In Slate today, I’ve got a story about Major League Baseball’s new CBA — and about its changes in how teams can acquire (and compensate) amateur talent. Among baseball pundits, a sturdy consensus has formed: these changes will make it even harder for small-market teams to compete. I try to show how this analysis overlooks a few key ideas, including the lessons of Michael Lewis’s Moneyball.

The gist of my argument is that spending tons of money on amateur players does give small-market teams an advantage — but that it’s such a big advantage everyone else will catch on and catch up, leaving the draft as stratified as every other element in baseball’s economy. It’s the classic Moneyball narrative: team exploits undervalued asset until it becomes properly (even overly) valued. One of the funny things here  is that Billy Beane and the A’s themselves undervalued draft picks. After all, a big part of Moneyball centers on the 2002 draft in which the A’s had a whopping seven first-round picks (and 35 picks overall). Instead of loading up on high-ceiling, high-cost amateurs — the kind of players you have to pay “over slot” — the A’s looked for players who would sign under slot. Now, as Lewis tells it, the A’s didn’t have much choice since their owner had allocated only $9.4 million for draft bonuses. But that was a terrible move. Bargain-hunting makes sense with big-league players, not with amateurs.

In the last few years, other teams — and, crucially, other owners — have wised up. The Royals provide the best example. But even now you’re starting to see big-market teams invest more and more money in amateur players, players they can keep or trade. The Tigers used two “over slot” prospects to trade for Miguel Cabrera; the Red Sox used two more to get Adrian Gonzalez. And if baseball’s new CBA hadn’t better regulated the draft, this trend would have only increased.

*  *  *

N.B. If you’re a baseball-slash-economics fan, you might enjoy a long feature I wrote this summer on the Cincinnati Reds and their fans. In it, I erroneously predicted that baseball “has too many people making too much money for anything major to change [in the new CBA].” But there’s lots more I did get right about small-market teams and how they can (and can’t) compete. A .pdf of the story is here.

On Sunday’s Cincinnati Edition, I had a nice conversation with Mark Perzel about my feature on the Bengals, the county, and their ruinous stadium lease. You can listen to it here.

Well, after a couple teasers — a miscellany of quotations from the county official who became a Bengals exec; an appreciation of Mike Brown as a “near-brilliant litigator” — my feature on the Bengals and their stadium lease is finally here. The story doesn’t break much news, other than a few hints about a potential solution to this 15-year mess. But I do think it synthesizes that mess into a coherent story.

It’s also a very depressing story. If you follow Cincinnati sports and want something a little more uplifting, check out the previous story I did for the magazine — on the Reds and their efforts to win back their fans.

*  *  *

One more thing: I should elaborate on one part of my stadium-fund story — the end, where I claim the Bengals’ mistreatment of Carson Palmer ”tells you everything you need to know about Brown.” After the issue went to press, the Bengals traded Palmer in one of the most slam-dunk deals of all time. That might seem like a vindication of Brown’s pettiness. After all, the Bengals now have two extra draft picks to go with their promising rookie quarterback. But I think this misses the larger picture. Throughout this saga, Brown treated Palmer, maybe the best (and certainly the nicest) player he’s ever drafted, with zero class. After the trade, Palmer took time to call the Cincinnati media, saying all the right things and handling the whole thing like a professional — like an adult. What did the Bengals do? Well, in the team’s statement — and you could obviously forget any interaction with the media — Brown didn’t even bother to thank Palmer for his years with the team. Marvin Lewis stooped even lower, bashing Palmer to reporters.

So here’s a question: how do you think players around the league perceived this? The Bengals have long struggled to lure free agents to Cincinnati. This offseason, Jonathan Joseph, a free agent and one of their best defensive players, bailed on the team despite its best efforts to resign him. Right now, it seems the Bengals can’t give their money away. Here’s a second question, then: What happens in five or six yeas when those two new draft picks become free agents?

Sometimes these stories seemed too tangential. (Remember when an aging Barry Larkin asked for grass in Riverfront Stadium? Brown [allegedly] blocked it because of the decades-long feud between the Bengals and the Reds — even though Larkin wanted off the knee-grinding astroturf so badly he was ready to pay for the switch himself.) Sometimes the stories were too detailed. (It would take plenty of space to explain how, since they’ve moved into Paul Brown Stadium, the Bengals have managed to sue their own fans — twice.) Sometimes the stories felt too thinly sourced. (Last year, Cincinnati CityBeat reported the recollections of a former township trustee who said Stuart Dornette and Bob Bedinghaus — two key members of the Bengals’ braintrust — came to him in 1995 with a quid-pro-quo election offer so long as he agreed to provide “a second vote on the County Commission for the stadium sales tax proposal.”)

