BASEBALL
LIKE IT OUGHTA BE
By Matt Taibbi
 The
BEAST will be keeping a full-season diary throughout the summer
of the Batavia Muckdogs, a single-A farm club in the Philadelphia
Phillies organization. Forget the big leagues. Forget the
upcoming strike. This is sports the way it should be.
"God,
I'm so fucking glad to be back here," Mike Nacey says. He's
a youngish guy, around thirty, thin and with a red goatee
and a baseball cap. He's standing serenely at the beer booth
like it's his own personal barcalounger. It practically is.
He lives around the corner from Dwyer Stadium in Batavia,
home of the single-A Muckdogs, and has been coming to games
for over twenty years. He's run the full fan cycle; he worked
the scoreboard when he was seven, now he works the brew stand.
He's seen it all here.
"John
Elway's first professional home run," he says. "I was here.
He hit it right out there to left." Elway played for the Oneonta
Yankees back in the early eighties. Another future football
star had a cup of coffee with the Muckdogs a few years back,
and Nacey remembers him, too. "Yeah, Ricky Williams was here,
I remember him," he says. "He was good. I kept waiting for
him to have a play at the plate, so that he could wipe out
the catcher. Never happened. He was fast, though. He stole
some bases."
Maybe things were different back in the days of the Polo grounds,
but no one can possibly feel the way Nacey feels about Dwyer
Stadium in a major league park these days. Dwyer park is his
house, you can see it. Big league parks, with their luxury
boxes and their impossibly complex leases and building deals,
manifestly belong to nobody, not even the teams they house.
Muckdog ball is different. "Simple pleasures, man," Nacey
says, looking around. "That's what it's all about."
This is probably what baseball was like way back when, when
America fell in love with the game. The local ballpark was
an extension of your front yard. The players were talented
kids who toughed it out every night and made as much playing
ball as you did pouring concrete or doing frame work, if not
less. You could catch the manager hanging around the hot dog
stand before the game and ask him how the new lefthander was
coming along. And you cared who won because you knew these
kids and felt like you were part of the team—not because
they wore the same name as some dot on a map.
And the players are still damn good. They're throwing one-hop
strikes to home from deep right field every single time. They're
laying off sliders down and away. And they don't have millions
yet. They're regular guys like us—only much better at
baseball.
It's the day before opening night. It has been rainy all afternoon
and the tarp is on the infield. The team's press guy has mud
on his pant-legs from working the grounds. The opening-night
starter, a promising 6'7" Venezuelan named Erick Arteaga,
is throwing heat off the bullpen mound. You can hear the ball
popping in the catcher's mitt all the way out in the parking
lot. A few other players are long-tossing in left field, but
most everybody else is already in the clubhouse. It's pretty
quiet out there.
 The
team has only been together for a few weeks. About half of
the players were only just drafted, and three or four only
signed a few days before. The guys are just getting to know
each other. Inside the clubhouse, a brawny Florida St. infield
prospect named Ryan Barthelemy is crossing vocational lines
to play Spades with three pitchers. They're useless when the
conversation turns to bat trends.
"Hey,
who else makes the maple bats?" he asks.
Bobby Korecky, a righthander from Michigan, winces in mild
disgust. "We don't know," he says.
Beau Richardson, a lefthander from Tulane, points in a circle.
"Pitchers," he reminds us. Spades is a team game and he seems
mildly annoyed that Barthelemy, his partner, is not paying
full attention. Worse, Barthelemy is showing me his hand,
which I make no sense of. I'm going to have to learn this
game.
Ryan's a genial, laid-back guy who I was told was one of the
team's best prospects. He doesn't know it yet, but he's going
to be batting clean-up on opening day tomorrow. He's only
been with the squad a few days. I grew up playing catcher
and as such can spot one from a hundred yards off—all
catchers can, for some mysterious reason—but it isn't
until I see Barthelemy's trunk-like forearms that I can tell
he's a first baseman. I ask him if he's a Marlins fan, being
from Florida.
"I'm
an East coast fan," he answers diplomatically.
The Muckdogs are a Phillies organization.
"How
would you feel about playing in Philly?" I ask.
He doesn't miss a beat. "I would feel outstanding about playing
in Philly," he says. "There's no such thing as a bad big league
destination."
He asks me where I'm from. I tell him I've just moved back
to the States from Russia. "Russia? Damn," he says. "So you
speak Russian?" I tell him I do.
"Well,"
he says. "I'm trying to learn Spanish. I'm going to have to."
He points over at a Dominican pitcher named Carlos Cabrera,
who's standing over in a corner next to Arteaga, who's just
walked in. "These guys are going to teach me. Right?"
Cabrera turns his head, nods. They've got 78 games to get
the language thing right. I make a note to get Cabrera to
test Barthelemy's Spanish before every issue.
Opening night. The hour before the game belongs to the people
working the various concession stands and attractions inside
the gate. There's a reading center for kids, a table belonging
to the local newspaper,  The
Batavia Daily News, and a merchandise stand where I buy a
Muckdogs dog bowl, a quality item, for five bucks. A 10th
grader named Andy Rock is working the speed-pitch game; guess
your speed on the radar gun, and win a free helmet. Andy's
making minimum wage, which is a promotion from his previous
Muckdog profession; turning in foul balls for hamburgers.
"I
got eighty last year," he said. I lose the radar game and
give him a dollar.
Hunting down foul balls is a big deal around here. It makes
sense; fewer fans, just as many foul balls. Everyone you meet
has his career numbers ready. Two kids named Nick and Steve,
who are in a band together ("We're the next Staind") and are
inside the gate here working an amusing gig in which a sign
invites you to ask them for their worthless autographs, both
have a good figure from last year.
"I
got about a hundred," Nick says.
Nacey has never turned his in for burgers. He's got twenty
years' worth. "I've got a whole trash can full of them," he
says.
You can tell a foul ball is coming in this park even if you're
behind the stands. The announcer cues up an ad for a detail
shop called Select Collision that features the sound of a
baseball hitting your parked car. "Select Collision, Route
33, Batavia," he says, as the ball flies over your head. "They'll
make your worries and dents disappear."
The Muckdogs used to be the Batavia Clippers. Five years ago
they changed their name. Local fans voted on the new title.
The team is named after a nearby field that has a lot of muck
in it; the vicious dog was apparently an afterthought. Before
the game starts, there's a strong smell of manure around the
field, but by the second inning or so, it goes away.
The game is a heartbreaker. Arteaga pitches a gem; seven shutout
innings, only one walk. The team is winning, 1-0, going into
the ninth, but a series of defensive miscues lets the Jamestown
Jammers tie it up in the last inning. After a close play at
home that would have won it for the Muckdogs in extra innings
is called an out, the Jammers come back in the twelfth and
rough up Mexican reliever Maximo Reyes for two runs.
The crowd got ugly toward the end of the game. The blown home
plate call clearly made the 62-degree evening feel a lot colder
all of the sudden.
"Damn
it, its freezing, the game goes on an extra hour, and we're
going to lose!" a fan shouted as Reyes gave up his second
run.
A full inning after the blown call, a fan on the first base
side was still giving it to the umpire. "That's the jerk play
of all time!" he shouted. "Of all time!"
Ryan had a rough night at the plate, although he drove in
the only Muckdog run with a sacrifice fly. Other than that,
he was 0 for 4 with four groundouts to second base, plus a
booted foul popup in the ninth. I try to find him after the
game, but instead run into Warren Brusstar, the former Phillies
reliever, who's in his first year as the Muckdogs' pitching
coach. He shrugs over the tough loss.
"It's
a learning experience for them," he says. "They'll get better."
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