blooper ball A pitch that is lobbed into a high arc, which, when thrown correctly, drops precipitously through the strike zone, tantalizing the batter in the process. — Dickson Baseball Dictionary
By Dan Nilsen
That definition of blooper ball pertains mainly to baseball. It refers to major league pitchers who would occasionally lob the ball overhand to throw off a batter’s timing and tease him into trying to hit it. Most famously, Ted Williams hit a home run on such a pitch in the 1946 All-Star Game.
At the recreational level, blooper ball is a different game, with a softball being thrown underhand high into the sky and landing on the plate or a mat behind it for a strike. The slow, high-arcing pitch was indeed “tantalizing” to softball players who didn’t like the fastpitch version of the game.
That’s what Dr. Duane Brown was thinking back in the late 1950s, when Frank Manley, creator of Flint’s community school program, challenged his directors to come up with a new activity for Flint men who had been idled by a big factory strike.
Brown, who happened to be taking a graduate class in Persuasion at the time, had no trouble persuading his fellow community school directors to adopt blooper ball as a new sport in town.
“To my surprise, they bought into it hook, line and sinker,” he said. “And from that day on, it just grew and grew and grew.”
Did it ever.
Starting in 1958 and lasting into the 1980s, blooper ball became the preferred summer activity for thousands of Flint families. Most of the 46 Flint schools had teams and even full leagues. The larger schools had games playing on two or three diamonds, three days a week. Counting all the league play, the Flint Olympian Games and other tournaments, approximately 600,000 players were involved in blooper ball over the quarter-century of its popularity.
That mere proposal of blooper ball, along with his other work in the community school program, has earned Brown induction into the Greater Flint Area Sports Hall of Fame as the Distinguished Service Award winner.
Brown was a good athlete himself, playing football, basketball and baseball at Beecher High.
“I’m a Beecher Buc, through and through,” he said. “Freshman year, I was the only freshman on the baseball team, and we won the County B League championship. That’s one of the things I still cherish.”
He also played quarterback and defensive back for the 1949 football team that went 9-0 and outscored its opponents 299-6. That team was inducted into the Greater Flint Area Sports Hall of Fame in 2003.
Brown tried out for football at Michigan State Normal College (now Eastern Michigan University) but never made the team. After a stint in the army, though, he was back on the playing field in another sport.
“My wife (Marilyn) was a teacher and coach at Dearborn Robichaud,” Brown said. “When I got discharged, the guys asked her if I’d like to play softball with them. Of course I said yes.”
Brown told them he played infield, so they put him at third base. Nobody told him it was blooper ball.
“Trying to be the big shot, I moved in between the mound and home plate for bunts and line drives,” he said. “On the first pitch, the guy throws the ball sky-high. I still have the record for back-tracking. That was my first introduction to it.”
Soon after that, Brown was hired by Manley as a community school director, and blooper ball followed him to Flint. He made changes to the Detroit version of the game — adding a 10th player to be used anywhere in the field, extending home plate to three feet with a mat, and banning full uniforms.
“No full uniforms was a big part of it, part of the growth,” Brown said. “You could wear a hat and a shirt with sponsor names on it, and spikes. There was no stealing bases, for safety reasons.”
He also continued to play.
“My first team was out of Martin School, and Joe Byrd had a team, too,” Brown said. “It wasn’t a fun and fumble league. I had college players and guys that played minor league ball.”
He also had one of the two best pitchers in town.
“Tom Duty and Tyree Walker. They were opponents, and we played for the city championship often against each other,” Brown said. “Both of them would get right down on the ground, and Ty would jump as high as he could and extend his arm. He got it up there.”
It was that kind of pitching that made the sport hard, the ball dropping straight down in front of the batter.
“That was the joy of the game,” Brown said. “I played slow-pitch later and it was like going to a picnic. In blooper ball you had to time it, and some guys couldn’t hit it. There were strikeouts. It was a good game.”
Off the field, Dr. Brown served the community, the nation and the world. He was a classroom teacher, Community School Director, Elementary School Principal, Director of Elementary Education, Executive Director of the National Center for Education and Executive Director of the International Center for Education.
He conducted seminars at colleges, served as adjunct professor at Eastern Michigan and Michigan State, and did work in New Zealand, Australia, England, Ireland, Hungary and several Caribbean islands.
“I did a week in submarine school in New London,” he said, referring to the U.S. Naval Submarine Base in Connecticut.
Those are the high-profile roles Dr. Brown held.
Other works are not as well-known.
“The job I enjoyed most was working at Durant-Tuuri-Mott Elementary with neighborhood kids and special-needs kids,” he said. “I had teen clubs for the handicapped, which it was called then, and got them into gymnastics. I had one of those Olympic coaches from Italy teaching blind kids gymnastics. I would take the blind kids skating at Ballenger Park, got them into skating.
“As far as enjoying and feeling good about a job, that was very special.”
He put a boxing ring in Martin School, turning it into a boxing center that helped Joe Byrd and his family launch a long and successful career in that sport.
Brown also had a prodigy in Ron Pruitt, a neighborhood boy who would go on to play nine years of Major League Baseball.
“He was a third-grader, and eventually I had to move him up higher. He had some real abilities,” Brown said.
“Then his dad ended up pitching blooper ball for me. We had a lot of fathers and sons playing together.”
Brown eventually settled into retirement, at least from his job.
“I told my wife when I quit blooper ball that I was all done,” he said. “Then I got recruited at 60-something to play slow-pitch. When you get recruited to play at 60-something, you can’t say no. She understood.”
Of course she did. Marilyn Brown played four sports herself at Beecher, including softball.
“Looking back,” Duane Brown said, recalling that invitation to play softball just out of the army, “it was actually through my wife that I got introduced to blooper ball.”