Like I said, lots of stories. But there is one other episode, alluded to in my story, that I’d like to summarize here since it highlights one of the most frustrating aspects of the Mike Brown era. The Cincinnati media loves to praise Brown’s “business savvy.” They’re wrong to do this — Brown’s stubborn belief in Family First, and in his own football acumen, has cost him millions in profits and a whole lot of capital appreciation. But Brown does seem to be a near-brilliant litigator. And that’s what’s so frustrating — he becomes quite creative in legal matters, even as he refuses to spend on players or to delegate football decision-making.

One thing my story tries to do is show just how much money Brown made in the mid-1990s (and, by extension, how much he continues to make today). It’s not just the Bengals’ year-to-year profits, though those consistently rank near the top of the NFL. It’s the millions in salaries and bonuses collected by Brown and his family — and, more than that, the appreciation in the Bengals’ value, which is how modern sports owners make their real money.

This last point isn’t news to Brown. In fact, one reason he ran the Bengals so cheaply the 1990s — players flying in coach, whirlpools that didn’t work, and so on — is because he was funneling every spare dollar toward his attempt to buy out the team’s other major shareholders. In this, Brown succeeded. “From 1984 to 1993,” the Enquirer noted in 1999, “the Bengals paid out every penny of profit — $66 million — to shareholders.”

Why could the Enquirer note those numbers? Well, the Bengals ended up in tax court because of their deal, and even more numbers came out when the shareholders’ heirs decided to sue. You can see why they were angry: the Bengals’s valuation has skyrocketed from $8 million, when Paul Brown co-founded them in 1968, to $875 million today — and most of that growth came after Brown bought up all those shares. Again, he can be near-brilliant when the business matters line up with his worldview. But Brown also feels zero guilt when it comes to diverting money from the team’s best interests to his own. In 1989, the Bengals went to the Super Bow. Over the next decade — a time when Brown was maximizing profits in order to buy up stock — the Bengals ranked last in the NFL in wins and next-to-last in payroll.

In short, Mike Brown ran his team into the ground in order to hoover up its shares. If that angers you, it’s only because his priorities are not your own.

Speaking of priorities, here’s a sublime quotation from the Brown family’s testimony in that tax court case:

Super Bowl teams do not make as much money as the public thinks. Revenues are shared among all 28 teams and expenses are only borne by the teams that play in the Super Bowl. Super Bowl teams lose more money in the following years because they have to pay their players more for their superior performance.

In the November issue of Cincinnati Magazine, I’ve got a feature on Hamilton County’s beleaguered stadium fund — and on how Mike Brown and the Bengals deserve much of the blame for its beleaguered state.  The feature’s long — 4,000 words — but not long enough, and I’m going to write a couple of preview posts with bonus material. Up first: a collection of retrospectively hilarious-slash-depressing quotations from Bob Bedinghaus.

For the uninitiated: As county commissioner in the 1990s, Bedinghaus did more than anyone to create the stadium fund and to finance Paul Brown Stadium. Then he lost reelection bid in 2000 — the first time a Republican had lost to a Democrat in this race since Lyndon Johnson was president. Then he got hired by the Bengals. (He’s pictured above in his stadium office.)

Anyway, the wit and wisdom of Bob Bedinghaus:

• Describing his 1995 meeting with Mike Brown: ”I walked away from there with a pretty good gut feeling that I could trust him.” [link]
• Describing his 1995 meeting with David Milenthal, CEO of the ad agency that used astroturfing to win the stadium proposal: “The first instruction from Milenthal was, SHUT UP.” [link]
• April of 1997 (when people were fretting the two stadiums would cost $675 million): “[The final cost will be] nowhere near that range.”  [link]
• (N.B. The two stadiums ended up costing well over a billion dollars.)
• November of 1997: “I think it’s expected there would be a healthy amount of buyer’s remorse. . . . It’s not too much different than someone who buys a new car or new house and then starts to rethink the decision.” [link]
• May of 1998: “I don’t know how anybody could be prepared to have gone through what I went through. . . . At some point I’ll walk away from the county commission knowing I’ve played a role in changing the direction of the community.” [link]
• August of 2000: “[The Bengals are] an organization that’s run by lawyers, and they look for every penny around every corner. . . . It’s going to be a difficult relationship going forward for the next 30 years.” [link]
• August of 2000: “The unfortunate reality of dealing with the Bengals is dealing with their lawsuits.” [link]
• August of 2000 (and in a debate with his political opponent, Todd Portune): “Are people angry about the cost of the stadium? Without a doubt. Will people realize that we made some of the tough decisions to make the investment to make this community better? I’m confident they’re going to see that.” [link]
• (N.B. The Bengals hire Bedinghaus somewhere around here. One of his job titles: Director of Stadium Development.)
• April of 2009 (and in response to Portune’s [admittedly ill-thought-out] proposal to sell the stadium’s naming rights): “The image that there is a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow for Hamilton County is not as shiny as it seems.” [link]
• November of 2010: “What we have found in our experience is that . . . Cincinnati is not an A-list city. Concert promoters are looking to put on events in areas where there is the most likelihood of success.” [link]

