sponsored by a company that helps a fan mortgage their house, and believe me, they wouldn’t let you forget it. Watching a baseball game live on TV comes with a commercial any chance they can get. A pitching change is followed by a commercial, always. Even when Bruce Bochy is replacing his pitcher with every single batter, you get an advertisement for toilet tissue or erectile dysfunction resolutions. That, believe me, is too much information.

I do live in Charlotte, NC., where the Triple-A White Sox affiliate Charlotte Knights play. They have a nice stadium and there isn’t a bad seat in the house. The stadium is in the middle of uptown (they don’t call it downtown here, something about a river, but I can’t remember) and it’s good ball to watch. After going to a few games, I discovered that there was another White Sox affiliate that played in Kannapolis, NC. They are called the Intimidators, named after local hero and Nascar legend Dale Earnhardt, who was nicknamed The Intimidator. I googled the whereabouts of Kannapolis, and discovered that is was only 57 miles from my home. Then I googled the field, Intimidators Stadium, and knew I had to go there.

I scooped my girlfriend up on a Friday after work and headed to the park. We got off the interstate and there was no traffic, which is a stark contrast from the hustle and bustle of Charlotte. We drove a mile or so, and hung a right on Stadium Drive. Then another half mile and a left into the park’s parking lot. We were greeted by two men, 60’s, who were collecting money for parking. I asked how much, and they replied $2 cash. This was a joy to me, music to my ears. Baseball angels sent from god. It’s not often that I go anywhere that takes cash only. When I find a place that is a cash only establishment, I remember the place and soon become a fixture there, no matter the place. I’ve had the best breakfast of my life at a diner that only took cash, and enjoyed the best beer of my life that was cash only. Mary Lou’s in Carbondale, IL. and L&L Tavern in Chicago, IL. Look them up if you go to either of those Illinois towns. Get biscuits & gravy and Hamm’s. At each place, respectively. As sure as the sky is blue and my ass is pale white, if you want the best of the best, find it that the merchant takes cash and only cash, and then you’ll have discovered the Mona Lisa of whatever it is you are consuming.

Parked the car, went to will call to pick up the tickets, as this place has no automatic download after buying, and no ticket-email feature that delivers the game ticket instantly to my electronic mailbox, nope! Your options, if you want to watch a ballgame here, is order and pick up at will call, or have the tickets mailed to your house for $2. Me, impatient and intent on seeing this field of dreams as soon as I could, obviously chose will call because I couldn’t wait on the mail. I may do the mail order option sometime, as I like the mail, too, sort of like Ralphie and the secret decoder. I have recently discovered that eBay has a lot of sellers that deal in old baseball cards, and I love getting those sent to the house. That’s another article for another day, but as a quick aside, I recently received 7 packs of old baseball cards. 1989 Topps, 1990 Topps Traded, which features promising rookies, players who changed teams, and new managers, and 1991 Score, just to name a few. The mail is exciting.

Intimidators Stadium has only a few sections, all located behind home plate, and down each foul line. No seats in the outfield, only trees and a green, grass covered hill. The scoreboard has numbers that light up red, telling each fan how many balls and strikes and outs there are, and nothing else. No video that says get loud, or whiff. They don’t have a radar to tell how fast the pitch is thrown ( the place is there on the scoreboard, but it doesn’t work), and all the scoreboard says is home and away–it doesn’t even list the name of the home town team. Nine timeless innings, any team could be playing, and all we know is how many runs, outs, errors, and hits the home and visitors have accumulated, less the neon sales pitch from local merchants bright on the scoreboard.

Now I’m not against sponsors in the game of baseball. Without a sponsor, my 1992 team, The Marion Batting Cages, or my 1993 team, The Elks, wouldn’t exist under any condition. We wouldn’t have had hats, bats, uniforms or numbers. No pop in the cooler after the game, and no big Gatorade jugs in July, and no trips to Dairy Queen after the Saturday afternoon game. So, sponsors are good, as long as they don’t take away from the game. The Kannapolis Intimidators have sponsors, and these advocates of the greatest game on earth do not loot even the slightest satisfaction from the game. Sponsors like F&M Bank, Arrow Exterminators, Bare Furniture, and Bank of America do not use pixels to drag the game through the hi-tech mechanism of electronic congestion, instead they use particle board from, probably I’d say, a local lumber yard. With this route of communication, you can look at the scoreboard at any moment and get the score! No need to solve the Rubik’s Cube. This isn’t Where’s Waldo, the team has 2 errors and Micker Adolfo is batting .289. It’s right there!

The ballpark is a DeLorean. The ability to travel through time is in the $3 hot dog and the $3 coke, not in the flux-capacitor or plutonium that was obtained in a trade for a bomb made of old pinball parts. There are no gullwing doors, just section 201, Row A, seats 14 and 15. You can sit so close, you can smell the grass, and all that is required is $9 dollars. Call up Stephen Hawking and tell him you have found time travel, and it’s in Kannapolis, NC. We don’t need to figure out how a black hole works, and there are no ripples in time to worry about that will cause a cataclysm of annihilation. That 1992 team, The Marion Batting Cages, all of a sudden was as undeniably real at that moment in section 201 as the lemonade in my hand. Buck O’Neil was right. I can remember pitching to my dad after work on that pitcher’s mound he built me, I can remember my dad and uncle coaching the team and having my cousin Josh take me through catching drills, how to block the ball so it didn’t go to the backstop, how to crouch down and move my legs as the ball trailed low and outside, moving quick and popping up to second to gun down a thief on the run. Things I never remembered before. The way a kid on my team pitched, I could see his windup like it was happening now, an old school windup that sent his hands swinging like Walter Johnson as they met above his head as his motion turned to home plate and generated the power needed to send the ball past the lefty in the box. Nicknamed Slammin’ Sammy, after Sammy Sosa. Even though he was a pitcher, the name fit. We were all ball players then, doing it all on the field. A kid named Pudge who sent balls over the left field fence, or struck out swinging at a ball over his head. A regular Adam Dunn with an eye like Ray Charles but the strength of a real slugger. He was like a little Babe Ruth up there. He had a gut, I swear to god, all at the age of 8! He just stood up there, no real batting stance really, just stood straight up with the bat over his head and hacked away like a guy with a hammer nailing down a roof. It’s as real, in this moment, as anything I can open my eyes and see right now. Buck O’Neil was one-hundred percent correct in the most literal sense. And the park out in Kannapolis takes you there.