5.2.04 SYRACUSE SKYCHIEFS vs SCRANTON/WILKES-BARRE RED BARONS
I’ve known what the end of the world might look like since the first week of tenth grade, seven years ago, when some friends and I went to the last-ever game at MacArthur Stadium, a hulking monstrosity that had hosted minor-league baseball in Syracuse, New York since the 1920s. That day seven years ago, Syracuse beat the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Red Barons (the playoffs were long since out of the question, and I imagine the players were either looking forward to their September callups or a nice round of golf), the P.A. announcer wished us a fond farewell, and the Syracuse Chiefs were no longer.
Then, suddenly, the crowd surged onto the field. People began to tear the place apart. Patches of grass, pieces of billboards, plastic bags full of dirt. Me and my townie friends just started going down the rows and kicking the blue plastic seat backs, hard – they were decrepit and the bolts were stripped, and they’d snap like broken bones, one after another. It’s surprising how little force is really needed to knock down an ancient baseball stadium.
The police officers on hand watched balefully as we took our souvenirs. In the parking lot outside the stadium, some guy offered me fifty bucks for my big hunk of molded blue plastic, and I turned him down. The thing hung, a monstrosity, on my bedroom wall until I left for college. It served as a monument to my sole participation in the classic thuggish mob mentality, my personal desecration of our national pastime.
In MacArthur’s stead, right in the parking lot, was built a sparkling new multi-purpose facility. After some haggling and some good old American bribery, the team had agreed to build on the outskirts of the city, rather than take over some available land downtown. This was a phenomenally bad decision. P&C Stadium, for being a beautiful minor-league park (albeit one with artificial turf and dimensions that are directly proportionate to those of the parent Blue Jays’ SkyDome, for fairly obvious player development reasons, aesthetics be damned), is almost quite literally in the middle of nowhere. Beyond its HOK-designed ersatz retro vistas, off in the distance, are great expanses of swampy undeveloped scrubland and railroad tracks. The nearest real civic asset is the hulking Carousel Center mall. If you listen closely, you can hear the rumble of trains pulling into the adjacent Amtrak station. It sits directly in the flight path of northbound planes into Hancock Airport.
In other words, all the bad things about Shea Stadium are reproduced in microcosm, here in the land of spunky underaged Dominican infielders and an orange furball mascot of indeterminate gender and species named, regrettably, Scooch. Yet whenever I’m home, I try to catch a game. I can’t help it. Even though I don’t know or care about the Toronto Blue Jays or their undoubtedly-burgeoning farm system, the allure of minor league baseball is so pure and unspoiled that I’m constantly compelled to partake.
Starting tonight for the hometown SkyChiefs was Sean Douglass, the poor man’s Derek Lowe – after he walked three consecutive batters on 12 straight balls, the old guy in front of me shouted, “Hey, Ankiel, go back to Medicine Hat!” He then turned to his wife and they began animatedly talking to the couple seated in front of them about, I think, exchange students.
“Arlene says the one we’re getting is really cute.”
“Iceland! That’s a great country.”
Officially there were 2,465 on hand, but the actual figure might not have topped five hundred. It was the night of the final episode of “Friends,” and despite offering free admission to anyone named Ross, Rachel, Monica, Chandler, Phoebe, or Joey, the stadium was a sepulchre. It was chilly and the pitchers all wore sleeves. We huddled against each other behind home plate for warmth. Somebody discussed building a bonfire.
P&C Stadium (named after surely the crappiest of the local supermarket chains) holds 11,000, a figure it reaches only when there’s fireworks or pickup truck giveaways. This evening, there were no extended-cabs to be seen, but a lucky ticketholder could win the following:
• A free Supercuts haircut
• $25 in New York lottery tickets
• A $10 gift certificate to a hardware store
• A bucket of paint
• Something called a “bottomless coffee mug”
By the time you’d get back from a run to the concession stand, it was 8–0, Red Barons. Douglass, the putative ace of the SkyChiefs’ staff, floundered, giving up five runs in two innings. In to pitch the third for Syracuse came the workmanlike Josue Matos, who almost immediately surrended two home runs, to Lou Collier and Mark Smith, while I was buying a hot dog.
