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Today's meeting included a fun and interesting presentation on the subject of town amateur baseball parks in MN by Arden Hills resident Todd Mueller. Todd is a retired marketing executive with a passion for small town baseball. He has written and published a "coffee table" style book on the subject, in which he profiles 27 of the towns/ball fields in the state that have earned his "best of" rating for one reason or another. We were surprised to learn that MN has the most town clubs of any state in the union, at just under 300! Some of his favorites can be found in the small towns of Dassel, Miesville, Pearl Lake, Red Eye, Dundas and Jordan. Many towns have populations of only several hundred people. Clubs can recruit from within a 30 mile radius of the town border but, still, one wonders how teams manage to fill their rosters in order to compete! In addition to the game itself, Mueller is also taken with the dedication of some of those who go above and beyond with the groundskeeping of these fields. He told of one fellow who routinely wakes in the middle of the night to water the grass and others who have perfected the art of the "criss cross" mowing pattern we admire on professional fields. Mueller's research for the book him over 2,500 miles to visit more than 130 ballparks from Detroit Lakes in the north to Winona in the south. The 230-page book features 500 photos selected from over 20,000 images.