ROCKGLEN, Sask. – Ralph Karst pauses.
The man who was named Saskatchewan baseball coach and manager of the year in 1993 is trying to recall if he has a baseball glove, bat or ball in the house. But no, they are all locked out in the garage on his farm southeast of Rockglen, Sask.
But Karst’s 40 years of playing and coaching baseball are evident through plaques, photographs and news clippings he keeps close by.
There is something else missing. This year is the first time since the 1920s that Rockglen has not had an adult baseball team, he said.
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It’s enough to make Karst want to get back in the game, but “it’ll come back,” he predicts.
Karst found during hard farming times, baseball was “a sure-cure medicine to get away from your worries and stress. It made you feel happy.”
Sidelined by illness recently, he is still a well known name in sports circles near the American border. The bachelor farmer spent decades working with youth in the area and one year was asked to coach nine different teams.
His best team, the Rockglen Cyclones, went through two seasons, losing only one game in the early 1990s.
Karst began playing softball at Hope Valley school across the road from his family’s farm but switched to playing baseball in his teens.
His dad played catcher with local teams and Karst said his father wrecked his fiddle-playing fingers due to the poor equipment in the early days.
Karst and his brother Donald played together all their lives on senior teams until Donald died in 1983. Karst was an outfielder while his brother was a pitcher. At one time, the family farm had a baseball field and practices would go on till early in the morning.
Karst said he didn’t realize when he got into coaching that it would be a decades-long commitment. He simply wanted all kids to have the chance to play baseball, whatever their skill. He has a theory why there are so few teams today.
“I feel it is due to the poor farming economy. Lots of the young people leave for jobs elsewhere, including lots of our fine baseball players… . I have three complete baseball teams alone in Calgary who have jobs there.”
Karst is a booster of his sport and his lifestyle. He praises small town life and farming as the best thing in the world.
His optimism comes out as a sports cliche: “If you lose you lose; if you win, you win. As long as you give it your best shot, that’s what counts.”
Over the years, he coached 420 teenagers, an age group that he had little trouble with. More than a few boys stuck to the rules to ensure they could play on the team.
“They were dedicated, loyal, full of heart and desire, energetic and every great adjective you could use to describe them while they were on the team,” he said.
“I believed in playing all the players all of the time, not just now and then, regardless how many players you have. Each one then gets the feeling of contributing to the team … nobody likes to ride the bench.”
None of his players made it to the major leagues, although one played for a farm team of the Boston Red Sox.
Karst’s habit of telling jokes probably led to the teams pulling pranks on him as a fair turnaround. One time they turned his brown truck snow white by wrapping it in toilet paper. Other times they jacked up the rear tires to prevent the truck from moving, and hotwired the driver’s seat so he would get a shock.
He downplays the money he laid out for the team’s uniforms, equipment and transportation and the time he put into practices or working on other small town activities with them, or the occasional counselling that happened.
While he no longer plays or coaches baseball, Karst has been interviewing the oldtimers and writing about the sport. The book he is planning to produce has been two decades in the making, but he anticipates it should be done in a couple more years. He has thousands of anecdotes on handwritten pages. He also keeps busy with his lifelong hobbies of photography and music. He is part of a band called the Rockglen Pickers that plays regularly in the area.
And he has one big dream – to see a major league baseball game live.
