By Granville Price, Palm Springs Semaphore
April 19, 2009

Potentilla Moonbeam is normally a calm person.  In fact, it’s what she does for a living; the soft-spoken, bespectacled woman runs the Center For Universal Peaceful Oneness of, Like, Everybody, a meditation and wellness center right across the street from Elderberry Field on the north side of Palm Springs.  But it’s that very accident of geography that has her seeing red.

Each morning for the past several months, the peaceful stillness on West Tramview Road has been shattered by the sounds of bulldozers, drills, and jackhammers working on the latest five thousand-seat expansion to the Codgers’ stadium.  “It’s just so, like, angular,” she said, her hands shaking as she struggled to keep her composure while trimming a small bonsai.  “My Tuesday morning ‘Holding Hands, Holding Minds’ group meditation class hasn’t been able to reach a unified beta state in weeks!”

Construction noise has not been the only problem noted with the stadium project.  Since the project’s announcement late last year, criticism has come in from virtually all quarters.

One particularly controversial move was Codgers officials’ decision not to utilize Voros and McCracken Construction, the firm that performed last year’s stadium expansion; instead the bid went to Joseph Morgan, Inc., a company which claimed it could deliver significant savings by eschewing complicated engineering computations and statistics, instead using “common sense” and lining things up by eye.

Contrary to these claims, however, the project has been beset by delays and cost overruns.  One section had to be rebuilt after it was found the concrete used in it had been laced with melamine; another collapsed due to a seam that had been sealed with Play-Doh.  During a heated discussion at a subsequent news conference, a JM, Inc. official told council member Wendy Clematis to “go <expletive deleted> herself.”  A lawsuit is now pending against the company.  Events have even inspired one enterprising group of Palm Springs fans to create a website urging the team to jettison the contractor.

Other issues have surfaced as well.  During construction, one worker – a fan of the Bakersfield Bears, the Codgers’ hated rival – buried a Pat Lilly jersey beneath one of the addition’s pillars in an attempt to “curse” the team.  Upon learning of the act, Codgers team officials insisted on digging up the jersey and auctioning it off for charity.

“Nice try, Bears, but it will take more than that for you to best us,” chuckled Codgers GM Denny Hills at the time.  “Neener neener!”

After hearing the story, Canton shortstop Jack Cobb visited the construction site.  Vowing to perpetrate the “ultimate curse,” Cobb – a former Bakersfield player –  climbed over a fence wearing his Longshoremen uniform and flung himself into a freshly poured batch of concrete.  He was pulled out shortly thereafter, covered with cement but otherwise unharmed.

But this was just the tip of the iceberg.  After the new section opened just prior to Opening Day, an anonymous post on an Internet message board revealed the awful truth – during the winter, when construction work had barely begun, fans of over a dozen PEBA teams had sneaked in during the dead of night, unbeknownst to team or contractor, and buried jerseys under the foundations of the Elderberry Field expansion!

Another Lilly jersey was among those secretly buried, as well as ones bearing the name of Tempe’s Markus “Fireworks” Hancock and New Jersey’s Rubén Cruz.  Ex-Codgers seemed particularly popular: Reno’s Brooks Erickson, Crystal Lake’s Mark Frazier, Alfredo Martínez of Duluth, Scot Christian of Yuma, the Coal Sox’ Terry Farmer, and Jorge Ruíz of New Orleans are all former Palm Springs players who are among those known to have their jerseys buried.  Even current Codgers are not immune – someone buried a vintage Ollie Morris Omaha Cyclones jersey, as well as one of Christian “Dracula” Butler from his early days with the London Underground.

A commemorative Thoroughbreds William Shatner jersey is known to be buried – along with a commemorative shot glass – as is a San Antonio Calzones of Laredo jersey with no number and the words “YOUR NAME HERE” emblazoned on the back.

But some of the choices seemed to twist the knife more than others.  One such was a jersey belonging to the Sandgnats’ Floyd Jackson, a Palm Springs native.  Another, possibly reopening a fresh wound, was a Florida Featherheads jersey bearing the name of recently departed Palm Springs shortstop Miguel Soto.

“I consider jinxing or cursing or whatever you want to call it to be practically a form of terrorism,” said Hills in response to this latest news, seemingly near tears.  “<expletive deleted>!”

While there was some discussion of digging up and removing the second round of buried jerseys, Codgers officials eventually decided it would be too time-consuming and costly, so they will remain beneath the ill-starred 2009 expansion to Elderberry Field in perpetuity.

Informed of the jersey-burying escapades, Ms. Moonbeam of the CFUPOLE nodded in approval.  “It serves them right for all the negativity they’ve bred in the community,” she said grimly.  “If I hadn’t renounced violence, I’d be temped to bust a cap in their <expletive deleted>.”