The Cape Cod League and the Fragile Ecology of Baseball
January 13, 1999
Cape Cod League baseball is the best baseball played, the best baseball to see; baseball where the line between the player, the fan, the little leaguer, the oldtimer, the business, and the love of the game is gloriously blurred, where professionalism reigns under an amateur organization, where many careers end and some hall of fame careers begin. It lives on a tenuous edge between its sheer quality and its popularity, between the game and the business of baseball, like the college students who play the game are on the cusp of "real life". Like Cape Cod itself, I love it dearly, and fear that by loving it too much we might kill it.
Cape Cod is essentially a large sand bar stuck out into the North Atlantic. The current native vegetation is mostly scrubby pine and hearty brambly plants that do well in the sandy soil and arid drainage. The only agricultural crop of any size is cranberries, grown in brackish bogs and mostly still harvested by hand. Water is a problem, as the sandy soil doesn't hold it well, and there are no natural springs. The intertidal ecology is beautiful, eroded by humanity, and in constant danger of being loved too well by the people who live or visit the Cape.
The Cape's economy, of course, is mostly supported by tourism, the trade of retirees too stolid for the endless sunshine of Florida but ready for some gentle ocean breezes, and with the advent of modern roads and urban sprawl, not a few hearty daily commuters to Boston. The traffic over the two bridges over the Cape Cod Canal, linking the greater part of the Cape to North America, now exceeds on a weekday in winter what the maximum summer weekend traffic was thirty years ago.
It was not always thus. As occasionally is remembered in accounts of the origin of Thanksgiving, the Pilgrims made their first landing not at Plymouth but at Provincetown, at the very tip of the Cape. At that time, the Cape had vigorous soil, a forest of hardwoods, and transient native populations who survived on both fishing and small crop farming. These populations at the time of the Pilgrims' arrival had been decimated (literally) by smallpox and other epidemics of unfamiliar Western bugs that had preceeded the English; with fewer pressures of human population, it was then probably at its most verdant since the arrival of humans in the area thousands of years before. The Pilgrims refreshed their water and wood stocks, but finding the land sparse and very much unlike accounts of Virginia (where they thought they were heading), pressed on to more famous climes.
But Europeans eventually did settle the Cape, and over the centuries, the toll of farming, chopping of wood for fuel, and depleting what local freshwater sources there were gradually impoverished the land, turning a peninsula into the sand bar of today. By the early 18th century, the situation was already bad enough that the first recorded conservation laws in North America were passed, in an attempt to preserve what few hardwoods were left. Thoreau, author of <i>Walden</i> wrote a celebrated book on the subject of nature and Cape Cod, warning of the ability of humans to permanently mark the earth -- almost 150 years ago.
The result of these centuries of attempts to preserve the increasingly fragile yet still dulcet and diverse natural ecology to contravene the ravages of mammalian invasion is as yet inconclusive. The population is at an all-time high, the strain on resources tremendous, yet restrictions on construction, zoning, and development, and protections of the incredible array of micro environments crammed into a 40-mile long stretch of land have brought back some plant and animal populations on the verge of local extinction even twenty years ago.
Other than the whaling towns of the sound and the island of Nantucket, which in the early 19th century were on par with boom oil towns, prosperity never touched Cape Cod until this century. Even as late as the early 20th century, Cape Cod was considered a backwater, and Cape Codders illiterate, unlettered hicks by other parts of New England. The isolation of the Cape -- unreachable by railroad until late in the 19th century, a shoal to be avoided by large ocean vessels, with no proper roads penetrating the thickets -- certainly made it culturally separate.
