Love blooms where it wishes. But as a helpful time and place to nourish it, the summer of 1980 on the corner of Magnolia and Lyndhurst in the Dilworth section of Charlotte, was just about heaven sent for an 11-year-old boy falling in love with baseball.
At cozy Crockett Park, which opened in 1941 as Clark Griffith Park with its covered wooden grandstand and a left field wall just 289 feet from home plate, the Double A Charlotte O’s were on their way to winning the Southern League championship with a 19-year-old third baseman named Cal Ripken Jr. One of the team’s clubhouse attendants was an 11-year-old kid from the Starmount neighborhood named Mike Shildt.