I’m tempted to end with the poetic contrast between Bedinghaus-the-public servant and Bedinghaus-the-Bengals exec. But let’s give the last word to Mike Brown, who, in February of 2000, when Bedinghaus’s reelection campaign was heating up, told the Enquirer that “Bob has taken a stand for the future of Hamilton County. . . . He was willing to risk his political future. We need more people like him in politics.” [link]

When Bedinghaus lost the election, Brown, an avid reader of history, compared him to Winston Churchill.

In the July issue of Cincinnati Magazine, I’ve got a long story on the Reds and their fans. It could have been much, much longer, as my (very gracious) editor can attest. Still, I managed to put a lot of that ancillary stuff on this blog. I’ll link to those posts below — and if any Reds fans want to share their stories or some feedback, feel free to email or leave a comment.

I started with a post outlining my personal history with the team; from there, I wrote an analysis of the Reds’ place in pop culture; a description of the Reds’ 1950s business operation; a sketch of Cincinnati’s TV scene, circa 1972; and a link to the local sports radio segment I did (and that crops up in my story).

Clearly, this turned out to be a pretty complex and multifaceted story. My main takeaway, though, was that the Reds know they need to attract more fans and are working incredibly hard to do so. And not just working hard, but working in a highly specialized and professionalized manner. In the story, I note how much corporate speak flies around the team’s offices. So let’s give the last word to that tradition — here, the concept of “strategic buckets,” a concept which the Reds’ management is quite fond of, and a concept which I had to look up:

Let’s change the subject. One thing I’ve been asking fans is whether or not they think Cincinnati is a “baseball town.” That’s a cherished idea around here. But it’s also a difficult one to test, outside of attendance figures. One of my friends made a really smart suggestion: do baseball and Cincinnati get paired up in pop culture? Think about the TV shows and movies set in Boston or Chicago. You’ll invariably get two cop partners, one a Cubs fan, the other a White Sox, or marriage proposal that occurs at Fenway. (Is that how that Jimmy Fallon / Red Sox movie ended? You couldn’t pay me enough money to watch it, but the trailer suggests something along those lines.)

Anyway, the point is Boston and Chicago are “baseball towns.” Not only do their teams attract consistent crowds and dominate the local conversation, they also cause writers and directors to invoke those teams when they want to represent the Real Civic Character. Is the same thing true of Cincinnati? It’s got a much smaller pop cultural canon, but the answer seems to be no. I didn’t see anyone wearing a Reds hat in Traffic. The kids of Glee never road-trip it to a Reds game. When The Brady Bunch came to Cincinnati, they stuck to Kings Island.

I can think of only two positive examples. The first is Rain Man, where Dustin Hoffman sleeps in a Reds shirt, keeps a picture of Crosley Field on his wall, and can recite the career statistics of Ted Kluszewski. Those details suggest someone living in Cincinnati might follow the Reds, but I don’t think they suggest that this is a “baseball town.” The other example comes from WKRP in Cincinnati. In an episode in the second season, the titular station hires Sparky Anderson to host a show. (You can watch the episode here.) Anderson acts remarkably well — his best line: after his show flops, he deadpans that “every time I come to this town, I get fired” — but this episode was the only time the show really delved into baseball. The message, again, seems to be that Cincinnati has a baseball team — but not that Cincinnati is a baseball town.

If anyone knows of other Reds mentions on TV or film, please drop me an email or leave a comment. Now, I’m going to go interview some fans.

[UPDATE, 5/20/2011:] I got some great responses on the Reds in pop culture thanks to a link from Red Leg Nation. Here’s a synthesis of the comments from that site and this blog. Thanks, guys!

