6.18.02 BATAVIA MUCKDOGS vs JAMESTOWN JAMMERS
 |
A couple lifetimes ago, my wife and I were both teachers. Well, okay, I was
a sub, but she was a real one, a physics teacher, and a damned good one. She’s
kept in touch with a handful of her kids over the years, and when one of them
graduated this year with a physics degree and grad school waiting for him
in the fall, she helped set him up with a summer internship here in Rochester.
Nick played some ball in high school and college, and his family is friends
with that of a reasonably famous current two-time all-star center fielder,
and it wasn’t long before this guy was opening my hopelessly outsider, baseball
dilettante eyes to things I’d never even thought of before. Not the least
of which, I realized as he scanned the amateur draft results for friends of
his who might’ve gotten picked up upon their graduations, was that the reason
short-season ball doesn’t start till June is that the players are all in
school until then. Duh. As it turned out, one of his friends had indeed
been drafted, by the Florida Marlins in the seventeenth round, a guy Nick
played with in Little League. He hadn’t seen him since high school.
I’d already gone on at some length about how New York–Penn League
ball was the greatest thing for miles around, and now I connected the dots.
The Muckdogs were opening their season at home against the Jamestown Jammers.
Over the off-season, the Jamestown Jammers had switched affiliations, ditching
the Atlanta Braves organization for that of, and how ’bout that, the
Florida Marlins. As if opening day in Batavia weren’t intriguing enough
already.
The rest of the world might have changed a great deal since last fall, or
at least that’s what we’re supposed to believe, but things in Batavia
still looked to be about as things in Batavia have ever looked to be,
I’m guessing. And what a fortunate thing that is. We bought our four-dollar
tickets, got a program and took our seats. I scanned the photocopied line-ups.
Pitcher, #38, Evan Greusel, R/R, 6'3", 210, 8/22/79, Diamond Bar,
CA. I turned to Nick. That your boy? “That’s him.” Well
goddamn.
Nick wandered over by the visitors’ bullpen and watched for a while,
but saw no sign of his friend. They called his name during the pre-game introductions,
but no corresponding figure ran onto the field to join the rest of the team.
Strange. Maybe he just hasn’t gotten here yet, Nick hypothesized. A little
later, a couple innings into the game, he ventured over to the pen again,
even asked one of the other Jamestown pitchers if a guy named Evan was around.
The pitcher shrugged. “Shit, man, I dunno.”
It was only as he was making his way back over to where we were sitting that
Nick found him, sitting in street clothes behind the plate, charting pitches.
I didn’t get to see it myself, but it’s not hard to imagine the
mother of all double-takes that transpired when, at this playground-sized
ballpark in tiny, remote, utterly random Batavia, New York, Nick walked up
to this kid whom he’d last seen four years ago and three thousand miles
away and greeted him with, “Yo, Evan, what’s up?”
The obligatory explanations out of the way, Evan briefed Nick on his week-old
career in professional ball. It was a Tuesday night. He’d arrived in
Jamestown the previous Thursday with only the vaguest of notions where he
was. The players were all given seventy-two hours to find a place to live
and a way to get to the ballpark and back. Evan and three teammates found
an unfurnished apartment and contributed what they could from their (barely)
four-figure signing bonuses toward the purchase of a $400 car. They have to
push it to start it. The driver’s side window broke off in the hands
of the guy who tried to lower it—not the winder, the window. In
the back window is a sticker reading “Your college sucks.” Unfortunately,
the car’s not big enough to fit furniture into, so they’ve all been
sleeping on eggcrates until they can figure out another way to get beds.
You couldn’t write a better script. I mean, how absolutely perfect is
that? I knew that I’d felt a deeper sympathy for the players in Batavia
than any I’d ever watched before, and now I knew why. These guys are
the indie-rockers of baseball. They might be called the Muckdogs and the Jammers
and the Cyclones and the Renegades, but really they’re the Trumans Waters
and the Crayons and the Furthers and the DiskothiQs, doing it for nothing
but love, for no other reason than that it’s fun, and c’mon—like
you’ve got something else better to do. As the Folk Implosion once said:
“Why? Because we can.”
Who could tonight was 21-year-old, 6' 7" Venezuelan righty Erick Arteaga,
who pitched seven lights-out innings for the Muckdogs, and his opposite number,
19-year-old Lance Davis, who, though less overpowering than Arteaga, managed
five innings of shut-out ball himself. Of course, as Nick pointed out, that
this was for many of these guys the first time they’d ever held a wooden
bat might have contributed to the difficulty they were having getting the
ball out of the infield.
Muckdogs shortstop Carlos Rodriguez broke the stalemate in the sixth when,
after a lead-off single, he scored on first baseman Ryan Barthelemy’s
sacrifice fly. Batavia’s 1–0 lead appeared safe, and the game in
hand, until the ninth. That was when they lost the game—the first time.
Kevin Randall, the Jammers’ shortstop, singled to right with one out. After making a couple false breaks toward second, though, Randall found himself caught out on a ledge. It was great. He was a good ten steps off the bag when the pitch reached catcher Mark McRoberts, and for a stunned, terrified moment the two players could only stand there staring at each other, like soldiers face-to-face with the enemy for the first time. The standoff ended when McRoberts went for his weapon and double-clutched. By the time the throw reached first, Randall was back in safely, checking himself for bullet-holes, the first of his rookie nine lives expended.
A batter later, with two out and designated hitter Phil Hartig at the plate,
Randall broke for second and didn’t turn back. This time McRoberts’ throw
sailed into center, allowing Randall to cruise in to third easily, the tying
run now ninety feet away.
It was a hanging curve from Victor Moreno that Hartig belted into center
field. With two strikes on the guy, even. Jeez.
The Muckdogs failed to get anything going in the bottom of the ninth, and
so, for the fourth time in my five visits to Dwyer Stadium, we were treated
to extra innings. The tenth went quietly. In the bottom of the eleventh, though,
the Muckdogs lost again. Or rather, they won, but the ump missed it. With
Yorman Bazardo on the mound now for the Jammers (Evan: “See this guy?
This is why I’ll never make it. Dude is seventeen. He’s throwing
94.”), Nielsen Abreu, who entered the game as a pinch runner in
the ninth, legged out an infield single. A passed ball got him to second.
Then, with two outs, Muckdogs second baseman Andres Silvera knocked one into
center field. Eric Reed’s throw was a good one, no question, but it wasn’t
enough to beat Abreu, who came around third back end swung wide, deep into
the throttle. The tag was late, the run was in, the Muckdogs win!
Then the call. Pssh.
“Must be getting paid by the inning,” said Nick. Two runs in the twelfth on a double and three consecutive singles sealed it for the Jammers. At least they ain’t the Braves anymore.
FINAL SCORE: JAMMERS 4, MUCKDOGS 2
LIFE DURING WARTIME: There was bunting, there were flags, there were old guys in garish starred and striped baseball caps. But this is Batavia we’re talking about. They had all that stuff last year.