The railroad, and later the highway, made the Cape accessible and a reasonable journey of a day from New York and Boston. The current vacation and tourism economy then developed, as people from the cities came to enjoy and love the quiet marshes and gentle seas of the Bay side, the dunes and large waves of the Atlantic side, the mild weather tempered by the Gulf Stream, and the slower pace of life. As frequently happens with such getaways, the very things that draw people to them are eroded with their increasing popularity. The poverty of the natives encourages growth through the influx of outside money, and Today, of course, the Cape is known mostly as a vacation destination, and the little towns of the Cape have gradually changed into odd colonies of retirement communities, weekend cottages, and pseudo-suburbs.
Modern baseball, local legend has it, made its appearance on the Cape sometime around the time of the Civil War, possibly brought back by veterans of the late war who learned the New York rules in army camp games. The current Cape Cod League tries to claim origins dating to the 1880s, rather improbably. The arc of baseball on the Cape followed that of many other regions in North America. Sandlot teams for the amusement of the players became neighborhood teams for the amusement of the players' friends and family; neighborhood teams became town teams, which started first series, then attempts at formal leagues, for the amusement and pride of their towns as a whole. At times, when the competitions became fierce and something more than mere amusements, ringers were brought in and teams became semi-professional. Admission was charged for games from an early era.
Somewhere along the way, the vacation economy dovetailed with the organization of baseball, and college players were found to be an effective and relatively cheap source of baseball manpower. The league suffered in times of war and recession, as jobs and extra payments for semi-pros waned with admission fees and the luxury of entertainment. As early as the 1920s, locals began to recognize baseball was a good pastime to draw and keep the vacationers occupied, and the long linkage of the Cape Cod league to the beat and flow of the distinct summer life began. True local players, statistically not as probable to be able to play at a high level merely because of their lower numbers, gradually got edged out from teams in favor of imports, most particular from the colleges. The post-war era, TV, and the general decline of interest in baseball as the central amusement of American life saw most of these teams disappear outside the Cape.
But unlike most other amateur, semi-pro, and town leagues long extinct in most parts of America, the Cape Cod League not only survived, it reorganized to prosper. This was partially because of the naturally complements of summer leisure and organized baseball, but also partially because of the tenacious organizing and preservation efforts of local residents motivated mostly out of love of the game. The current incarnation of the Cape league emerged in the 1960s, along with sanctioning by the NCAA and its transformation into a purely college-player summer amateur league, and the organization of the league and the quality of play has improved continuously ever since.
Much has been written about the Cape Cod League in recent years, much as the growth of the Cape has made it a less than well-kept secret. It's certainly better known as the best amateur league in operation, where one in eight players will play in professional ball at a high level, and where All-Stars ranging from Jeff Bagwell to Albert Belle had brief and glorious careers that brought them to prominence. However, for those unfamiliar with the essential nature of the league, a little review of the basics is in order.
The Cape League today plays a season from early June to early August. It's a 44-game schedule, plus or minus a few games, with an all-star game and playoffs at the end. The players are almost all from NCAA Division I schools, and can play after their Freshman, Sophomore, or Junior years. The players all have day jobs to earn their summer living, and live with local families. The coaches are the only real professionals involved, in the most literal sense of being paid for their efforts, and are all Division I baseball coaches who double as general managers of the baseball talent.
The number of teams has stablized after many years of alternating expansion and contraction at ten, ranging from Chatham in the mid Cape on the Atlantic shore to Wareham and Bourne on the "wrong" side of the Cape Cod Canal. No team's field is more than a 45-minute trip from another's. All the fields are grass, and are all high school (or in one case, a former high school) fields. Some of them have delightful quirks, like the embankment in front of the fire house in Chatham; some are just in delightful settings, like the deep woods off the beach of Lowell Field, the home of the whimsically-named Cotuit Kettleers. The left field in Orleans opens on to a traffic circle. Several have playgrounds immediately adjacent. All have deep outfields, most have bumps and rolls of various degrees of seriousness. Each one plays uniquely, most pleasing to any collector of ballparks, and no two line drives, fly balls, or grounders are exactly the same.