• A lot of people noted Reds asides in various movies. In Good Will Hunting, Robin Williams talks about the 1975 World Series, though that seems like more of a Red Sox allusion than a Reds one. Similarly, the Reds crop up in Field of Dreams, but I’m scoring that movie for the White Sox. In Angels in the Outfield, the Angels’ owner tells his new manager, a Reds import, that “they expect you to win in Cincinnati. It’s different here.” In Blues Brothers, someone wears a Reds hat during the Bob’s Country Bunker scene. In Airborne, which is set in Cincinnati, a rollerblade race ends at Cinergy Field. In High Anxiety, Mel Brooks learns a lounge patron hails from Cincinnati and says, “Love that Big Red Machine.”
• The Big Red Machine also provided the best examples of Reds players doing celebrity endorsements and commercials. Pete Rose did Gillette and Aqua Velva; Johnny Bench did Krylon (“No runs, no drips, no errors”). More recently, Ken Griffey Jr. did plenty of national ad campaigns. Aroldis Chapman did a Pepto Bismol commercial that can only be described as Lynchian. (Watch it here.)
• The Reds boast a few celebrity fans, most notably George Clooney and Charlie Sheen. You also see a number of rappers wearing Reds hats, though this stems less from fandom than from the Bloods borrowing the team’s iconography.
• My favorite example of the Reds in pop culture came from a commenter named Dale. “I have an 8 year old daughter who loves American Girl dolls,” Dale wrote. “There is one doll in the lineup that is based in the 1930s. Her name is Kit Kittredge and she is a huge Reds fan. Her favorite player is Enie Lombardi. This is all documented in the book Kit’s Home Run. I remember there being a Reds outfit for sale in the catalog as well as a game giveaway of an outfit at GABP a few years back.”

I’d say the Kit Kittredge example comes closest to disproving my thesis — that people outside of Cincinnati don’t really link the city to its team (or think of the city because of its team) in any unique or lasting way. But the other examples all support it. They also suggest that things may have been different during the Big Red Machine. It wouldn’t be the first time that brief and glorious era has distorted our perception of the Reds’ relationship to their city and their fans. But that’s a topic for another day. In the meantime, here’s one more example of the Reds in pop culture from the 1970s. In his book The Machine, Joe Posnanski says the Reds became so popular that Arthur Jones, who had just invented something called a Nautilus, decided to donate one of his first working models to the team’s clubhouse. Jones hoped this would popularize his device. The only problem was that, in those days, baseball players looked down on weightlifting. In fact, Tony Perez used the Nautilus to torment the team’s younger players, telling them that they were on Sparky Anderson’s “list” for Nautilus duty.

In this month’s issue of Indianapolis Monthly, I’ve got a long feature on Milan, Indiana — the small town that inspired Hoosiers and that’s struggled ever since. The magazine’s website is in the middle of a redesign, so the story didn’t make it online. I’m posting a slightly longer version of it below the jump.

Another Long Shot

Milan could be any Indiana town — except, of course, for its high school basketball team, which won the state tournament almost 60 years ago. Now, a few locals are trying to convert that tradition into a basketball museum and a shot at reviving their town. But what if Milan’s legacy is what’s holding it back?

So there’s this picture. It’s of the 1954 Milan Indians, and it’s not the reserved, rigorously posed one everyone knows. Somebody — no one remembers who — took this picture right after the team had shocked the state, took it inside their Hinkle Fieldhouse locker room where it’s all sweat and shock and self-pinching, where the players and coaches are tightly woven together, wearing a series of expressions that reveals just how many ways a human being can feel joy.

You might not know the picture, but you know the story: the high school whose enrollment is 161, led by the coach whose favorite phrase is “I’ll try,” watches the player who doesn’t own a telephone hit the game-winning shot. The next day, 40,000 fans lined the road leading into Milan, spilling into fields and onto building tops, waving homemade signs, enduring Manhattan levels of honking. People have been celebrating the team ever since — especially after it was Hollywoodized in Hoosiers. Milan frequently crops up on Top-Whatever lists (Sports Illustrated’s “20 Favorite Teams of the Century”), and Butler’s Final Four run brought with it another wave of invocations.

In 2011, however, Milan finds itself caught up in another — and, unfortunately, much more common — story: a withered downtown, a dearth of good jobs, and kids who head off to college and never come back. The town has become a weird mash-up of old and new, dying and getting-by, hallowed ground and Dairy Queen. Its aging population needs a pharmacy, but since they’re too few to keep one around, they must drive twenty minutes for a prescription. The Milan Plaza, a strip mall decorated in the school’s colors of black and gold, has vacancies in four of its seven storefronts. No realtor has even bothered to put up signs for prospective clients.

But local nonprofit, Milan ‘54, Inc., wants to change all this by building a brand-new, big-money museum to capitalize on the town’s legacy. The nonprofit includes eight men and women — some of them former players, others related to former players, one even related to the ‘54 mascot. They’re some of Milan’s best and brightest, people who seem smart and passionate and more than a little stubborn. At stake, they believe, is more than just a team or a game or a legacy. It’s a small town and its way of life.

Still, when you see what the group is up against, you realize that this might not be the right plan to save the town — or even the right lesson to draw from the original team. In Milan and Indy and everywhere else, the boys of ‘54 have become a parable, something that can dilate to the level of the American Dream or shrink down to the smallest daily struggle. But the real point of the Milan Miracle is in that forgotten picture, and in that picture is why we play (and watch) sports. It’s not about innocence or destiny or David or Goliath, it’s about base stuff like effort and competition — stuff that sometimes pays off and sometimes doesn’t.

