Hemstad to enter the Hall Aug. 15
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John Hemstad’s hall of fame baseball career started out innocently enough on the family farm east of Domremy. John and his younger brother Norman would play one-on-one baseball, using the barn as a backstop and a soft but unpredictable sponge ball.
Little did they know at the time, those games would eventually make great players. Norman was inducted into the Manitoba Baseball Hall of Fame in 2005 when his career took him there, while John is now being recognized a decade later. He’ll be inducted into the Saskatchewan Baseball Hall of Fame in a banquet in Battleford on Aug. 15.
“We couldn’t travel much in the 50’s on the farm, so we taught ourselves to play ball,” said John. “It was he and I with a sponge ball against the barn door. We would throw and bat and we learned to really become excellent hitters because a sponge ball did funny things when you threw it—it would curve, it would go straight. We were very competitive so you learned to keep your eye and coordination in hitting a ball. Little did we know that later on when we became really involved in baseball competition, that coordination or eye and bat and seeing a baseball thrown by a pitcher was tremendously involved in being a good hitter.
“(Norman) went on in his career in Manitoba, I stayed in Saskatchewan and lo and behold, the two of us involved in the barn yard scene ended up in the hall of fame. It’s quite exciting.”