The entirety of Syracuse’s offense came on a two-run homer by third baseman Glenn Williams. Williams, at 27, has spent a mind-numbing ten years bouncing around various outposts of minor league baseball, from Macon, GA to Danville, VA – all very far from his hometown of Wattle Grove, Australia. Williams has the misfortune of being both an exceedingly mediocre third baseman (albeit one with decent power and a disarmingly photogenic smile) and employed by a Toronto organization that starts a former Rookie of the Year, Eric Hinske, at third – if Williams is ever going to get his first major league at-bat, it will likely not come in a Blue Jays uniform.
As often happens in depressingly one-sided baseball games, both teams stopped trying, and the between-inning contests became far more interesting than the on-field play. In the top of the fifth inning, somebody had the chance to win two round-trip tickets on an airline that, frankly, I’ve never heard of – one of those regional carriers that flies only Gulfstreams – if the first three Red Barons were retired on fly balls to the outfield. One of the weirder stipulations I’ve ever heard of, to be sure, but wouldn’t you know, the guy won. In the spirit of generosity (or perhaps needing to fill seats on that lucrative Syracuse–Altoona route), said anonymous airline counted the final out, a little flare to the first baseman on the very edge of the outfield grass, as a “fly ball,” and we showered him with applause befitting a war hero. The joy had been sucked out of the game before it became official.
In the seventh inning, Mark Lukasiewicz came on to pitch for Syracuse. Lukasiewicz’ story reads like baseball as penned by John Cheever – a big lefty from New Jersey, he was tabbed as a can’t-miss prospect and snatched up in the first round of the 1993 draft by the then-dominant Toronto Blue Jays. He spent the next seven years in the Toronto farm system, and liked Syracuse so much that he decided to live there in the off-season.
Baseball players, as a rule, do not tend to do this. Baseball players do not choose to live in cities that average 114 inches of snowfall per year. Syracuse is an inhospitable, isolated place in the wintertime, and it speaks to deeper, more complicated feelings on the part of Lukasiewicz that he actually makes his home there in the offseason, rather than Arizona or Florida or Texas.
Lukasiewicz was picked up by Anaheim in 2000, and actually won a ring in 2002 with the Angels, in what appears to be a stroke of blind luck. His only major league service came during that short time with the Angels; in the 2003 season, he was cut by Anaheim and re-signed by Toronto, and back he came to Syracuse, to baseball’s version of purgatory.
Lukasiewicz must have reflected on all this when he surrended another towering homer to Collier, after which, in the cold metallic echo of the stadium, you could hear somebody shout from the upper deck, “Put a For Sale sign on your house, Mark!” After J.P. Roberge whacked a double off the wall in left, somebody next to me sighed, “Next year he’ll be painting houses.”
Lukasiewicz was promptly yanked, and it saddens me to say that Toronto gave him his unconditional release a couple of months later; he’s sunken further into the abyss, pitching for the Somerset Patriots of the independent Atlantic League. Last night, as of this long-delayed writeup (July 28, 2004), he walked home Rickey Henderson to take the loss against the Newark Bears.
FINAL SCORE: Scranton/Wilkes-Barre 8, Syracuse 2.
FOOD CONSUMED: If there’s one redeeming quality of baseball in Syracuse, it’s the hot dogs. Hofmann’s hot dogs are truly the sweet nectar of the baseball gods, but even better are their coneys (or “white hots,” as the Philistines to the west in Rochester insist on calling them, and let’s not even talk about the Zweigle’s vs. Hofmann’s rivalry, which is as one-sided as the Syracuse/Canisius basketball feud) – the delicate spices and the solid crunch of the natural casing are enough to make me release any ethical qualms that normally stand in the way of my consumption of veal.
So when it’s dollar coney night, look the fuck out.
MEMORABLE HECKLE: I didn’t even talk about the drunk girl down the left-field line, who started off charming and wound up nearly falling into the home dugout; through the course of the game, she pounded Labatt’s Blue (the official binge beer of Central New York by a country mile) until she was nearly catatonic. She hurled incoherent insults at nearly every member of the opposing team, but the whopper came at the expense of a certain hot-shot Red Barons second baseman: “Chase Utley? More like Chase Ugly!”
Dan Cohen