* * *

Right now, the Milan ‘54 museum is crammed into an old Main Street barbershop. It looks a lot like the one where Gene Hackman meets the Hickory patriarchs, except this one — “Nichol’s Barber Shop” is still stenciled in the window — is much, much smaller.

Still, the Milan ‘54 group has made the most of their temporary home. The barber shop’s pale green walls are covered with blown-up photographs (Coach Wood cutting down the net, the parade crowd shivering in the cold) and yellowed newspaper clippings. On and around the cracked porcelain sinks and National cash register sits a mismatched collection of display cases. In addition to uniforms, ticket stubs, and other things you’d expect, they display the team’s original first aid kit, a rusted rim taken from a player’s barn, the fur coat worn by Wood’s wife to the parade, and pieces from the old Milan gym floor. The back wall is lined with ten wooden lockers, which contain autographed basketballs, varsity jackets (both Milan and Hickory High), brief where-are-they-now narratives, pennants, sneakers, yearbook pages, a handkerchief one player gave his girl at a school dance. There are several dozen fat three-ring binders containing even more photos and newspaper clippings and — after the high school janitor rediscovered them in 2003 — almost 200 telegrams and letters from the Governor, the Mayor of Indianapolis, and others congratulating the team. (One letter is addressed to simply “THE COACH / THE TEAM, MILAN, INDIANA.”)

It’s an incredible collection — especially if you’ve passed through Milan for most of your life without even knowing it existed. Like my father and grandfather, I grew up about five miles from Milan. Still, none of us had heard of the museum. And so, last January — I’d moved to Connecticut after college, but was home for Christmas — I found myself on my first visit, sitting in an uncomfortably inclined barber’s chair and talking with Tom Kohlmeier and Roselyn McKittrick, two of the museum’s biggest boosters.

“It just happened,” Roselyn says of the museum. “There wasn’t a big plan.” Roselyn, wearing a white turtleneck and even whiter Keds, is now in her 70s, but when Hoosiers came out she was still running Milan’s Railroad Inn, which was widely esteemed for its fried chicken. (Roselyn ended up selling the restaurant, and it has since closed — because, she contends, “the new owner tried to turn it into a 4-star.”) At the request of some local Boy Scouts, Roselyn put out a few 5x7s from Hoosiers at the Railroad Inn. The photos sold out in a week, and the movie — which Roselyn, like everyone else I talked to, loves; “truth, if not accuracy” is the company line — catalyzed everything. It convinced her a museum might work.

So Roselyn began acquiring and displaying Milan memorabilia at the Railroad Inn, then at her next business, an antique store. In 2000, she and a few other locals formed Milan ‘54, Inc. — and bigger plans began to take shape. In 2002, they bought the old State Bank of Milan, a two-story brick building that sits right next to Nichol’s Barber Shop. They also hired Schmidt Associates, an Indianapolis consulting firm, to draw up an ambitious plan that called not only for the restoration of the Bank to its 1954 state, but also for additions like turning the vault into a display room for the championship trophy and players’ rings, a corner office into a 30-seat movie theater, and one outside wall into a simulated barn door and basketball hoop.

It all sounds state-of-the-art. But a quality product costs money — $2.5 million, according to Schmidt Associates. Roselyn insists Milan ‘54 “won’t spend the money if we don’t have it.” To buy the Bank, which cost $60,000, the group received a grant for $50,000 from the philanthropic arm of a local casino. They also got $3,000 from Mitch Daniels’s foundation, and their website — like the museum, it offers Milan ‘54 shirts, hats, and DVDs, all with optional player autographs — has brought in “a few thousand dollars.” But that’s about it. Indiana still loves its most famous underdogs — the State Senate passed a resolution honoring the team in 2004 — but more tangible recognition has been harder to find.

The Milan ‘54 members also feel like they’ve been neglected at home. “The town,” as Tom Kohlmeier puts it, “is anesthetized to the story.” While Tom was only three years old in 1954, he still feels a connection to the team — perhaps because his parents and grandparents attended every game that season, perhaps because his P.E. teachers showed the ‘54 game film in class every year. Dressed in blue jeans and a bomber jacket, Tom is blunt and intense, quickly confessing, for example, that he left Milan for college and never came back. (This may be the ‘54 team’s most lasting legacy: of its 10 players, nine went to college and eight graduated — all shocking statistics in 1950s Indiana.) But Tom and the rest of the group remain frustrated by the lack of local support. “The tanning shop, which is four blocks down, didn’t know where we were,” says Roselyn. Tom mentions that a local photographer with a whole basement full of images from the game won’t let the museum even see them without first paying a fee. And then there’s the town’s brand new sign, a simple “Welcome to Milan, Est. 1854” number that replaced the old one and its prominent “1954 State Champs” logo.