The bats are wood (returning in the early 80s after a long and dreary hiatus with aluminum), but as if to provide an imperfect stitch in an otherwise perfect purists's quilt, the DH is used, and most of the games are played at night -- to accomodate the day jobs of the players and the volunteers who keep the league running, but also to provide a little evening entertainment to the sunshine-weary visitors.
The fans are mostly summer folk, but with a good smattering of permanent residents who maintain a 19th-century-style devotion to the town team. To these latter folks the building of the team and its fruition into a champion for the year are still meaningful. Attendance might range from a few dozens on nights of poor weather at the less summer-oriented towns to thousands on special occasions, but usually is in the comfortable hundreds. The crowds are large enough to know there's a competition going on, but small enough that you can start a conversation in mid-game with another fan on the other side of the diamonds. There are wood stands and some metal risers at all the parks, but the best seats are usually lawn chairs plunked down behind chain link fences. With no admission, all the seats are general admission, and fans police themselves.
The teams do not charge admission. Some funding comes from the sale of snacks and souvenirs at games, sponsorships and ads from local businesses in the game programs, a surprising number of contributions from former players, and at least for now, a small subsidy from Major League baseball. (MLB has considered cutting this out, which has caused a minor panic in the organization of the league, which will probably end up in an organized campaign for an endowment to put the organization on a more modern stabile financial basis. As anybody who's been involved with non-profits knows, the stability of such endowment and organization is quite necessary in this day and age, and comes with its own unpleasant side effects of permanency of an organization, a bureaucracy, and intransigent rules.) More funding comes from the players literally passing the hat, or the batting helmet in some cases, around the crowd in the middle of the game. Most of the true value and work that goes into keeping the teams playing such an aggressive schedule comes from volunteers from the communities, who expend much free-time year round doing things from cutting the grass to lining up summer jobs for the players.
One of the more expensive parts of Cape operations is the wooden bats, which, after all, break under normal wear and tear. These were supplied for a long time by a local bat making company out of Hyannis, which made pretty nice bats with what I'd call a "round" balanced feel. However, the league recently took a subsidy from a certain very large bat manufacturer in exchange for an exclusive contract. Thus the local business has been supplanted by a large corporation, and the League is more or less forced into it by the economics, most particularly the threatened loss of a subsidy from the majors.
Much has been made of certain aspects of the Cape League, like the fact the players work day jobs for a living whlie playing baseball (mostly) at night. I find it particularly poignant that Albert Belle once reminisced about his job pumping gas during his first summer in the Cape league as one of the truly happy periods of his life. Being tired from a full day of work, far from detracting from the experience of playing, must add some sauce to the meat of playing a game. Many of the players now work for summer baseball daycamps put on by the local teams, a clever innovation that provides jobs for the players, a little operating money for the teams, some baseball education for the kids, and some daytime relief for parents trying to have a vacation. Of course, this might be viewed as a sinecure, especially for players who might not have to work for a summer living. But still almost all the players work earnestly at real jobs, and when I see the latest report of Belle's bizarre relationship with baseball success, I can't help but think some of the players who never got pro contracts got the best start of all in the Cape league in between games.
A lot has also been made of the "graduation rate" of Cape leaguers to the big leagues. This got an early boost by a few successful Cape Leaguers who actually got noticed by scouts the first time in Cape League games, and who went on to become great successes in the majors. That in turn recommended the league to more college players, and the quality of the players recruited improved even more as a result, and thus the reputation of the league improved, and so on. The Cape League is really essentially a Division I College all-star league of sorts now, although gratifyingly, players of lesser repute still manage to occasioonally make a name through a big Cape League season. This ascending cycle has a certain, somewhat disagreeable reductio ad absurdum at the top of the spiral: in recent years, some drafted college players have even used the threat of going to play in the Cape for the summer as a form of minor holdout to negotiate a better contract, and the Cape's cadre of players in early June noticeable suffers due to the timing of the Major League amateur draft and occasionally the College World Series. The profusion of professional scouts at games is no longer a novelty, it's an actual intrusion, as they frequently demand the best lawn chair spots behind home plate for their radar guns and pitching charts. Not that long ago, I actually had a scout demand I move from a spot I'd been in for half an hour.
These are rather player-centric conceits, however valid the observations. The more subtle joys beyond seeing a future major leaguer, a perspective that somehow cheapens the Cape league unfairly to the status of a short-season rookie league.
One of my favorite Cape pastimes is a private little game I call spot-the-parent. Because it's a summer league, a lot of parents and families of players come up for weeks on end and attend every game, home and "road". A quick glance around during a particular player's at-bat, or a pitcher's entrance into the game, is usually enough to give the parents away. Usually they're excited, and the moms (more than the dads) love to call things out to the player like they've been doing since little league. Sometimes, the comments can become eerily uncomfortable, particularly when the player slips up: the closer the player is to being an obvious success, the more frequently this seems to happen. There's a fine line between pride and fear. Blissfully, this is the exception. Striking up a conversation with the parents is one of the recovered joys of watching baseball (lost in a lot of modern pro ballparks): having an intimate conversation with a total stranger about a topic of mutual interest. The parents as a category have a deep love for baseball born of numerous kicked balls and ugly whiffs, an understanding embedded in their psyches. They're pretty amusing, quite charming.
The other game within a game that's sure to be fun is chase the foul ball. The teams have to recover foul balls -- balls are expensive -- which isn't always easy if you play in the woods. Every foul ball is followed by a legion of kids, chasing after it just for the privilege of returning it personally to the batboy or the hometown bench: it's the love of the chase without the need for possession. The kids generally get bored with the game itself, but between jawing with the players between innings, chasing the balls, the games of catch on the sidelines, and the occasional wrestling match, they seem to amuse themselves pretty well.
But above it all is the baseball: oh, joy, the baseball.
The raw talent is superb. It is, after all, the cream of the college crop, playing baseball in the deep of summer, barely out of boyhood. It's not a living for any of the kids playing the game, but they're as good as any amateur can get.
But the league is an inherent challenge. For almost all the hitters, the Cape league is their first extended use of wood bats. Adjusting from aluminum makes it a difficult go for some hitters, and many have problems. The big outfields, the heavy wet sea air, the sea level air pressure, and the strange weather (fog outs are not infrequent) all conspire to confound the batter and aid the pitcher. .280 with 5 homers is a very good season; at the same time, there are those who rise to the occasion, and .400 seasons are not unknown in 160 AB. (The league record, set back in '63, is .505!)
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While the pitchers as a class benefit from these factors, they have their own adjustments. Everybody can hit the fastball in the this league: as with the high minors, the successful pitchers are the ones who have a second pitch, and the relatively balanced schedule means hitters get second and third shots at starters. The weird infield hops and variable outfield plays are a constant source of defensive frustration and unearned and earned runs alike. (I once saw a ball -- a little duffer single to right -- disappear into a pile of raked cut grass in Dennis -- the outfielder couldn't find it, and absent a ground rule, the scoring had to be an inside the park homer as the runner circled the bags. They found it a few minutes afterwards -- they had to, since in the Cape league you can't afford to lose balls.) The strange lighting can work as much against a pitcher as a hitter, and the hitting backgrounds are almost all perfect.
But again, it's a chance for pitchers to start taking advantage of their talents in a less punishing environment than aluminum-batted Div I ball: Eric Milton, he of the punishingly high rookie ERA in the majors in 1999, is the all-time ERA leader with a nifty 0.21 ('96). And as a whole, the league's a marvelous pitchers' league.
This, of course, puts it in opposition to the current professional game, and for lovers of low-scoring games and "little" ball, it's heaven. The steals totals are proportionately much higher than the homers totals; I saw Sean Casey lay down a sacrifice from the clean-up spot for the Brewster Whitecaps in 1994 (in the same game, he was intentially walked twice.)