Such slights aggravate Tom because, to his mind, they trip up not only the museum, but ultimately the town itself. Where Roselyn offers a mix of hope and historical perspective — for the town’s sesquicentennial in 2004, she co-wrote a fascinating history of Milan — Tom brings a strong business sense to the Milan ‘54 group. He now lives and owns a company in Noblesville, but hopes to retire in Milan — and in a Milan closer to the one where he was born and raised. Milan used to be “self-contained” and “vertically integrated,” Tom says, and the Milan Miracle simply confirmed what the natives had known all along: that Milan was a wonderful place to live, work, and play. Few people work or play there today. And while the Milan ‘54 group understands that the museum won’t save the town by itself, they do hope it will inspire an economic renaissance. Tom dreams of “an open-air terrace” downtown (and he ticks off several municipal models). Roselyn suggests a soda fountain and a smattering of specialty shops. But they also admit they’d settle even for corporate clients, with Tom bringing up Subway and CVS by name.

The mention of CVS causes everyone to stop and fret over Milan’s lack of a pharmacy. It’s enough to make even McKittrick pause. “We are under time pressure because of the age of the players,” she says — and, it’s implied, the age of the Milan ‘54 board, the youngest of whom are closing in on retirement. But when I ask about what they’ll do if they don’t get the full $2.5 million, Tom jumps in again.

“I refuse to accept that,” he says. “If I have to take my personal retirement money, I will, and I’m not alone in that.”

* * *

To understand statements like this, you need to understand what the Milan ‘54 group are trying to build — or, more accurately, what they’re trying to revive. In 1954, Milan was a typical small town, meriting barely a mention in the Federal Writers’ Project guide to Indiana. Its 1,150 citizens were happily stranded between Indianapolis and Cincinnati, surrounded by cornfields and the occasional wood-frame farmhouse.

This hasn’t really changed — Milan’s population is up to 1,800, and a few of its fields have been broken up by newer homes — but, for the first half of the twentieth century, Milan’s isolation served as its greatest strength. To accommodate the local farmers and factory workers, Milan’s downtown grew into three business-packed blocks: a bakery, a jewelry store, a shoe store, a dress store, a drug store, a dime store with comic books and hair barrettes, a clinic with five doctors, several department stores and groceries, and more. There were restaurants like Arkenberg’s Ideal Dining Room, whose owner left basketball games early to start on the players’ milkshakes and burgers. Best (and biggest) of all, there was Chris Volz Motors, a dealership with enough selection to draw Cincinnati Reds players to Milan. At the grand opening of his new location in 1950 (and this is all in Roselyn’s book), Volz handed out 4,800 bottles of Coca Cola and 5,500 hot dogs. Several ‘54 players worked for Volz, and he coordinated a fleet of Cadillacs to bring the state champs home from Indianapolis in style.

The final stretch of the Cadillacs’ route — the part lined with 40,000 fans — followed State Road 101. But this would soon change. In 1956, Milan got a bypass that shifted 101 from Main Street to a newer, speedier road. In some places, the route moved only few hundred yards, but it was a big enough change to earn a photo spread in the Indianapolis News. Before too long, those pictures began to feel like the first part of a before-and-after set. In 1959, the first grocery store left Milan’s downtown; by 1968, another had moved out to the bypass and the new Milan Plaza, where it was soon joined by the Milan Drug Store and the local dime store. A new hardware store opened on the bypass in 1961. The old railroad station was torn down in 1964. By 1974, the town was down to one doctor.

As this was happening in Milan, of course, it was happening everywhere else. And the other bypasses, along with the completion of Interstate 74, began to leach away Milan’s remaining stores and traffic. My dad, who was born in 1959, doesn’t remember the vibrant downtown version of Milan. The town’s main employer, the Milan Furniture Manufacturing Company, which employed around 200 people at its peak, burned down in 1980. Most locals see this as the violent coda to a decline that began only a few years earlier. The last movie to play at the Milan Theater was 1958’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. For the Hoosiers premiere in 1986, the town loaded into school buses and went to nearby Batesville, then came back to Milan High School for a big reception.

* * *

Last summer, I visited Milan a second time. I planned to check in with Roselyn and Tom. But first, I wanted to go to the grand opening and dedication of the Milan Public Library, which promised to be the town’s social event of 2010 — and, in comparison to the basketball museum, a very different vision for its future.

The afternoon commenced with a classic Indiana rainstorm, but it didn’t slow the turnout. In fact, by the time the ceremony began, the library’s parking lot was so full that people started parking their cars and trucks in the mud alongside the road. While stragglers continued to join the crowd, a local minister led us in a prayer and the pledge under the new building’s outsized American flag. Next came a ribbon cutting, complete with giant scissors and the local State Rep.

After that, we headed inside. Older people took up all the folding chairs in the library’s community room, a small space separated from the main shelving area by a folding partition. Everyone else squeezed around the opening, and the head librarian kicked things off with a joke about crowd size and a new Twilight book.

But things soon turned serious, and the remaining speakers — each of whom had to brave the new sound system’s squealing feedback — explained how exactly the Milan Public Library went from a hazy dream in 1992 to a reality today. Technically, we were standing in the Milan Branch of the Osgood Public Library because Milan and its surrounding townships did not have enough people to start a library. The Milan Library Project, a group of six volunteers, had struggled with all sorts of legal and bureaucratic hang-ups. They wrote letters, walked beside parade floats, made presentation after presentation. And then there was the money. In 2002, ten years into their quest, they received a huge boost when Mabel Lamb, a local teacher who lived in Milan until her death at the age of 97, left them five acres and $50,000. It became the seed money for earning enough grants to cover the construction costs, which came in at just under a million dollars.

The library that resulted, with its high ceilings and bright colors and the first Wi-Fi hotspot in town history, immediately stood as the newest, nicest building in Milan. But it was clear from the ceremony’s speeches and throat-clearings and hugs and, finally, tears — it was clear that the library was also much more. “Children” and “opportunity” were the day’s refrains, and everyone nodded like they were at a revival.

After the program ended, a woman resumed playing an electric piano brought in for the reception. The Friends of the Milan Library served cookies and punch, though there weren’t nearly enough. There was a raffle for two Reds tickets and for a Build-a-Bear. I ended up, punchless, next to Gary Anderson and Joe Neihardt, who, like everyone else, had dressed up for the occasion. Anderson, a carpenter who also handled Mabel’s power of attorney, had lived in Milan long enough to keep the same phone number for 33 years. When I asked him about the town’s future, he said, “Small towns are dying because of demographics, and Milan’s not going to come back. We haven’t had anything to offer young people for generations.” Neihardt, whose grandfather ran Milan’s original downtown hardware store, agreed. I asked about the Milan ‘54 museum and its goal of reviving the downtown, but Anderson and Neihardt both gave polite non-answers. Still, they didn’t seem to tire of the story behind it. “Tired of the team?” Neihardt said, “Oh, heavens no. Any place you go, they know about Milan. That’s the only thing we have going for us.”

John Ingram, Milan’s town manager (that is, its equivalent to a mayor), seemed to agree. In his messy, windowless office, which included an autographed ball from the ‘54 team, Ingram praised Milan’s quality of life — a few months back, it had its first home burglary in “10 or 12 years” — but remained realistic about its limitations. Milan, like everywhere else, Ingram said, was still hurting from the recession, though he cheerfully added that “technically, there aren’t any businesses to suffer.” He had nothing but nice things to say about town’s basketball legacy, but added that he was far more worried about working toward a new sewer plant.

And this attitude seemed pretty representative. You can understand why the high school and basketball team might get a little tired of the Milan ‘54 talk. (Even with the new class-conscious tournament, the team has been up and down, going 3-17 in 2009.) But most of the townspeople I talked to — and I hit all the important institutions: post office, liquor store, First Baptist Church — seemed ambivalent about the Milan ‘54 group. Just about everyone shared a story about visitors asking for directions to the gym or the museum. But their municipal wish-lists centered on more sidewalks, fewer potholes, launching a town beautification initiative. The thing I heard most — here, in the words of a bank teller whose branch lobby carried copies of Roselyn’s book for sale — was that “I just wish we had more stuff for our kids. They move away as soon as they can.”

* * *

My grandparents first met Roselyn in 1952 at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Washington, D.C., when my grandfather, who’d just enlisted in the Army, bumped into her soon-to-be husband, a Navy man, each with his significant other in tow. Two years later, since she was dating a local boy, Roselyn kept up with the Milan team through the newspaper. In 1956, she moved there, raised three children there.

All this to say that, for Roselyn, or for Tom, whose family owned the furniture factory for a while, or for anyone else affiliated with the museum, Milan’s history is also a personal history. That’s why the town’s ambivalence feels like an insult. It’s also why the Milan ‘54 group seems nostalgic not simply for a team, but also for a way of life — for a time when Milan was a destination and not a departure point.

But nostalgia can become a distraction. In 2004, for the Milan team’s fiftieth anniversary, the Indianapolis Star ran a relatively inoffensive story on the museum efforts — which were at the same point then as they are now — and noted that a $100-per-plate fundraiser had flopped. (So did plans to sell a Bobby Plump bobblehead.) When I asked about those events, though, Roselyn turned quiet for the first time: “Let’s not talk about that.”