So, the raw talent is put to a test, and part of the test is against a game many of the players have never had to play. Taking pitches. Hitting the ball to the other side of the field. Getting a good grounder instead of a bad pop-up. There's a marvelous tension, sickening and exhilirating, in seeing a 25-homer college player struggle with just getting a wicked, wet slider into play.
In 1998, I attended the perfect game at Harwich. It wasn't a perfect game in the technical sense: it was a game that achieved the perfect baseball moment, a 1-0 five inning fog-out victory for the home team.
The visiting team is Bourne. Rodney Nye, a huge strapping kid from Arkansas, is pitching for Harwich: so far this year, he's had 11 scoreless innings for a crisp ERA of 0.00 and an opponents' average hovering around .200; he's given up only two walks, and struck out 14. Against him is the so far hapless Andy Beal from Clemson. Walks have killed him so far: 13 in 18 innings, which along with 18 hits, have resulted in a not surprising 12 earned runs. The batters for both clubs have been struggling -- the only solid hitter for Harwich is none other than Nye, when he doubles as DH, who's hitting a nice .315, but isn't batting tonight. Otherwise, .240 is a good average. Bourne has a similar lineup, with the exception of clean-up hitter Mike O'Brien from Rutgers, who's batted in 23 runs in 29 games and has a positively blistering average of .295.
It's been raining off and on all day, so the weather is humid but chilly at gametime at the Harwich high field. It's a weeknight, and with the rainy weather attendance is a bit light. There's a bigger crowd behind the Harwich bench, but there's a group behind the Bourne bench that clearly made the ride out for the game, eating sandwiches out of coolers and nursing lemonades (no alcohol allowed at Cape games).
Bourne goes quietly in the top of the ninth: two groundouts, and David DeJesus from Rutgers gets called out looking at a pitch on the black. Harwich leadoff man Henri Stanley, from Clemson, works a walk on a 3-2 count, the bain of Beal's season. It's the only walk Beal will give up, but it's a fatal one. Kurt Keen dribbles a single to right, which actually stops in the long grass before the right fielder picks it up. The three hole hitter, Jeff Becker from Duke, lays down a very nice sac bunt that's almost too short, but it works and runners advance to second and third. The clean-up man, Jason Harris from Clemson, struggles to get the ball in play, as Beal's fastball starts to pick up a little movement. But he muscles the ball to the first baseman, who's playing back against Harris' power, and the run scores on a 3-unassisted putout. The next batter pops out to center, but it's a 1-0 game.
The second is the really exciting inning: Nye strikes out the side, all three batters swinging. His fastball seems too quick for the lassitudinous humidity, and he pops one gigantic humidity-aided curveball that seems to break twice on its way over the plate. After that, he only has one more strikeout, but the ball seems dead as players try to fight the speed of his pitches and the wet air.
In the second, Harwich's leadoff hitter strikes out, but the next two batters single (after launching the first foul ball expeditions of the night -- right into the poison ivy down the left field line, past the batting cage. The kids chasing it don't seem to mind -- wait until tomorrow morning.) The second of these is hit by Paul Turco from Auburn, a stinger to right center that with some height might've gone for extra bases; it's the only hard-hit ball of the evening that falls in. The number 9 hitter valiantly twists to try to get the ball on the ground to the right, but he's overmatched: he pops up to second base, two outs, runners on first and second. Back to the leadoff hitter, Stanley, who waited out the walk in the first. This time he smacks the first fastball he gets, a hard enough shot to right. DeJesus plays the hop perfectly, though, and fires a strike to catcher Brian Loeb from Baylor: it's a classic play at the plate, and Mooney, the runner, is out, and Beal's out of a jam.
Nye quickly gets the first two hitters in the third, but the #9 hitter, Mike Pisani from Michigan State, breaks up his no-hitter and perfect game with a tweener the opposite way.