But don’t we have to talk about it? Don’t we have to talk about how the Milan ‘54 group is trying to raise money in an economy that forced even the mighty Indianapolis Museum of Art to lay off 10 percent of its staff? Don’t we have to talk about how Milan sits in the middle of a cultural wasteland, too far from both Cincinnati and Indianapolis to draw consistent, museum-sustaining crowds? And, most importantly, don’t we have to talk about how the Milan ‘54 group’s downtown plan seems rigid and maybe even a little naïve, based more on a desire for the past than a plan for the future? After all, for a lot of people, the State Road 101 bypass looked like progress. And the things Milan does have going for it — the new Dollar General; a paper company and lumber yard and assisted living community, all arriving soon; and, yes, the library — now form a long, thin strip of stores, small businesses, and nicer houses all along the bypass.

The downtown, meanwhile, has become Milan’s worst section. In addition to Nichol’s Barbershop and the town government building, you’ll find a food pantry (“operated by Milan Council of Churches”), Wayne’s Meats, B&L Motorsports, and not much else. The movie theater, which had been resurrected as a gym during my January visit, is empty again. The Milan Computer Repair displays the sun-bleached boxes of a 56k modem and an external CD drive in its windows. The iconic Milan water tower fell into disrepair long ago and is now graffitied and surrounded by scrap metal and rusted-out machinery. More than half of the houses have been turned into rental units, as have many of former retail locations, their storefront windows now boarded up living rooms and kitchens. The other retail locations remain for sale or for rent.

If Milan seems like a fine place to live — a place that’s safe and comfortable and a little shabby — it also seems like a place completely disconnected from Roselyn and Tom’s dream of a postcard downtown. Instead of adapting with the town, though, the Milan ‘54 group sticks to its vision. Roselyn tried to convince the library to build downtown, even after it got Mabel Lamb’s property out on the bypass, and she doesn’t like its modern look anymore than its new location. “It upsets me,” Roselyn says, “but it’s there, and we’re going to support it.” When I ask about Milan’s kids, Tom suggests that the revived downtown could include “a video arcade or something.”

Roselyn also admits the Indiana Hoops Hall of Fame has asked about the museum’s material, if things don’t work out. “But I don’t want an Indianapolis museum.”

* * *

The counterargument — to the pothole-obsessed public, to the local boy turned East Coast cynic — remains the same: believe. Believe in big dreams. Believe in town-sized miracles. Believe in one more upset.

Roselyn can point to her cache of letters, voice mails, and, most of all, stories from people who have made pilgrimages to Milan. The museum attracts visitors from all 50 states and 14 foreign countries, but it draws only 40 people a week. (That number jumped to 74 during the week of Butler’s Final Four appearance.) Souvenir sales and the proceeds from Roselyn’s book keep the doors open a few hours each day, Wednesday through Sunday, but only in an overhead-free location like Nichol’s Barber Shop and only with a volunteer staff.

Even under these conditions, the Milan ‘54 museum remains worth a visit, if you’re passing through. After looking at the memorabilia, you can talk to Roselyn. She might be sitting at the desk in the back, addressing copies of Hoopla, the group’s newsletter, to state officials. She might be working on the Milan ‘54 application to the Indiana Historical Society’s list of endangered sites. (“We know that’s normally for buildings, but we feel the story’s endangered.”) She might even be willing to help you shake the feeling that, this time around, Milan will soon know the taste of defeat.

Over at Deadspin, I’ve got a dispatch-slash-photo gallery from last night’s LeBron James television special, which was staged in Greenwich, CT. The special generated tons of coverage in both the standard and Watching-the-Watchmen traditions, but I tried to focus on how the media manufactured and replicated its stories. You don’t need to blame anyone at this event to admit that the media ecosystem deploys its resources in a mysterious way.

If you like the story, you might also like the first thing I wrote for Deadspin—another investigation of media malpractice, this time about the story of a 9-year-old pitcher banned by his baseball league for being “too good.”

Also, the real winner in all this, to my mind, is Kobe Bryant—he’s no longer the NBA’s Iago.

In this week’s New Haven Advocate, I’ve got a long story on Squash Haven, a local nonprofit that follows the after-school orthodoxy except for one thing: its kids play squash. This focus raises some obvious questions (namely: Why turn to such an expensive and elitist sport?), and I try to touch on them in the story. Still, the people at Squash Haven are doing great work and getting great results. It’s tough to question that.

I should add that the story might seem a little fractured or jumpy since, for a lot of reasons (most of them my fault), the reporting dates back to 2008. I did go back this month to check on my group of middle schoolers, and several of them are heading to a national squash tournament. I’m sure they—and Squash Haven as a whole—will do New Haven proud.