In the meantime, there's been a few sprinkles, and the clouds have gotten lower: it's starting to impair visibility for balls hit to the outfield. This makes it particularly amusing in the bottom of the third, when the #3 and #4 hitters for Harwich hit hefty flies to right and center. The crowd cheers when Bourne's Shawn Pearson, late of Guelph Ontario and Old Dominion, pulls the ball out of his glove: half of us can't even see the ball go on its downward arc. My dad compliments me on the turkey sandwich I packed him for the game.
In the top of the third, the heart of the Bourne order is up, and they're really struggling against Nye. Two batters ground to second, neither hard, and the third looks at a called third strike.
In the bottom of the inning, Josh Schmitt leads off for Harwich. Schmitt's a rarity in the Cape League: he's a community college player, originally from Florida but somehow playing at Santa Fe Community College. He appears to have no plate discipline and he hasn't gotten much playing time, but batting fifth in this game, he drags a half bunt and barely makes it to first. Playing little ball, there's a sequence of throws and looks and furtive edging off first. I want to scream to either the pitcher or runner to just do something. Eventually, the pitcher gives in and throws to the plate, and the runner goes: the ball to second is a bullet from catcher Loeb, and the runner's out stealing. On the next ball, the batter grounds out, and Beal gets the next man flying to center.
In the fifth, the fog's getting even worse, which makes the flyout to center and the pop to short even more exciting. Harwich's shorstop, Turco, makes particularly good work of a pop that literally disappears in the fog: he's camped out in such a way so he can lunge at the last minute to stab it, while the second baseman and centerfielder stagger around like sailors on leave in completely different quadrants. The last batter grounds to second, and we've got an official game.
Harwich gets through its first two hitters -- a groundout to first, followed by another very exciting flyout to left. On this last play, it's not clear if the left fielder caught it, since no one sitting around the infield can see him. But he appears holding the ball above his head, and the basepaths ump calls him out. At that, the two umps have a conference, and a delay for the fog is called.
At this, the game simply fades away. The players stay out on the field, starting conversations in several groups, some of them going into the stands to talk to friends or family. One ducks into the woods with a young woman. A small group starts a game of pepper in the first base area, to which the bat boy and two of the bat boys non-uniformed friends are added in short order. The conversation in the stands turns from the prospects of resuming play to the chances for the Red Sox to the patterns the fog makes when it rolls over the trees into the open space where the field is. Hot dogs are passed from the stands to the bench, and one of the pitchers stretches out on the now-empty bullpen bench. Some fans go to their cars, others walk off into the fog. After 45 minutes, the game is called, but it's melted of its own accord; gone into its own whiteout, devolved into a dozen small games and ballpark conversations, half the crowd asleep or gone, the other half jovially pressing on. Harwich wins 1-0 on the scoreboard. We fold up the lawnchairs and walk to the car, talking about that throw to the plate and Pisani's spoiler hit in the third. Not a scout in sight.
The perfect game. It's on an edge on the Cape: requiring modern organization and marketing to sustain itself, needing to nurse the games of pepper with eight year olds in the middle of the field during fog delays. I walk on the beach, eroded on one side by the sea and on the other by the beach house built perilously close to the dune, but the sand still feels great between my toes.
Note to readers: There's a breezy, readable history of the Cape League by Christopher Price of the Cape Cod Tiems, who's the closest thing to a beat writer for the league, called Baseball by the Beach (Parnassus Imprints, Hyannis, MA, 1998, ISBN 0-940160-71-4), available from the major on-line booksellers or direct from the publisher at 45 Plant Rd. Hyannis, MA, 02601. It has some nice anecdotes about players and some snapshots of life in the league, and describes the mechanics of how the league is put together in some detail. The cover is the lovely aerial shot of Lowell Field in Cotuit that so epitomizes the delicate, delicious boundary of the Cape and the Cape League.
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